– or ‘The Laurels’ principle of distancing yourself from the competition
”It is by imitation, far more than precept, that we learn everything.” - Edmund Burke
Those among you who grasp the beauty of The Laurels principle are about to experience a frisson of realisation: a light bulb going on, a Sliding Doors moment – call it what you will. Because once you ‘get’ this, you need never worry about the competition again. As marketing strategies go it’s painfully simple and inexpensive, and yet so few businesses exploit it. Why? You tell me.
A few years ago some schoolteacher friends of mine showed me a leaflet they’d picked up in their school common room. It was an advertisement for a small hotel on the Herefordshire-Wales border. The Laurels Hotel specialised in away-breaks ‘exclusively for teachers’, with ‘special rates’ for teachers’ union members. The leaflet showed photographs of cosy bedrooms, unpretentious, book-lined drawing rooms and rambling gardens. It was also relatively cheap – in fact it was just the kind of place that might appeal to a hard-pressed teacher in need of a spontaneous break. The killer stroke was to include mouth-watering details of a ‘typical’ dinner menu, the price of which was included in the weekend package.
My friends promptly booked a weekend. It was just what they needed.
When my friends arrived at their (as it turned out, mediocre) ‘hotel’ they noticed that it was one of many similar out-sized guesthouses in the neighbourhood, all of which seemed empty of guests (it was deep in the off-season). All, that was, apart from The Laurels. The hotel lounge was heaving with guests – all teachers, all couples, all having picked up the identical promotional leaflet in school common rooms up and down the country.
Now this is a classical example of what I call Isolation Marketing. The owners of the Laurels had identified a niche in the market (teachers) and exploited that niche by contacting its members directly. They’d simply acquired a list of schools and mailed each of them a few of their leaflets together with a polite covering letter requesting that the leaflets be displayed in teachers’ common rooms. Instead of advertising alongside their competitors (most of which offered no more or less than the Laurels) in magazines and newspapers, they isolated their appeal.
None of The Laurels’ competitors, it seemed, had thought of the idea, and the beauty of this marketing strategy was that it was unlikely to be copied - because the competitors didn’t know about it! The Laurels’ had left their competitors scratching their heads: “How is it we’re all empty and yet The Laurels is full?
If you’re struggling to differentiate your business from the competition, this is the very technique you could be using to fight back. It works. And this is but one limited example of how to bypass the competition.
More on the subtle art of Isolation Marketing next time.
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