Ideas

The Catalogue Effect

Garth Beyer

There’s a problem with overserving, with overshipping, and with overcreating.

Do you know what a catalogue is? They used to be extremely popular because every week, month, or year, the catalogue would present everything new that is being sold. Yes, they would contain older products, but companies don’t send out catalogues to show you their old products, they send them to show you the new products.

A catalogue is the greatest 18th and 19th century way to overserve, overship, and demand overcreation. I’m going to let you in on a secret. The secret why catalogues have died off – it’s not because of the internet. No.

When people would receive catalogues, they looked at them to see what was new, but contrary to the seller’s belief, the consumer wasn’t looking to see what was new to buy it. The catalogue became a news source. All the consumer was left with after receiving a catalogue was wonderment with what the next catalogue could possibly contain.

Where does that leave the seller?

It’s neither positive or negative. The seller makes money as she always does.

The real person you should be questioning is the creator. Where does that leave her?

It’s a positive thing to serve, create, and ship with some form of regularity. However, when you overserve, overcreate, and overship, you produce the catalogue effect. Yes, people will value your work, but merely appearance wise. After you begin to deliver excessively, they will only be interested in what you will concoct up next. (Not what they will pay for next.)

 

Stay Positive & Creating More, Makes Your Audience Want More, But Not Spend More

Garth E. Beyer

Idea Day!

Garth Beyer

I have a lot of ideas for businesses or publicity acts and what not. Here’s one I wrote about already. Here’s a handful more.

  • Music media channels. One person puts a music channel on (similar to Pandora stations) and other people can tune in to the same station and chat about it. Where music professionals go.
  • A social media site that requires you to have more than 400 characters to post something. A place where you must find meaning in everything.
  • Create a magazine that you can only find the magazine content in the magazine, and the online content, online. Freshtent: Will never find the same story in a different tent.
  • New designed paper shredder. Cross cut’s as you put it in +++++
  • Cop-locater Facebook page. Use of Google maps to see where people have marked a cop car in the last hour.
  • Abercrombie & Fitch
  • Dog leash shoelaces: like the retractable 32 foot dog leash, but picture it in a shoe. So in winter when you toss your shoes the laces don’t get soaked in the melting snow because they retracted back into the shoe.
  • Picture texting: You take a picture and you can put your text inside it. For example: Take a picture of a billboard and you can write what you want in the billboard.
  • eReaders sectioned like real books in a library. Grab and check out an eReader. Now you hold access to 50 books on the subject you want, not just one.
  • President can provide a photo filter for people to upload their social media profile images to represent the President that they want to win. For example
  • Nook Nook Instead of looking for a book and sitting down at Barnes & Noble, why not have a lounge area stocked with eReaders where you can just sit down, pick up an eReader and browse their online collection of books.
  • A restaurant creates an area online where they post the days and times waitresses will be working so that frequent eaters can either 1. Reserve to be waited on by a certain waitress or 2. Can go there and request to have the same waitress as last time. – I’m not being discriminatory: waiter/waitress, whichever. –

Stay Positive & Keep The Ideas Coming

Garth E. Beyer

Taking Inventory

Garth Beyer

I’ve written a bunch about starting fresh this new year. This post is by far my favorite

Ship or Delete

Taking Inventory

Nah. It’s more like getting rid of your inventory. Very cut and dry.

Go through all of your lists right now: your projects, your folders, your notes, your journals, your goals, and either ship or delete them.

Simple right?

Well you’re going to come across a project and think to yourself, “Well this is something that I can’t ship right now because it’s unfinished and it’ll take time to be finished.”

Decide right now whether you will actually finish it within the next two months. If yes, then do it. If no, then either delete it or ship a short version of it. Put it out there for someone else to work on.

There are a couple of concepts at play here.

The first is that if your idea was remarkable enough, you would be working on it constantly or would be passionate enough to complete it within two months.

The second is that if you can withhold one of your ideas, one of your projects, then you are saying it’s not important enough to be delivered right away. (If it is, then now I’m mad that you’ve made me wait so long and won’t buy into it when you finally deliver it.)

The new year is about starting fresh. You have 21 days to go through all you have and either ship or delete. Ship or delete. Ship or delete.

In order for a door to open, you must close one. Actually, the cool thing about life is that when one door closes, a million open for you. How many will you have opened for the new year?

 

Stay Positive & Make Room For New Inventory

Garth E. Beyer

 

On What To Write About

Garth Beyer

Writer, novelist, journalist, whatever your title, the question always comes up, what should I write on?

For many, we have plenty of ideas to keep us occupied. However, that doesn’t always mean that our readers want the same things that we want to write about.

There is a simple solution.

I’ve recently interviewed Doug Moe, long time columnist for the Wis. State Journal. When asked about how he decides what to write on, he mentioned that he gets a lot of his ideas from his own history. Things happen to connect for him. On the other hand, he also gets a lot of suggestions from readers, friends, and people looking to be profiled.

Doug elegantly entwines what he wants to write about and what other people want him to write about, all the while making it so that each piece is loved and felt by the people of Madison.

When you can’t come up with ideas for what to write on, or your ideas aren’t appealing to your audience, don’t quit, don’t give up, don’t put down the pen. Get people to suggest stories for you and run with them like you’ve been handed a batton in the Olympics.

Every idea for your audience is a treasure, or at least it will be viewed as one when you’re done writing about it.

The Five Stages Within The Diffusion Process

Garth Beyer

The Diffusion of Innovations, also called the Diffusion Theory, is a theory that strives on the interpretation of how people either adopt or reject new ideas, technology, products, or change in general.

There are five stages within the diffusion process:

  1. Awareness Stage: An individual becomes aware of the existence of an idea but lacks knowledge of what it does, or the benefits of it.
  2. Interest Stage: An individual has a desire to obtain more information on the idea: what is it, what does it do, how will it affect our culture, what are the possibilities of using it?
  3. Evaluation Stage: An individual mentally questions the selfishness that the idea can be used; how will it benefit me? The individual also begins to demonstrate interpersonal communication by requesting feedback on the idea from others.
  4. Trial Stage: If it benefits the individual, then the idea will be tried. It will be a personal experiment, a small sample to be tested in a way that concludes how the individual can benefit most from it.
  5. Adoption Stage: The individual begins to scale the idea and use it consistently. This adoption stage is largely based on continuous satisfaction of the idea.

A similar five stage process in the mental acceptance of an idea is Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation, Confirmation encompassing similar definitions to those I have presented.