Loss Leader Chickens, Exploding Worlds, and Book Covers – The Sales Lead Digest

The first article hits close to home because when you buy your next Costco rotisserie chicken it may be coming from our home state of Nebraska. Fremont Chickens may not catch up to Omaha Steaks but you never know! This week there are a few big numbers in our articles – 91 million chickens, 100 million mobile downloads, 6 million concurrent game users – then we wrap it up with a bit on book covers. It’s a good reminder, don’t judge the newsletter by the article covers. Dig in.

This weeks sales and marketing news:

It’s only $4.99. But Costco’s rotisserie chicken comes at a huge price

“…the chickens are a lure, pulling customers into stores and getting them to browse the aisles, adding sometimes hundreds of dollars worth of items to their shopping carts before they pick up that bird.

The chickens have become almost a cult item. 91 million were sold last year, double the number from a decade earlier. They have their own Facebook page with nearly 13,000 followers.”

91 million “loss leaders” sold in a year? Competing with Amazon is a challenge and it looks like cheap chickens is one way to get us off the couch and into a store. Does your business use loss leaders to bring in new customers? I just bumped into a piece of recruiting software that is free if you buy workers comp insurance from the company. Very loss-leader-ish behavior. The idea is as old as sales itself, consider it for your business.

‘Call of Duty: Mobile’ smashes records with 100 million downloads in first week

“The mobile version of videogame franchise “Call of Duty” racked up 100 million downloads in its first week, industry site Sensor Tower said on Tuesday, dwarfing the debuts of previous smashes including “Fortnite” and “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” (PUBG).”

I’ve mentioned how some news items are a wake up call for just how clueless I am about how big the world is. 100 million is a giant number. The Super Bowl took 40+ years to get to 100 million viewers and last year may not have even hit that number. It may be time to ask about your customers gaming habits because it just may be the new watering hole your business needs to be part of.

kid playing online gameFortnite has reached The End – changing video game storytelling for good

“On Sunday evening, more than 6 million people gathered online via streaming services such as Twitch and YouTube to watch the end of the world. Not our world, thankfully, but the world of Fortnite, which was sucked into a black hole, taking the whole game and all player characters with it.”

All sales and marketing is storytelling and right now some of the best storytellers are working in online gaming. This is great, there is foreshadowing, snippets, and clues to get people talking and then, bam. Offline. It’s all gone. We’re working with a company that’s about to announce the relaunch of a service and it could use some good storytelling. We may not be able to get 6MM people to pay attention, but we can try!

booksA Book Cover’s Promise

“Try this: take out your favorite books. Look at the cover. Is it an accurate detailing of specifics from within the book? Or is it the promise of the book? I know what my favorite books/covers are.”

I know, it’s lazy to pick a tweet instead of an article but when I bumped into this guys thoughts on what a book cover is supposed to do, I thought “Marketing!” This is what our job is too. We’re trying to make our prospects a promise: if they choose us and spend their valuable time us, this is what they will experience. I need to talk to more book cover designers. 

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