I own a few website domains – my innovation blog, my name, and several sites for various business ideas – through either GoDaddy.com or Register.com. In the last week, two sales tactics that Register.com use really jumped out at me – and not in a positive way.

When I was in high school I would drive down to the local bowling alley to play pinball and video games.   I was experiencing the pay-per-use business model for games – keep feeding quarters into the machine if you want to keep playing.  In the decades since, a number of new business models for the industry have emerged, with different impacts to the seller:

Buy new to own.  This has been the most prominent model since pay-per-use.  Buy new games to play on a console, or on your PC, or even …

Sometimes the easiest way to be innovative is to let your competitors make mistakes.  Here are three examples of companies that took advantage of their competitors, with embedded videos of the advertisements they created.

A great marketing activity is one that doesn’t feel like marketing at all. That doesn’t happen very often, so when it does it feels noteworthy.
Southwest Airlines (revenues: $11 billion) sent me a birthday card this week. Seriously. A birthday card. Not a promotion disguised as a birthday card, it was just a birthday card. It didn’t even have drink coupon enclosed. And guess what – I appreciated it a lot more without any coupons. It made it much more memorable (obviously since I’m …

Google has just mailed out window stickers to 190,000 businesses that contain 2-dimensional bar codes (or “QR” code), which when scanned by a mobile phone will call up the business’s local directory page on – you guessed it – Google.  There are over 1 million businesses that have filled out their Google local listings, but the company has mailed these stickers to the 20% that are most searched for on the web. (Source article from TechCrunch, image from Gizmodo article.)
Great distribution model
What struck me first was the efficiency of Google’s …

IKEA came up with an innovative way to market their new store in Malmo, Sweden.  (Original story from Mashable.)
They setup a Facebook page for their store manager and then uploaded showroom pictures over a period of 2 weeks.  The first people that “tagged” themselves to a product in the pictures won the product.
The beauty of this idea was its use of an existing Facebook feature – photo tagging – which served to automatically post the picture to each user’s Facebook page, broadcasting it to all of their friends.  Simple idea …

Telemarketers work hard to earn their bad reputation.  They’ll call at work or at home.  They try to talk non-stop without taking a breath for as long as possible so that you can’t say “not interested”.  If you stay on long enough to tell them you aren’t interested, they don’t believe you and try to convince you that you are wrong.  Sometimes their strategy is to be very nice and polished so that you won’t hang up on them.  Other times they are rude and will hang up on you …

I think that I want an Amazon Kindle.  As a self-professed early adopter of gadgets, the Kindle should certainly rank near the top of my list.  I wish the product did more (touch screen, color, play movies, etc.) but I’ll just have to wait for the future Apple tablet to give me another multimedia toy.   At $299 it is also fairly expensive as noted by many reviewers, but that hasn’t stopped me from buying cool technology before.
So why haven’t I taken the plunge?  Because I have at least a dozen …

If there was ever a time that an image jumped out at you and yelled “innovation!”, this was the time for me.  It makes you remember that some of the most creative people in the world work in marketing – it’s a demanding job, since whatever they dream up today they can hang their hat on for only a short period of time before they need to dream something up again for tomorrow.
Was this more expensive than a billboard?  I’m sure it was.  But compare the effect of this to …

If the success of a book was based on the number of pages that I underlined or wrote notes on, then Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson might become the most successful book of all time.  Obviously that probably won’t happen, but by the time I finished my pen was out of ink.
What struck me first were the incredible number of examples – not just the known examples like Google and Facebook, but many companies and products that I had never heard of before.  Did you …