BoxTofu

8 Things we can Learn From Homeless Marketing

Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by koichi.

When you walk by a homeless person on the street, do you ignore them? But, do you ignore all of them? My bet is that some of them pique your interest, and sometimes you give them money.  This, my friends, is homeless marketing.

Think about it. Most blog owners are very happy if a mere 1% of visitors click on their ads. Online stores are happy if 1% of people buy products. It doesn’t take much, and if a tweak in the way you market something can get you another 0.2% success rate, you’d be very happy. Yesterday, I stood across the street from a homeless guy with a pretty standard “Any help appreciated” cardboard sign. Approximately 0.7% of people gave him money, but of course, his sign was pretty blah.

After doing some extensive research (and by extensive research, I just mean walking around San Francisco for a month), I’ve come to realize that the homeless use marketing tactics that are very applicable to all kinds of businesses. Believe it or not, there are some pretty bright minds “working” in homeless advertising right now, and I guarantee you some of them have 5% or better conversion rates. I even know of one person in particular that has an avid repeat customer (me!). He does one helluva job.

I’ve been examining their tactics  and reverse engineered them for you and your business. Whether you’re the writer of a small blog, or the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, these may be useful for you. (more…)

Continue Reading

Welcome to BoxTofu!

Posted on 05. May, 2009 by koichi.

Hey everyone! Welcome to BoxTofu, a “blog for ridiculous marketing.” To be completely honest, I hate the logo, I hate the website name, and I hate everything about the branding of this site. But do you know what? If I can brand and market this garbage, then you can do the same for anything else. Anything. And i hope to help you do that.

But do you know what I hate more? I hate it when people start writing a blog post for the first time (just like this one) and pretend like people are reading it, because they most definitely are not. I imagine it takes at least ten posts to not look like a quitter before you even start, not to mention Google barely knows this blog exists (or if it does, I’m page number 4,305 no matter what search you stick in there).

So screw it with the intro! I’m going to start writing posts instead, and won’t bother with anything else for a while. If you read this, then enjoy the overly happy / surprised picture on the right. It was cold and my frail blogger’s eyes weren’t used to the outdoors (have you ever watched a puppy meet snow for the first time?).

Anyways, I’ll see you all around soon, and meet you a little bit later, I’m sure. Cheers and thanks for stopping by!

Continue Reading