We’ll Work For Wine

Trading goods and services without the use of money has been around forever. Early civilizations relied on this kind of exchange as most of them had no form of cash. And when the Americas were colonized,  the Europeans used bartering with the indigenous people as the locals had no desire for printed money. They couldn’t eat it and they had nowhere to spend it. To them it was just paper. The practice of bartering is still in use today, but to a much lesser extent, simply because it is very hard to give someone change when they want to pay for a chicken and the smallest thing they have to pay for it is a cow. But aside from the implications of keeping spare chickens as change, I think it is a practice which is way too often overlooked by companies short on cash flow but flush with stock (be it intellectual or warehouse stock).

Even as kids we knew the value of bartering. Do you remember back in school when you would swap your juice for chips, or cookies for Twinkies? Even as children we had a very real sense of the comparable value of things. To the kid who gets cookies in his lunch every day, that elusive cream-filled gooey cake treat is worth maybe a week’s worth of cookies, but he also realizes that his friend might feel completely different. To the Twinkie kid, cookies might be a really nice change. After all, how many Twinkies can one actually stand? The value of any given product in a barter system is based on how much the other person values what is on offer. A heater in Alaska is worth way more than an air conditioner, but the same can’t be said in Texas. It’s all relative.

Some would argue that bartering won’t work for everything. And that is probably true. That is why money was invented in the first place. With money the problems involved with bartering either disappear or severely diminish. You no longer have to find people who want what you have and are willing to barter their stuff for whatever you are offering. Carrying coins is also a hell of a lot easier than carrying cows.

But the mark­eting services industry has been using bartering for years. For instance, businesses often trade goods or services for advertising space or marketing. Newspapers offer ad space, shops offer the side of their building for billboard space, film producers offer product placements – the opportunities are virtually limitless. Sponsorships and promotions work the same way. If Coke buys the uniforms for a kids sports team, the teams can agree to put the Coca-Cola logo on each jersey and hang banner ads in their local sports park.

And while we designed the ad above to be a cheeky spot for the Marketing Thought social media page (see here), we will actually work for wine. As long as it is a decent quality Red in lots of at least 4 cases. The concept is not entirely new to Marketing Thought, we have arranged contra bartering deals for restaurant vouchers for w2eat.co.nz, traded ad space for a Peugeot scooter, and we know a flight partner that contras everything they do in marketing for flights (but we have to keep who they are a secret). Of course money is better for paying the bills, but sometimes the barter system suits what you have to offer.

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The Thank You Email

Every day life seems to get just a little bit more chaotic, a bit more busy than the day before. With the constant sound bites of desperate politicians begging for your vote or ceaseless ads invading your head space so that you will try a new hair product, it can all be a bit overwhelming. Your phone can ring 10 times a days with some automated caller, a voice all cheerful and happy, telling you that YOU may be entitled to debt relief or asking if you have been injured in an accident that wasn’t your fault.

Then on top of that you probably get your in-box jammed with 25 emails daily offering you everything from generic Viagra to the best price on a holiday in Majorca. Buy Now! Save More! It is not uncommon for people to spend the first hour of their workday going through their messages. It is high pressure sales without a guy in the bad suit standing in front of you. It has become a hurry-up world, where few people have time for niceties, as they only have 20 minutes for lunch break and have to race back to the office so that they aren’t in the line-up when the next lot of redundancies are announced. From the supermarket to the dry cleaner and even at your local bar, it seems people are in much more of a hurry and not often in the mood to bother with the somewhat outdated notion of courtesy.

 

 

Yes, it seems like courtesy has left the world…it got on a bus and headed to warmer climates where it still felt wanted and appreciated. No forwarding address and not even a thank you note. Can you blame it? After being ignored and tramped on for the last few years, well, I would probably do the same. The art of saying thank you (which was never really all that hard in the first place) seems to have also tagged along when courtesy went on vacation.

A great example of this lack of Thank You’s in the world can be found in that in-box that you dutifully spent clearing junk mail out of this morning. When you order a product online, almost every company will send a “confirmation of order”. Yes, there will probably be some kind of thank you tacked on there, but it is of the cursory kind, as though it was just the e-marketing team bowing down to the memory of their mother who told them relentlessly “Say thank you to the nice man.” It doesn’t feel like a REAL thank you, it feels a lot more like a receipt. And there is nothing wrong with a receipt, it is an important part of the process.
But how much nicer would a real personalized thank you be?