“If you’re going to steal, rob a bank, not a grocery store.”

I read this quote many years ago in a magazine article that chronicled the career of General Motors Chief Designer Bill Mitchell. Bill was a car designer with General Motors who worked his way up the ranks to Chief Designer at Chevrolet in the Fifties and then Chief Designer for all of General Motors in the Sixties.

Bill was the man responsible for the “split-window” in the famous ‘63 Corvette. Bill oversaw and approved the designs for many of the striking and exciting cars that rolled out of GM’s divisions in the Fifties and Sixties (the cars collectors are coveting today).

So what does any of this have to do with small business marketing? Everything.

The above quote was a response to a question put to Bill about where he got some of his ideas. He said everyone steals ideas and copies ideas from other designers in the auto industry. It’s just a question of who you’re going to steal ideas from.

When he was a designer at Chevy, he and his cohorts would come up with truly unique and interesting designs. The chief designer would take a look and then say, “That’s nice. What’s Ford doing?”

Ford and Chevy were rivals for decades and whoever was ahead in sales, the other would copy their ideas to try and steal away some of their competitor’s thunder.

When Bill got the Chief Designer’s chair, he didn’t care what the rivals on the other side of town were doing. He wanted to know what Mercedes Benz and Rolls Royce and Ferrari were doing. He had his people studying Porsche and Maserati designs.

These were the people selling Sex and Power and Success and Glamour. They were selling cars that went for five to ten times what top of the line GM products were selling for.

So, who are the big winners in your industry? Who is selling sex and glamour and power and success? Who is the “Standard of Excellence”? Don’t look at your rivals in town. If they were such great marketers, they would have left you in the dust years ago and they would be the “big dogs”.

Study the biggest winners in your industry and copy them. Steal their ideas for your web site, your marketing materials, your press releases, your sales team. How are they marketing themselves? What mediums are successful for them?

And don’t just do what they do. Look at the details. What kind of emails do they send out? Are they blogging? How do they contact customers or clients? If they send out letters, what do they write? Study everything…

“If you’re going to steal – rob a bank, not a grocery store!”

Build your next marketing plan putting them squarely in the cross hairs and then pull the trigger!

Originally posted 2008-08-24 12:56:08. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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