Look For Lessons Everywhere

As you go about your daily life, you can find many marketing and business lessons, if you raise your awareness and look.

Take, for example, a trip to your local McDonald’s. (I know none of us actually eats those burgers or fries, but you might stop in to get a yogurt parfait, salad, or one of their other healthy choices) You can learn a lot about the importance of business systems and how they really run the business by observing a McDonald’s.

Have you ever noticed, no matter where you are, when you go into a McDonald’s the french fry machine is always in the same place? It doesn’t matter if you’re in Iowa, California, or Florida, the french fry machine is always to your left as you’re facing the counter.

If you get your McDonald’s order to go, the bag is always white, they never hand you a brown paper bag – it’s always white.

If McDonald’s can run successful businesses all over the world with teenagers, it would seem like anybody ought to be able to run a successful business. And one of the keys to running any successful business if having systems in place, like McDonald’s does to run the business with. Then, the people simply execute those systems.

Sounds simple, huh? And, it is, once you have some basic systems in place in your business.

This might not be on your everyday walk in life, but if you ever have the pleasure of going on a cruise – we’ve been on several, and we love them – pay close attention to all the marketing lessons onboard.

Take, Carnival Cruise lines, for example, everywhere you look, they are marketing, or selling, something to you. It starts before you get on board, with the “embarkation” photo they take of you just before you get on the ship, and continues with every photo they take in the dining room, on the decks, every time you get off the ship, on excursions, and everywhere else you look.

There are the specialty drinks of the day, each in its own, different souvenir cup of the day. Not an alcohol drinker? No problem, how about a card that allows you unlimited sodas for the duration of the trip? And, and we do have these nice insulated tumblers, you can purchase, to drink them out of, if you’d like.

And don’t forget about those fun little towel animals they put in your room every night; that’s not marketing, you might think, until the flyer comes offering you the book on how to make them, all for $14.95, or whatever it is.

Those are just a few of the hundreds of items being marketed and sold to you while you’re on a cruise. One big advantage the cruise ships have is that you a captive audience; it’s not like you have a lot of choices, you either get it from them, or you go without.

Now, you might not have the opportunity to capture your clients all in one place, where they’re living and getting all their meals and entertainment for a week with you, but you do have the ability to captivate your audience with your copywriting skills. You also have the ability to hold a seminar or live event, where you have a few hundred of your best clients in a meeting room at a hotel for a period of 2, 3, or 4 days at a time – then it’s up to you to keep them in the room so you can market and sell products and services they need to them during that time.

I encourage you to look for other examples as you walk around the world everyday to learn more about business, in general, and more specifically, marketing. Don’t be afraid to learn lessons from bad marketing or business examples, just like you do the good or great examples.

For more great marketing & business strategies go to www.CompleteMarketingSystems.com or call (866) 293-0589.