Magic and Mitchell

Jack Mitchell was my boss at the great and or glorious Remington Arms Company. In hindsight, I probally should have stayed there and retired but I didn't and here I am. Lucky you! :o)

There were a lot of ideas floating around Remington all of the time. Granted, most of the product line was sold out the first week of the first quarter but there were other things that needed attention. Here's an example.

We wanted to make sure that Boy Scouts kept shooting in their life. Most of them learned how to shoot a .22 rifle at camp and we wanted to encourage them to keep it up. Here's an idea one of the ammo product managers brought to us. Put 500 rounds into a big tin can with lots of pro scouting picture on the can.

Dandy. Only one little problem. Not many Boy Scouts were willing to pay $99 for a can of .22 shells. The package that needed to change was the cardboard one that he carried in his pocket until it got wet and fell apart. Ask any scout mom if she found any live .22 rounds in a jean pocket just before she tossed the jeans into the dryer!

Jack stopped that idea right in it's tracks. He had four questions that he applied to Remington marketing ideas:

1.  Who's the prospect?
2.  What is the prospect's problem?
3.  What is the product (service)?
4.  How do we break the "boredom barrier?"

As you might guess, the problem was not the quantity available. It was the price of the quantity. Plus, the idea already assumed we had an avid shooter and were needed to develop the habit. We had a problem with questions 2 and 3. No go.

Those questions are almost as old as I am. Well, 40 years anyway. They are as true now as they were then and are questions any web marketer should carefully consider and address in the communications section of a business plan.

Everyone thinks the web is pure magic. In some cases, it was and still is. In the early cases, it wasn't. Remember the dot com  disaster a few years back? You could go back to any one of those failures and apply Jack Mitchell's questions and really wonder what and who those folks were after other than someone to buy them out before the dot com became the dot bomb.

So step one in web success is DO YOUR HOMEWORK!!! The web is hard work for most folks. Think first. Write it down. Leave it alone for a few days. Read it again. Think. Think. Think! Do field research. Do web research. Type the idea into Google search. See who and what comes back. Take your time and get it right.

Nothing is more common than a good ideas that can't reach the buyers for it. Answer Mr. Mitchell's questions about your products and services, think and do research, and stay tuned.