Doug Hall, CEO Eureka Ranch, gave the exciting opening keynote talk on Jump Start Your Brain at the TieCON East. “In today’s world of rapid changes, it is grow or die. So what? Why bother? It is not important because survival is not mandatory,” said Hall. 94% of all failures are due to poor systems and only 6% are caused by worker mistakes. In an interactive session, Hall had six questions for the audience to assess markeing knowledge.

1.    The smartest way to significantly grow sales is …‘increase number of customers’ or increase loyalty.
2.    Most new products or services fail because of …poor marketing or it is a bad product or ‘it is a poor idea from the beginning’.
3.    When creating ideas for new offerings the smartest strategy is …‘create ideas customers are not necessarily asking for’ or listen to voice of the customer.
4.    A customer letter or print ad has the best chance of success if …it is written at the high school level or ‘fifth grade level’.
5.    Building customer credibility is most effective if you offer …testimony from satisfied customers or ‘product demonstration’.
6.    With a breakthrough product or service you can usually tell …the winner in 12 months or ‘it usually takes 6 years’.  (‘  ’ correct answer)

“In a survey of businesses started by 400 Harvard Business School graduates, nearly half of them failed. Of the ones who succeeded, 93% found success after initial failure. Other surveys have shown that you are 2.8 times better off with more customers than loyal customer, 2.6 better off with non-incremental ideas than incremental ideas that appear to be less risky, and 10 times better off with non-customer driven ideas. When marketing it is important to let customers know one or two key benefits, not features, of your products and services. Other important strategies for marketing include avoiding confusion in promotion material and telling what you do/make on your business cards,” said Hall.

Hall stated three laws of 'Marketing Physics' that entrepreneur should understand well.  Overt Benefit:  One can triple the effectiveness of marketing efforts by overtly communicating benefits to customers. Real Reason to Believe: One can double odds of success by communicating the real reason to believe that the overt benefit will be delivered. Dramatic Difference:  One can triple odds of success by offering  a dramatic difference in overt benefit or real reason to believe.

According to Hall:        Eureka = (Stimulus ^ Diversity) / Fear
i.e. in order to succeed, one needs to increase the stimulus, leverage diversity and reduce fear. Learn to laugh with people rather than at people.

The present day brainstorming process was developed more than 50 years ago. There are few corporations still working with business models developedfive decades ago. The problem is with the ‘Thinking’ system. The creativity lies within individuals, patents are issued to individuals and then assigned to companies, and individuals start companies. So instead of group brainstorming at meetings, Hall recommends a three-step process:

Brain Writing – Solo
Dialog – Pairs
Brainstorming – Team

Finally, the secret to success is ‘Love’ rather than passion, which can be faked at times. In another survey of 1500 business school students, 1245 wanted to make money and then pursue their passion and 255 went with their passion. 20 years later, only one of the 1245 was a millionaire where as 100 out of second group of 255 had made it big.

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