No need to look for competitors since your business offering is so unique, there’s nothing out there remotely like it?
Think again!
You are going to find competition, if you are thorough, and tenacious, and keep searching until you find offerings on the market directly or indirectly related to yours.
No one wants to find their brilliant idea has been produced by someone else. But it’s smart business to look for the same, or similar offerings to yours before investing a lot of effort in developing and/or marketing what’s already available.
“Find and Utilize Competition with Competitive Analysis,” is a 50 minute talk detailing the Competitive Analysis process—efficiently, proactively, step-by-step. This Marketing PRACTICE Meetup provides a Competitive Analysis template to easily discover, and monitor your competition, enabling you to match, or surpass each of their offerings with your own.
for a TEMPLATE that will PROVE your startup has marketable offerings of value, for profit:
Tuesday, April 21, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
Got an idea for an app, product or service, or want more sales with your marketing efforts?
Learn how to VALIDIATE, i.e. PROVE your offering has marketable VALUE, and how to identify WHO (target audience) will BUY your products and services.
The success of any business begins with MARKETING.
Why?
Without an offering of value, that many will benefit from using, at a price-point they’ll pay for, there’s nothing to market/brand/sell.
“Product Validation Through Productization,” is a 50 minute talk on the process of becoming intimate with your potential, or developed offering. This webinar provides a template—like a plug-n-play marketing equation—for turning most any idea, or even developed product, into a marketable offering of value, for profit.
Attendees will learn how to:
Determine ‘Product/Market Fit,’ then concisely, and specifically label the features of the product or service you envision (or have produced).
Identify a benefit or solution each feature provides, as well as likely customers who will find value in your offering.
Perform the Productization process on each offering conceived, or developed (better late than never!), to produce marketable offerings of value, for profit.
Construct dynamic lists of keywords and phrases all related to your offering, your target markets, your business, and industry.
Utilize Productization Lists for iterative discovery, as well as SEO content when branding and marketing your [fully-productized] offering.
Avoid the #1 Reason Startups Fail
Neglect to productize each and every offering, and at best, you’ll likely waste a lot of time and money on misdirected marketing that gets little traction. At worse, ignoring Productization leads to business failure. The Productization process is time-consuming, detail-oriented, and necessary to perform, continually, to produce tightly targeted marketing that motivates clicks, downloads, and/or purchases of your products or services. Begin marketing each offering with Productization to build a sustainable, thriving business.
Speaker Bio
Creative Director, and Stanford marketing educator, Jeri Cafesin, inspired by over two decades marketing seed startups to Fortune 100s, brings practical, applicable, lean Marketing PRACTICE to Silicon Valley. A MarCom specialist for over two decades, and founder of IPPglobal.org—Lean Marketing Workshops for Entrepreneurs—her marketing strategies and campaigns have helped build thriving companies that realize sustained business growth.
While women are worried the guy is a psycho-killer, most guys are worried the woman will be fat.
I’ve always had a…complicated relationship with food. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when heroin addict thin was trending chic. My mother’s favorite actress was Audrey Hepburn, because she was, “So beautiful and thin!” The perfect woman when I was a kid had a 36” chest, a 24” waist, and a 34” hips. A 24” waist is a size 2, in women’s clothing. How many women do you know who wear a size 2? Not me!
As a writer, food plays a huge role in every story I weave. Often, as in my novel memoir, DISCONNECTED, it’s a main character. Rachel sought what most women did—to be successful, married and in love, have healthy kids. It was hard enough attracting a man when she wasn’t heroin thin like most Hollywood women. But in the 1990s, finding a man wanting an equal partner instead of an arm piece, a woman beside him instead of behind him, seemed the impossible dream.
Then along came Lee…
And Lee was an overweight, weed addicted gambler, who devoured food like he did most of life. Modeling Rachel’s father, Lee ate every meal as if it were his first, and last. He took her to great new restaurants, and late night cafes where they got intimate over fritters and pies. Flattered by his interest, and enamored with his charm and wit, she indulged with him. But Rachel was always fighting her weight, mindful of every calorie she ate. And it didn’t take long for her to figure out they’d be a train wreck together. But by the time she did, she was in love with him.
In every novel or short story I write, food is described intimately for the reader to partake in the eating experience. Readers smell each dish placed in front of the characters; feel the heat, or cold on their lips and tongue; then savor munching chewy, crunchy, or smooth blends of flavors and seasonings.
Consuming food is probably our most communal activity. Meals are often shared, as are treats like ice cream, and popcorn. And holidays are all about eating together. I write character driven stories. And sharing a meal is a great stage for revealing intimate details about the people at the table.
On the plane coming back from Hawaii, the guy seated in front of me was easily over 300 pounds. He bulged over the armrests on either side of him. When he leaned his seat back, it came back so far it was virtually in my face. A teenage boy of equal girth sat next to him and crowded the small Asian couple on his left.
I felt annoyed, their big bodies invading the little space we all had. Then the woman across the aisle from them handed each a burger, dripping with cheese, and big bags of french fries. I went from irritated to disgusted. Our family vacation this summer began on the Big Island. Traveling around through large and small towns, within days it was impossible to ignore that a good percentage of the tourists, and seemingly the majority of natives were extremely heavy to outright obese.
Genetically destined to be fat?
Bullshit.
Never been scientifically proven. No one has even come close to finding a ‘fat gene’ that dictates you will or won’t be, regardless of calorie intake and lifestyle.
True, it’s been shown that certain genetics gives one the propensity towards producing similar body types, but ultimately diet and exercise determine individual body mass.
Much more troubling than genetics, studies have also shown cultures pass on habitually destructive behaviors from one generation to the next. Clearly, this plays out on Hawaii’s Big Island, where the pace is beyond slow, bordering reverse. The warm, humid air stifles motion; and the narrow, curvy, hot roads surrounded by desolate lava flows do not entice jogging, or cycling, or even rollerblading any distance. Typical cafes and family restaurants served large portions, piled high, and most were consumed quickly.
Been there. Done that. Spent my youth in front of the TV, and ate. Of course, I was overweight. Took a lot of ribbing as a plumb kid, and rarely got a date in my teen years. Made to feel small for being big, so I took the defensive pose and stood on [faulty] moral grounds instead of doing the hard work I knew it would take to lose the weight.
The summer before my senior year of high school my best friend gave me some black pills from her mother’s medicine supply. We both dropped 25 pounds before Christmas break, with ease. It would be another five years before replacing pharmaceuticals with racquetball, but eventually I learned to maintain a ‘normal’ body weight with diet and consistent, rigorous exercise. And I’d love to say staying fit gets easier to maintain with practice, but that too would be crap. A huge amount of my energy is still spent on my internal battle between reason and desire.
I love food. I have a slow metabolism. I always feel hungry. Working out hurts. I’m weak. Addicted. Old, now.
Whatever my excuses, the absolute truth is even running three miles five days a week, and mindful of every mouthful, when I put into my body more calories than I use, I gain weight. Like it or not, the reality is food has calories that turn to fat if they are not burned for energy. Simple laws of physics, and believe in them or not, we are all beholden to them regardless of genetics.
I am cursed with the proclivity towards obesity. My blood pressure is low, probably from running which is known to lower heart rate. It takes me longer to use calories than say, my husband, who has always been thin with a fast burn rate. Three out of four of my grandparents died of complications from adult onset diabetes brought on by consuming too much, and moving too little. My father’s been fat as long as I can remember; desserts high up on his reason for living, and a self-proclaimed connoisseur of just about anything eatable. Sports meant exercise, which was too taxing to even watch on TV, but he loved cop/court dramas, only getting off the couch for the bathroom or to get a snack.
I work very hard to maintain what so often feels a facade—the lazy kid who loves to eat always lurking just beneath the surface. She taunts me, tells me sugar cubes aren’t as bad as say, donuts, and tries to persuade me to remain inert since exercise hurts. Well, no shit. Fatiguing and stretching muscles is going to hurt. Jogging is jarring on bones and joints, no doubt. But pursuing trim isn’t simply a matter of being ‘in,’ as in hip, slick and trendy. It continually proves to be healthy.
Running is the quickest calorie burn for me, which is why I do it, but most any rigorous exercise that makes you sweat for half hour or more a day shows substantial health benefits. Cardio workouts are known to strengthen the heart, and our immune system to fight off colds, flu, cancer and more. Staying light increases life expectancy, neural connectivity, reduces depression, and mood swings, and makes it a hell of a lot easier to run. And stretching muscles keep us limber, less likely for bone loss, or injury, and quicker to heal.
In a restaurant in Walnut Creek for dinner with a friend last week, I watched her bump and grind her way through the crowded entrance. She’s been fat as long as I’ve known her, stands only five feet and weighs no less than 250 pounds. After squeezing into our booth across from me, she first described her recent knee surgery, only months after her back surgery, then spoke at length of her upcoming retirement plans, projecting a long, healthy, happy future well into her 90s.
She had to be kidding.
Obesity takes years off life expectancy, regardless of heredity. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319224823.htm On the plane home from Hawaii, on my way back from the tiny bathroom, I noticed “Proud to be big,” printed across the sweatshirt of the large teen next to the fat guy in front of me. Facebook returned 472 pages of “Fat and Proud” groups.
Are they for real?
Be proud for winning the row with your inner-child demanding instant gratification, not giving into the brat.
Let’s take off the pc gloves and get down to brass tacks. Nearly 34% of American adults http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/14obese.html and close to 20% of our kids are obese—30 or more pounds overweight, setting them up with health issues for the rest of their lives. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood/index.html We may have the right to do what we want with our body, but beyond the cost to society, modeling obesity condemns our children to a shorter life, full of health problems, body issues and social stigmas. And, it’s true you don’t have to be a young, flat, anorexic model to be beautiful—but illness is never pretty.
Fat is NOT a state of being. For most, it’s merely a state of mind. Eat salad and fish, not burgers and fries; include a rigorous workout daily, religiously, and most anyone can achieve and maintain fit. It’s going to hurt, especially at first. Get over it. Start slow, work up. Deny yourself that dessert on the knowledge the sugar rush is bad for your body thin or fat, and calories from sugars convert quickly to fats. Think before shoving crap in your mouth and get off the couch and odds are you’ll ultimately feel better, have more energy, get more done; be healthier, happier, smarter, and live longer. Best of all you’ll be modeling healthy living to our kids, and grandkids, and possibly a few generations down the line obesity will be a thing of the past.
IPP’s Lean Marketing Workshops are presented LIVE, at your business, or local office space in select locations.* LIVE LBM workshops are also available online, via Zoom, to virtually anywhere on the planet. We provide practical, lean Marketing methods, tools, process, and projects, to turn each offering you produce (now, or in the future) into a marketable offering of value, then market them, for profit (or donations).
Each workshop is Marketing PRACTICE, immersion into today’s trending marketing methods, and timeless marketing strategies, developed to educate participants to think differently about the Marketing Process, then apply this knowledge to build a sustainable foundation for effectively marketing your business at launch, and beyond. And that’s just Workshop 1…
Follow the steps in each workshop, in order, to achieve greater engagement on your all your marketing efforts forward.
