That is, unless you get the shift in consumer psychology and respond quickly. Over the last two weeks, I’ve spoken with a people very high up in the luxury furniture, hotel, goods and services businesses. And, they all tell me the same thing.

Enough people still have money to buy what they’re selling, but they don’t want to be viewed as spending frivolously right now.

There’s been a shift in the psychology of luxury buyers. For some, it’s that they feel genuinely awkward spending conspicuously, while so many others are in pain. For others, it’s more about perception, it’s just not “cool” to be spending lavishly on luxury right now.

Regardless of the reason, there’s been a noticeable shift away from spending money on things that are positioned as “public displays of luxury.”

Does that mean you’re hosed if you sell luxury stuff?

No. Well, yes, if you don’t do anything to at least temporarily reposition what you’re selling. But, no, if you get this change in psychology and what’s motivating it and then quickly change the marketing message around what you’re selling.

So, rather than luxury, you’re now selling exceptional quality. Rather than pampering, you’re selling high-level stress management and rejuvenation. Rather than glitz, glamor and showiness, you’re now in the business of premium, yet discrete, subtle and noticeable to the right people.

See, react, reposition … survive.

Thoughts?

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About the Author: Jonathan Fields is a former hedge-fund lawyer turned serial lifestyle entrepreneur, copywriter, Internet and direct marketer, speaker and writer. You can find him blogging on entrepreneurship and lifestyles at Awake At The Wheel, crafting high-impact copy for clients at Vibe Creative or training people to become entrepreneurs and career renegades at Career Renegade (also a book published through Random House/Broadway Books).

The post When Luxury Becomes A Four Letter Word appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Not any more (though, honestly, that’s never been my approach anyway).

When money gets tighter, people get pickier. Which means, if want to continue to not only survive, but thrive, you’re going to need to dig a bit more deeply into the differentiation well and publicly showcase why you are the woman, man or business that people should be handing their money over to.

Perfect example. Walking down the block looking for a place to grab lunch with my wife on a weekday, we passed 7 or 8 restaurants and every single one was close to being empty. Then we poked our heads into the local pub. We’d never been there before. And, it was packed.

Not because people were drinking their troubles away. They were all sitting and eating. And, 75% were moms in their 30s and 40s. Whaaa?

It wasn’t long until we figured out what was going on. This little pub had figured out a way to shine, while all the restaurants around them stumbled. Along with their standard menu, we were each given a long, 6 inch wide piece of paper and a red pen.

On the paper were about 50 different options for chopped salad mix-ins. We each sat choosing our salad items and, a few minutes later, two giant finely-chopped salads arrived at our table. We dove in, couldn’t finish either and reveled about how we never about this hidden salad gem before. But, clearly others had.

Since then, this little grill has become our go-to place for taking out, ordering in and the occasional dinner with friends, family style.

Because … they get it.

People are looking for value more than at any other time in decades. And, if you can’t strongly differentiate yourself, you and your business become fungible replaceable interchangeable.

And, that’s an awful place to be in a down economy.

So, how will you differentiate and showcase your unique value in 2009?

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About the Author: Jonathan Fields is a former hedge-fund lawyer turned serial lifestyle entrepreneur, copywriter, Internet and direct marketer, speaker and writer. You can find him blogging on entrepreneurship and lifestyles at Awake At The Wheel, crafting high-impact copy for clients at Vibe Creative or training people to become entrepreneurs and career renegades at Career Renegade. His next book, also called Career Renegade, is due out from Random House/Broadway Books In January 2009.

The post Differentiate Or Die In A Downturn appeared first on Small Business Trends.

You hear a lot about branding in business, establishing yourself as the must-have solution, idea, product or service in a particular field. Associating your company or product with a specific problem, emotion, sensation or solution.

Large companies spend millions every year in advertising and PR to brand themselves.

Viewing it as a gargantuan, costly effort, though, most small businesses largely give up on the notion of branding. Well, here’s some good news, if you’re willing to strap on your innovation hat, there may be ways to not only brand your business without paying a dime…

You may be able to get people to pay you to brand your business.

Here are a few ideas and examples to get you started:

• Label Your Takeaway products – One of the fastest easiest ways to get people to literally pay to help brand you is to add labels, logos and brand ID to items they already buy. So, for example, if you have a restaurant and people take out food, add large brand IDs, logos ad contact information on the packaging for their food. If you sell drinks or water bottles, add a logo to the cups or consider having private label water (FYI — private label water can end up being less expensive than buying bottled water from vendors). How much branding do you think the world’s water companies get from the labels on water bottles that people carry around all day?
• Develop a visual brand that people want to display — There’s a shop in NYC called The Chocolate Bar and their labels and packaging are very hip. In fact, they are cool enough that people will actually buy the circular labels they use to seal packages and display them as stickers. Surf, Skate and snowboard companies have used this same strategy effectively for years to help grow and brand their businesses. The challenge here is to create a visual brand that appeals enough to your market that they’d actually not only buy it, but want to display it for other to see. Add some kind of “movement” energy can be strong motivator to buy. So, for example, I might buy a sticker for Element surf wear, because (a) it looks cool, and (b) I want others to know I am a surfer. As I write this, the back of m notebook computer screen is covered with a variety of stickers, some of which were given to me, others, I liked enough to pay a nominal fee for.
• Develop a visual brand that people want to wear – A local kids band, Hot Peas & Butter sets up tables after every concert with kids t-shirts boasting a vibrant, highly visual logo that every kid wants. The table is mobbed after every show with parents buying t-shirts for their kids. These t-shirts will brand the band for months to every other kid and parent who sees the t-shirt. For my yoga studio in NYC, we roll out seasonal t-shirt and pant screen designs that integrate the name of the business, along with some specific energy or emotion.  Rather than looking to make a big profit from them, we sell them for just a bit above cost, because we know the advertising and branding effect will be more than worth it.
• Attach your brand ID to an item people will use every day — The killer example of this is the expanding wave of shopping bags made from recycled materials that are now being sold for a nominal fee by places like Whole Foods Markets. People pay something like $1 to buy a bag they will uses every time they go shopping. And, the bag displays the companies brand information all over it. Plus, there’s the added benefit of the emotion associated with a company that’s trying to “do the right thing” by being environmentally conscious. Tote bags, in general, tend to be great examples of this.
• Sell snippets in public, high-volume places — Perfect examples of this are face-painters, balloon makers and party entertainers of all sorts. Go to a local street fair and you’ll always find a face painter. Usually, they charge just a few dollars to paint a child’s face. Why? It’s not about the money, it’s about getting paid to brand and advertise. Paint a kid’s face and they walk around the fair all day long advertising your business. And, while the parents wait for their kids’ faces to be painted, inevitably a handful ask if the face painter does parties, a card is exchanged and a small handful of those parents turn into party clients, which is where the real money is. Massage therapists offer a similar experience, with 5-minute chair massages that lead to paid sessions. And chiropractors offer mini-spinal assessments, then literally books appointments on the street.

In the end, what we start to see is that, if you really get creative, branding is not just a mega-company’s game. They make have to spend millions to become known on a global level, but your goal is to become known on a discrete, local level. Even, if you’re online, you can still focus largely just on a niche.

Ask yourself,

• Is there some way turn my visual brand/logo into something that people would actually pay me to buy and wear or display?
• Is there some way to package a sample of my service or product and offer it at a nominal fee (that would cover my costs or make a small profit) in a highly public, high volume, highly-targeted place?

As always, let’s continue the discussion in the comments.

And, if you have any other examples you can bring to our community to serve as ideas, please feel free to share those in the comments, too.

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About the Author: Jonathan Fields is a former hedge-fund lawyer turned serial lifestyle entrepreneur, copywriter, Internet and direct marketer, speaker and writer. You can find him blogging on entrepreneurship and lifestyles at Awake At The Wheel, crafting high-impact copy for clients at Vibe Creative or training people to become entrepreneurs and career renegades at Career Renegade (also a book published through Random House/Broadway Books).

The post 5 Simple Ways To Get Paid To Build Your Brand appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Well, living in New York City, I see somewhere in the order of millions of slogans a year, some great, some funny, a few are memorable, but, all too often, business slogans are completely ineffective (often bordering on downright awful).

Rather than complain about this, I figured, it’s a great opportunity for all of us to not only learn about crafting killer slogans, but have a little fun and help some small business owners at the same time by jointing coming up with much better ones for them. Think of it as our service to the small business community.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• On a regular basis, I’ll post a new slogan that I’ve seen around the city
• I am not going to reveal the company, service or product right away
• You guys get to try to guess the business, based solely on the slogan
• After a brief but torturous round of guessing (a day or so), I’ll reveal the business in the comments
• Then we’ll tap the rest of the comments to come up with some better slogans.
• And, no, its all about fun and service to the entrepreneurial community, so nobody gets paid

We’ll try this format out, see how it works, then tweak it as needed.

That said, I am thrilled to introduce our first Slogan Smackdown.

Today’s slogan was seen on the side of a delivery truck on the Upper West Side of New York City, that’s your only hint. It read …

“Managed Services, Managed Better”

Okay, your first challenge – guess the company or type of company, without looking it up anywhere. No cheating and trying to look it up in Google — guess based on whether you can tell what it means.

Share your guess in the comments below.

In a day or so, I’ll reveal the company and type of business in the comments, speak to why it fails as a slogan, then it’s up to us to crowdsource the slogan and come up with something better for them.

So, go ahead, guess away…

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About the Author: Jonathan Fields is a former hedge-fund lawyer turned serial lifestyle entrepreneur, copywriter, Internet and direct marketer, speaker and writer. You can find him blogging on entrepreneurship and lifestyles at Awake At The Wheel, crafting high-impact copy for clients at Vibe Creative or training people to become entrepreneurs and career renegades at Career Renegade. His next book, also called Career Renegade, is due out from Random House/Broadway Books In January 2009.

The post Slogan Smackdown: Managed Services, Managed Better appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I can’t tell you how many people have asked me this. The answers are myriad, but, beyond the shear distraction and fun of having a worldwide water-cooler at my disposal, one of the biggest benefits of social media, to me, has been … access.

Social media is about layers of access

A few weeks ago, Business Week senior writer and blogger, Steve Baker, wrote the cover story for the magazine about blogging and social media. Not too long before that, I’d never heard of Steve and I am fairly confident he’d never heard of me. But, I started following him on Twitter after stumbling upon his account, because I wanted to see what he was up to and I enjoyed his “tweets.”

Knock, Knock, it’s Business Week calling!

While writing his story, Steve regularly asked his Twitter followers for input, at one point asking people to share their feelings about the role of blogs, social media and Twitter. I wrote something like,

“Blogs are the big show, IM/social media is the backstage pass and twitter/micro-blogging is the afterparty. It’s about layers of access.”

Steve dug the quote and a few months later, it ended up, “I” ended up, in the cover story in Business Week. Pretty cool, right?

In fact, this very story actually proves the point of my quote.

Blogging, social media and, especially micro-blogging give you access to conversations you’d never have been able to have … or would’ve been given the evil-eye for trying to join in. And, as more influencers beyond the tech-world join in the conversation, the broader and deeper the access becomes.

How’d you like to land a book deal with a major publisher?

Think that might help your reputation or business? Chris Webb, hotshot editor (actually just changed to even bigger muckety-muck title) from Wiley, is a regular user of social media, especially Twitter. But, even I was surprised when, a few weeks ago, he posted this tweet:

“Pitch me a book idea in 140 characters or less. Go.”

With tens of thousands of people desperately trying to get attention of top book editors every year, here, in the hallowed halls of Twitter, direct access was being served up on a platter. So, we’ve seen how micro-blogging has given access to mainstream print media and major NYC publishers. But, what about radio or TV?

Can micro-blogging and social media give you an in with TV?

How’d you like to be on NBC news? Here’s a big tip. More and more news producers are turning to micro-blogging as a way to find news, sources and segment ideas. Because micro-bloggers are, to a certain extent, self-selecting mavens and, to use Malcom Gladwell’s term, sneezers. They are dialed in and are often sources of huge news and interesting stories and points of view.

Want to be on NBC TV?

Example: NBC 4 Managing Editor (Central Ohio), Ryan Squire, is a regular Twitter user and often not only shares stories, but looks for them on Twitter. Got an idea that’d be relevant to his market and you’d like to see on NBC? Join in the conversation with him.

And, don’t be high and mighty about it not being the NYC market. Just as stories regularly begin in major markets and expand outward, others start local and trickle up to the major markets.

In the end, the conversation is great, it’s also about layers of access.

Blogging is, indeed, the big show. It’s where the meaty, public and sometimes deep conversations and comment debates happen. IM is a nice place to build on those conversations in a more private virtual setting. And, micro-blogging is the after party, that secret place where you get access to the ideas and questions before they even become the conversations that the “rest” of the world sees.

The deeper you follow the exchange of ideas, the more likely it is that magic happens, both for you and for your business. Because, at its heart social media and business success share one huge congruence … they are all about the relationship.

And, with social media, it’s often not about the relationship or conversation you’re having with the customer, but rather the conversation you’re having with the greater community…and the one they’re having about you.

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About the Author: Jonathan Fields is a former hedge-fund lawyer turned serial lifestyle entrepreneur, copywriter, Internet and direct marketer, speaker and writer. You can find him blogging on entrepreneurship and lifestyles at Awake At The Wheel, crafting high-impact copy for clients at Vibe Creative or training people to become entrepreneurs and career renegades at Career Renegade. His next book, also called Career Renegade, is due out from Random House/Broadway Books In January 2009.

The post Grab Attention Of Top Editors And Producers With Social Media appeared first on Small Business Trends.