I don’t know whether Warren Buffet writes this himself … though I must say the copy oozes personality … and if he didn’t write it … there’s one heck of a copywriter behind this.

Size Can Fool Ya
Given Berkshire Hathaway’s monstrous size you’d expect an annual letter from the top dog to be some dry cookie-cutter verbiage filled with all the usual corporate jargon.

Yet this letter has none of that…

Financial Copywriting at Its Best
The document his lined with numbers, percentages, return rates and all that good stuff that would usually put the average person to sleep … this letter makes you laugh, nod, and believe in the company.

This paragraph gives a clear picture of the company’s values:

With our acquisition of BNSF, we now have about 257,000 employees and literally hundreds of
different operating units. We hope to have many more of each. But we will never allow Berkshire
to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple
layers of management.

And how about this beauty:

We make no attempt to woo Wall Street. Investors who buy and sell based upon media or analyst
commentary are not for us.

There’s another story going on that many people aren’t familiar with – the success of sales of Olympic goods. A local company, Elastic Path Software was tasked with running this ecommerce store.

During the development process and on an on-going basis the good folks at Elastic Path kept notes and shared their results as they optimized the ecommerce stores web pages.

Here are links to 4 such blog posts. If you’re into internet marketing and website conversion optimization, you’ll enjoy these links:

Checkout Process
Product Details Page
Homepage
Category Page

Was searching for a rental car company in Europe and heard of Easycar. Anyways I was too lazy to type it into the address bar so I just hit up Google for the search. Look what came back … I’ve never seen this kind of Adwords ad that delivers additional links.

Is this new? Any experiences with it?

Many of you are likely familiar with it. But actually executing it takes determination and is harder said than done. Why? If everyone followed through there would be many more successful startups around.

One company that look to be executing extremely well on this formula is Japadog in Vancouver.

Japadog sells hotdogs. But from the get go they’ve taken this commodity type business and differntiated themselves extremely well. How you ask? They sell hotdogs created in Japanese style. The hotdogs are covered with Japanese mayonnaise, seaweed, Japanese pork and many other wild and wildly tasty goodness.

Back to Japadog’s model though. They seem to have started off with just one hotdog stand. They tested the waters and when things went well they opened another, and now another is coming. They started off in good locations and opened up in even better ones.

They expanded only after they took their leap of faith and had their hypothesis proven true.

Now in a few months, Japadog will open an actual restaurant style shop. This is hotdog making at a whole new level.

What’s next for the company? You’d think if this new restaurant approach is successful, they’d open more across the city and be prime picking for becoming the next franchise chain.

Who eats these things you might wondering? While Vancouver has a good sized Japanese population, and a very large Asian population, Japadog attracts all kinds of people. In fact, if you drive or walk by a Japadog stand on any given day around lunch hour, you’ll often see more suits than jeans waiting to grab a dog. Way to go Japadog!

The initial look of the site was great. Clearly they’ve done some nice design work. But seems like someone forgot the customer experience and why people actually visit retailers’ websites…to look at product!

There’s no where on this page to find what products they carry. The only way is to click on View Flyer and then have to enter a postal code. I don’t want to see a flyer with some products, I want to search as I please…is that so much to ask?

In this day and age it’s surprising to see that Zellers shows so little of what they carry. Maybe I’m missing something here? If I am, do let me know…BTW, I never found what I was looking for (I headed for another retailer’s site).

Intense Debate replied with a very detailed and honest answer about how their product can and can not be used.

Disqus replied with “You can use Disqus”, that’s it.

I’ve heard great things about both companies and products. But as someone that really values customer service and support it’s interesting to note how different the responses were.

Hope you all are well. Let’s keep things moving!

No doubt there’s a ton of books written on the ‘new’ social media landscape and marketing strategies and techniques that
can be used effectively. And hey, that’s all good.

In fact, I not only believe a lot of what authors such as David Meerman Scott have written in their recent books – we’ve been putting some of these principles to work for our clients for quite some time.

What I found myself questioning the other day, is how can so many people say that the old direct response approach to selling products directly to consumers doesn’t work anymore…when the TV and magazines are filled with repeat advertisers hawking their wares.

The basic premise of direct-response is that you test a bunch of ads in different media. You take what generates the best results and then continually test different headlines, offers, guarantees, etc until you have a money making ad. Once you have that you run with it.

So here’s the thing ( I know this is clearly a rant, but anyways…) I’ve been seeing some direct response style ads for auto and home insurance, as well as for life insurance run for more than 6 months. I’ve seen one company run the same ad only with slight variations for close to a year.

Either these companies have found a winning ad and are raking the money in, or they’re a bunch of idiots losing money hand over fist. And if the former is the case, there’s no denying that effective direct-response advertising is still alive and well.

From the results we’ve been generating, the best recipe is using social media to leverage direct-response marketing principles. A lot more can be said on this last topic, but I’ve got to get running so we’ll leave it there for the moment.

Most of my writing these days has been up on Business Consulting Buzz, so for the latest articles on being a marketing consultant and the consulting business be sure to check that out.

I’ll continue to post here as often as possible. Stay tuned. Cheers!