The “Unattainable Triangle”

The Audio Podcast for this posting is avaliable here (2:40).

The "unattainable triangle" is composed of quality, price, and speed. All products or services have two out of the three sides of the triangle. That is to say, high-quality and fast turnaround but high-price or low-price, fast-turnaround but low-quality and so on.

The triangle is unattainable for two reasons. The first is logistical. Providing high-quality service with faster-than-average turnaround time is going to cost you more money than your competitor who can do the same level of quality at a lower price with slightly slower turnaround. It’s pretty much logistically impossible to maintain a profitable business that has somehow "attained the triangle."

The second reason the triangle is unattainable is the "snake oil" effect. Let's say it was possible for you to design a software solution that was faster and better than any other software solution on the market today and you priced it below market value hoping to make your money back from high-volume selling. Chances are you would fail. You would fail because buyers today are more sophisticated than ever before and their perception of your offering would be that it's simply too good to be true. This is the "snake oil" effect.

Here's the big marketing idea.

If you were able to offer all three sides of the triangle, you shouldn't. It would be in your best interest to maximize your profitability by sacrificing one of the three sides. So if you had something that was better and faster, you can and should increase the price. The strange thing about this strategy is that it might actually sell better with a higher price. This kind of strategy is known as a Price Premium. For more information, on price premiums, check out the Justin Downey Marketing Campaign Strategies Playbook.

Proof of Concept ::

• Starbucks: High-quality/Fast-turnaround – High-price
• Whataburger: Low-price/Fast-turnaround—Low-qualit
• U.S Postal Service: Low-price/High-quality—slow-turnaround

Look around you and every company you see will be leaning on two of the three sides of the "unattainable triangle". The key for your business is choosing the right two sides to promote.

Visit our website to see if you can guess which two sides Justin Downey Marketing leans on. Do you think we should be leaning on a different two?

Coffee and an Easy Marketing Idea

Justin Downey Marketing’s "Easy Marketing" white paper series is designed to be a valuable resource to small businesses. We pour over data, establish our low-cost, high-impact best practices and distill all that information down into a short, easy-to-understand white paper. We have a few ideas for what we should work on next, but we want to know what you want to read.

Go to www.justindowneymarketing.com/easymarketing to see the white paper topics slated for release. If you can come up with a better, more valuable topic for us to cover in our series, you could win a $25 dollar gift certificate to Starbucks Coffee.

Coffee and an "Easy Small Business Marketing" white paper from Justin Downey Marketing. Sounds like a productive morning to me.

Submit your topic ideas by going to www.justindowneymarketing.com/ideas and you’ll be automatically entered to win a $25 gift certificate to Starbucks Coffee.

Entries for consideration are due by December 19th, 2007, so don’t delay.

Entries chosen by Justin Downey Marketing prior to December 19th will be entered into the winners drawing. Odds of winning are subject to the number of entries. No purchase necessary. All rights reserved.

Promoting Your Small Business with Press Releases

After much anticipation, Justin Downey Marketing has released the second installment of our small business marketing best practices white paper series. "Easy Small Business Marketing :: Online Public Relations" illustrates the easy and low-cost way for small business owners to promote their business online through online press releases.

Of all the marketing activities at your disposal, only public relations marketing comes across as informative, rather than self-serving, like traditional advertising.

There are also other equally powerful benefits of online press releases. Send your online press release through a distributer like TransWorldNews and links to your site are distributed throughout any number of the hundreds of news-related sites that subscribe to that feed.

Besides instantly creating hundreds of channels for traffic to make it to your site, you have also increased your site’s search engine ranking. Most search engines look at the number of websites that link to yours as a way of gauging credibility and expertise. With even a single release, hundreds of websites would link to your business website.

To learn the easy and low-cost way to promote your business through online public relations marketing, download our latest Easy Marketing whitepaper: “Easy Small Business Marketing :: Online Public Relations.”

Included in this marketing best practices whitepaper:

• How Online PR Fits into the ‘Marketing Mix’
• Demystifying Online Press Releases
• Search Engine Optimization Benefits of Online Press Releases
• Marketing Public Relations in 3 Easy Steps

The whitepaper is available for download here:
http://www.justindowneymarketing.com/CFR/jdm_Registration.php?refer=blog2

Stay tuned to www.justindowneymarketing.com/easymarketing for the latest information, including release dates for the next installment of our whitepaper series.

The Next “Easy Marketing” Whitepaper

On August 27th of this year, Justin Downey Marketing published the first in its series of "Easy Small Business Marketing" whitepapers (see: TransWorldNews Top News Story). Our first whitepaper focused on creating and optimizing your business website so it could become more than just an online advertisement. It could become a resource for your prospective buyers.

Our next "Easy Marketing" whitepaper, highlights the easy way to:

• Efficiently Brand your company;
• Stir interest for a new product or service offering;
• Drive traffic to your website;
• Increase your website’s ranking within top search engines;
• And do it all for a lot less than you think.

"Easy Marketing :: Online Public Relations" illustrates the power of online press releases to accomplish all the things above, quickly, easily and for a lot less than you might think.


The whitepaper is scheduled for release on November 15th.


Stay tuned to http://www.justindowneymarketing.com/easymarketing to download our first whitepaper and for the latest whitepaper release information.