The staple puller was invented by Pankonin and patented in 1936. The need for a staple removal device came about because of the efficiency of the staple. Once a staple is put into a stack of paper, it is not meant to come back out. The point of a staple is to hold things together forever and ever. However, people make mistakes. Every once in a while I use my sleek black and silver Swingline special to staple papers together only to find out that I need them separated once again. Oops. That is where Jaime and my staple puller come into play. I need an office do-over, a mulligan, a little dose of mercy for being so hasty with my stapler. So I get my little friend out and retrieve the staple (or have Jaime do it for me.)

How does all of this relate to marketing? If you are in charge of your company’s marketing efforts, you realize that the pressure to be effective in your job is greater than ever. In 2011, corporations cannot afford to miss on their attraction of new business. Just a couple of years ago, many marketing plans either followed the latest trends or kept on doing what had always been done before. Without a whole lot of thought, most companies were content to "pull the staple” on their marketing efforts and try again. It became a trial and error approach to marketing. If web banner advertising did not work, they tried putting ads on shopping carts in the grocery store. If that did not work, they bought billboard space. Upon the failure of billboards, they tried sports sponsorships, and so on. The other end of that spectrum contained the folks that just kept on doing what they had always done before. They just kept signing an advertising contract year after year. There was no real measurement of the success or failure of the ads. I had one partner in a financial services firm admit to me that they had not had one call from their Yellow Pages ad in years, but felt like it was still a good investment. "How so?” I inquired. "It keeps our name in the public eye,” was his response. Not if no one is looking at it! Have you seen the number of ads in a typical Yellow Pages phone book? Momentum shifts in advertising venues and you have to move with them if you are going to stay relevant.

The party is over for ineffective marketing. Business leaders are insisting that marketing and sales get it right the first time. There simply is not enough fat in the budget in 2011 to keep pulling the staple time after time. So how do you know what will be effective and what will not? First of all, do your homework. Talk to customers and find out what sticks with them. What would cause them to leave their present suppliers and go somewhere else? Ask them how they go about finding new vendors when they are dissatisfied with the old. Market to the source of their pain. This is not only a good exercise for potential customers you wish to have in your fold, but for your current clients as well. Don’t buy into the myth that they will never leave you. Secondly, what can truly be measured in terms of marketing effectiveness? Take a look at response rates tied directly to your advertising. Don’t get sucked into the sales jargon that really means nothing. For instance, if you are trying to drive traffic to your web site off of your advertising, there should be a direct link to what the customer sees and what he does. If someone tells you that their search engine gets 5 million "hits” a day, be suspicious. (Hits are a measurement of requests for a file on your web site. Most web pages have several files, so a visitor viewing one web page may trigger several hits. It is a totally useless measurement for marketing purposes.) What you really want to measure is how many "unique visitors” – actual people – browse your web site, how many of your web pages are they viewing and what specific pages are they looking at. That will tell you whether you are being successful in your marketing campaign. Don’t be afraid to ask new clients how they found out about your business. Find out what works and stick with it. 2011 is the year of the marketing stapler, not the staple puller.

_______________________________________________

Knick Knacks and Miscellania. The common staple remover

http://www.jitterbuzz.com/indkni.html

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Staple Remover, November 25, 2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_remover

Photo by David Brimm