It will be the hottest marketing promotion of the summer — until it runs out of gas. Companies of all kinds are giving away tankfuls of free gas as long as you buy something: a new car, hotel room, even Calloway golf clubs. With $4 a gallon fuel prices and $50-75 fill-ups becoming part of our auto-oriented lifestyle, gasoline giveaways are a real attention-getting promotional idea.

Expect to see it a lot of them this summer, before they fade away by Labor Day, says a marketing professor at at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

But why bother with gas cards at all? Why not just take $50 off the product price, or give customers the cash as a rebate instead? After all, money is money, right? Shouldn’t consumers be just as excited about a $50 discount as a $50 gas card?

Aha, that’s where the psychology of marketing comes in! Any copywriter worth his thesaurus knows that buying decisions are primarily driven by emotion, not logic, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Suzanne Shu, a marketing professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, says:

“The more (a) purchase feels discretionary, like staying at a luxury hotel, the more the gas cards have impact because people can use them to justify something they might not do otherwise.”

So if you’re thinking of going down the “free gas” road for your next promotion, just remember those roads are going to get pretty congested. Link

photo credit: pixelnaiad

Seth reminds us of the first rule of b2b selling:

“If it gets to the RFP (Request for Proposals) stage, you lost.”

In other words, you should already have dazzled the prospect with your knowledge and ideas and closed the deal — long before it ever reached that point. As Godin put it:

“The RFP is an organizational punt, it’s a way of saying, ‘it’s all a commodity, we can’t decide, cheap guy wins.’”

And who wants to compete on price?

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned Andy Sernovitz of MarketingProfs and his list of ingredients found in good word-of-mouth marketing. Then I asked you to figure out what was missing from my list. (Note: It’s on Andy’s list, but I purposely omitted it to make a point.)

The missing link is the same thing that causes a lot of products, services, blogs, and companies to crash and burn. With it, you’ve got a shot at success. Without it, you’re doomed. What is the missing ingredient?

It’s what makes something — anything — exciting, buzzworthy, viral. It’s simple, once you think of it. Ready?

It’s having a fantastic product (or service). Then adding some features that make it remarkable. (”Remarkable”= “worthy of remark” = word of mouth!)

Sure, it’s obvious and elementary. But look around at many businesses today, especially some online businesses and Web applications. You’ve got to wonder, what is so special about this? What were these people thinking? Who did they think was going to use (buy) this?

Online or off, I believe the biggest problem most small businesses have is cultivating their uniqueness. Your Unique Selling Proposition, to use the old marketing textbook phrase. It’s really tough to distinguish yourself from competitors when everyone is offering essentially the same product or service.

Finding and promoting what’s different and fantastic about you — that’s the essence of all marketing. Once you find (or add) that, copywriting and promotion becomes easy.

Let’s face it, none of us like dishing out our personal information online, especially to a company we don’t know or haven’t done business with before. It can result in all sorts of unpleasantness, including spammy emails.

Zillow, the real estate valuation website, is launching a service that I think is simply brilliant. Mortgage Marketplace lets borrowers get quotes anonymously, and at the same time provides free leads for lenders. Can you say “win-win?”

“Borrowers fill out detailed loan request forms but do not provide any personally identifiable information… The borrowers get e-mail alerts and can choose which quote and lender they want. Zillow vets the lenders so only reputable ones can offer quotes… The quotes must… disclose all fees and Zillow estimates the taxes, insurance, and monthly payments, making comparison shopping easier.” CNet

Wow! As a marketing consultant, I’m always trying to dig out my client’s Unique Selling Proposition. But this — this is a no-brainer!

I predict privacy will become an even more urgent problem in the months and years ahead. (Can you say TJX and Hannaford?) Savvy companies like Zillow will proactively offer ways to protect their customers’ privacy while still providing value-added services.