1. Appear as Large as You Possibly Can

The peacock typically has its feathers, quills, etc in a “down” position, making the bird very “long” with its trailing tail. However upon seeing or smelling a nearby prospective mate (interestingly, called a “peahen”) it spreads those feathers into a beautiful pattern of color — beautiful at close distances and at least visible at greater distances.

And so it is with business — customers are more willing to trust an established company than a new company (which may not be around 3 months down the road). Large companies are usually unwilling to do business with startups, but midsize companies may be willing to take a shot with a small company (one rung up from “startup”).

So you want to cover the basics, such as:

• Have a website so it’s clear that you’re in business
• Correspond with an email address at your corporate domain (not gmail, aol, etc)
• Show that you’re protecting your products with trademarks, patents, etc.
• …

In a conversation with Dylan Adams (intellectual property attorney with Graybeal Jackson) I recently got some good insight that will benefit owners and team members in startups and small companies alike.

1. Labeling your text as “Copyright” is perfectly appropriate, as anything you have written implicitly has one — even without filing.  Use “C” within a circle if you have actually filed with the Library of Congress.
2. Using “TM” is ok to indicate you intend to file a trademark, but “R” within a circle is a no-no.  This indicates that the USPTO has granted a trademark and that it is “registered.
3. Labeling your technology as “patent pending” is ok if you have filed for a provisional patent.  Do not, however, use it as liberal window dressing — otherwise you could find yourself incurring a $500 fine per instance (such as every customer download) which could easily multiply to the point of putting you out of business.

I hope this saves you trouble with the Fed, which absolutely will slow down your startup ascent!

(We’ll save for another column how Jobs could, in turn, allow Microsoft to “lift” the concept and keep it always playing catchup!)

Today’s post is about a brilliant, entertaining video series from Xerox that says we’re still around and we feel your pain!

They’re not trying to sell you a product, they just want you to be unsurprised if you hear about Xerox in one of your upcoming meetings — and to have a positive association.  This is merely following the age-old truism, know they customer.

What do you think — did it work for you? Takeaway: how can you create a smile on your customers’ face

They’ve recognized that many people have wi-fi in the home, at their employer, and at their local coffee purveyor. So if you agree to connect your phone to wi-fi whenever possible, they’ll sell you unlimited text and data over the Sprint network the rest of the time for a phenomenal $19/month.

They support Android phones in the Beta phase, but given that Sprint just committed to buying something astronomical like 20 million iPhones in a multi-year period, I’m thinking Republic could be soon be advertising support for the market leading hardware — while punching AT&T below the belt on retail costs!

The takeaway:  how can you drop barriers with your customers so they see you as the coolest company earning their trust?

It stems from or is supported by the Network Effect, which states that the value of the network grows in proportion to the number of nodes or members of the network.

A virtuous circle: the lending library may cut into sales of ebooks, but that will be more than eclipsed by the number of Kindles sold (and goodwill generated) by the PR from this program — which in turn drives more authors to write for the Kindle platform.

NOTE: this program took work (lots of it — in terms of analysis, marketing communications, and certainly software development) but represented no addition hardware SKU’s or stock keeping units to carry.

It is a classic example of a marketing program that any business can develop to bend or break the rules for TOMA — top of mind awareness — for customers.

How can you do right by them today?

“Catching the wave” takes effort, but the risk of not doing so is potentially getting left in the dust by your competitors.

Which camp are you in?

I found this one quite helpful and hope you do too:

Well it just turned 90 degrees clockwise for me — straight down.

What could prompt such a fickle customer reaction? Almost anything — customers are human, and humans are tuned to the radio station WIIFM (what’s in it for me?)

In this case, I forgot my eyeglasses in the vehicle I left at the shop late last night.

No problem, I checked with the service manager and he said he’d be happy to overnight them to me at my client site in another state — but he didn’t have any forms or boxes.

Appreciative of his help, I said “no problem — I’ll phone it in and have them bring a box and completed paperwork to make it easy” for him.

I was on the phone with 800-GoFedEx for 5 or 10 minutes providing an account number, the shop contact info, my client contact info, etc. when I heard shocking news.

It would work just fine if I wanted FedEx Ground.

But not overnight with Express!

It doesn’t make sense for me to chew the customer service rep’s ear that this made no sense… the cheaper service was easier for the customer but the more expensive overnight service made me do more work??

Indeed, I had to spend another 15 minutes with a technical support rep to accomplish what I could have done immediately with the ground service.

Shocking — clearly the CMO and COO haven’t walked in the customer shoes.

Today’s takeaway: where are your customers giving you feedback about matters that (left alone) could prompt their defection?

Not just because of what I prefer to call “Interdependence Day”, but because every 823 years, the days line up in the month so as to have 5 full weekends.

So yes, this can be simply your nifty factoid for the week.

Or, you can use it as an anchor to remember that “business” and “personal” are more connected than separate (in the business-to-consumer sense).  The bigger picture is to be aware of the calendar that your customers live by, especially when targeting new customer segments.

Certain holidays or points in the weekly/monthly/yearly rhythm can be particularly good — or bad! For this month: entertainment, retail, and seasonal businesses can capitalize and post monthly sales highs.

Or consider this quintessential example:

US Federal Income tax reports are due every April 15th (unless it falls on a holiday).  So if you are selling to accountants or tax preparers, the month immediately prior is a waste of your time — whereas the month afterward is golden.

Using the “calendaring lens”, what opportunities can you identify?

Now at first glance, these people naturally got their hackles up about competitors — but drilling down in conversation with them, it turned out that the first served publicly traded multinationals, while the second specialized in funding plans for startups! There is a reason they’d never crossed paths in daily life — they aren’t competitors but have a better chance of sending work to each other as referrals.

So the lesson is to always focus on serving the special needs of your customer constituents, unlike the following where Dr. Juma can do almost everything (in fact, s/he competes with me – “Customer Attraction”!!)  The narrower your focus, the greater the possibility you’ll be seen by a non-competitor in the industry as complementary and thus a potential referral.

Consider the following billboard and I’ll be back next time with an exercise!

I stumbled upon this great example today demonstrating thought leadership and felt compelled to highlight it.

Sharing a lesson dating back to my anthropology professors back in the Harvard Business School executive program, we “marketers” (read: businesspersons, non-profit leaders, engineering managers, etc etc) are always most successful when we tie into the customer’s reference frame, i.e. how do they think of their world?

I leave you with the rhetorical question: are you clearly defining where your product or service “lives” in the customer’s map of their world?