by Brian H Meredith
Enjoying my usual (albeit clichéd) Sunday morning ritual of latté and newspapers, I was struck by an item in the Sunday Star Times “Sunday” Magazine.
In a regular feature entitled “Day Job”, where ordinary, decent folk talk about their work, Rusty Smith, 41, a locksmith from Ponsonby, started his item with the words “I wash my car every morning”.
Rusty continued “..have done for the past 15 years. When your name is on the side of the vehicle, its an important thing”.
And there, in a single sentence, an ordinary tradesman, going about his business in the best way he knows how, revealed himself to be a very smart marketer.
Smarter, quite probably, than a lot of other marketing types who live in the same suburb as Rusty and think themselves so much smarter, hipper and cooler than your average locksmith.
And they’d be wrong.
The relationship your business (or Brand) has with its customers and potential customers has nothing to do with how hip, cool or smart you are when you live in Ponsonby and work in some corporate marketing department (working, perhaps, on the way hip, cool, smart launch of Telecom’s XT Network, for example)
It has everything to do with washing your car every morning for fifteen years.
Ask Rusty – he knows.
Comments
In short I love my job but more than that I love "the way I go about it".
I meet people everyday that have amazed me with their passion on any particular subject, and from their excitement you know that it is news to them too! We all have something special to give, we just need an avenue to bring it to fruition.