Adding Value

VALUEYou go to a comedy club to see some comedians you’ve never heard of and who ends up doing a set but Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld benefits only little from the set – maybe he’s not getting paid and the short time he spends onstage helps only little to hone his set – but the value he ads to the show and your experience is incalculable.

In the same way, things have tremendous to your clients and others that cost you virtually nothing. A $5 bill left on the nightstand has a lot more value to the woman who cleans your hotel room than what it costs you.

How many ways can you add similar value to your product or service on behalf of your clients?

Return to daviDDeeble.com or watch me tell jokes about my wife.

How SodaStream Might Reverse Its Fortunes By Telling A New Story

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Yesterday the New York Times published an article about the challenges facing SodaStream, the “once-hot device for do-it-yourself sodas”. SodaStream, according to the article, has responded to reduced sales and profits by unveiling “a new line of fruit flavorings like pomegranate açaí, green tea lychee and yuzo mandarin”. The article also outlines the difficulty SodaStream has encountered convincing Americans to make traditional soda (i.e. soft drinks) at home.

So what’s going on here? It seems to me that SodaStream is diluting its brand by telling two very different stories to two very different groups. One one hand they offer an array of exotic, healthy-sounding and unpronounceable beverages aimed at the health-concious, New Age-ists, women, etc. At the same time they promise the working-class the seemingly-irresistable allure of essentially making Red Bull at home. The disparity between these two stories might be what is causing SodaStream’s sales to flag.

So what to do?

What if SodaStream stopped telling both these stories and committed to a new, third story? The story is simple: Slake your real craving: bubbles.

It wouldn’t be difficult to find ways to make Diet Coke drinkers, for example, aware that what their bodies really crave isn’t aspartame but bubbles. Trying to convince the Mountain Dew and Red Bull crowd to make soft drinks at home is waste of time because it isn’t worth their time.

As for the yoga crowd who wouldn’t touch a can of soda with a ten-foot pole, SodaStream can offer the opportunity to make the healthiest of all beverages even more enjoyable right in the privacy of their home, not to mention the opportunity to advertise their virtue right there in the corner of their kitchen.

There are several ways to tell this new story. By reminding everyone, for example, of the adverse affects of virtually all non-water beverages on healthy teeth, SodaStream might be able to position itself as the purveyor of something remarkable: a healthy beverage that not only fills you up but does not make you think about your next trip to the dentist.

In short, SodaStream should consider getting out of the water-flavoring and pseudo-soft drink business and shake their real moneymaker: the tantalizing possibility of a perfectly-healthy beverage which also makes you feel full.

Thoughts or comments? Leave them in the section below.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or watch me juggle plastic grocery bags at the Magic Castle in Hollywood.

Marketing 101: The Value Of Being “The Only”

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Thanks to the good people at “America’s Got Talent!” for the flattering photo.

In marketing – and certainly in show business – it never hurts to be able to call yourself “the one and only” of virtually anything. I am happy to inform audiences that I’m the only performer ever kicked off America’s Got Talent! by just describing my act.

The same goes for being the most, the least, the tallest, the ugliest. It piques people’s curiosity. From time to time I toy with the phrase “World’s funniest juggler” but then I realize that that’s tantamount to calling myself the world’s tallest dwarf.

Thoughts? Comments? Leave them in the section below.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or watch me tell jokes at the Magic Castle.

How I Grew My YouTube Following

When I’m in Turkey there’s a barber I like to pop into in the coastal town of Kusadasi. He gives me what, in Turkey, I call “the standard”: haircut, shave, arm, hand, neck, ear, temple massage and wraps it all up my setting fire to stray clippings on my face and neck with an open flame.

This time, however, my wife videotaped the affair – I use the word advisedly – and as you can see he couldn’t resist giving me a little extra business. Anyway, I posted it to YouTube and it began spreading quite quickly – several thousand views right off the bat – and as of this writing is at around 40,000 views.

This is not the only humorous clip on my YouTube channel – I am a comedian after all – but the speed with which this clip spread was an order of magnitude faster than any of my others. I checked out Youtube’s handy analytics and quickly discovered the source of its popularity: someone had posted it to a fetish website catering to – I’m going out on a limb here – men who enjoy other men being tickled.

So my advice for success on YouTube is, unlike my Turkish barber, is to forget “playing to the balcony” and seek out a niche audience – kids obsessed with Star Wars, housewives aching for cute cat videos, men who crave to see other men being tickled with varying degrees of permission – and let them spread the good word for you.