Fast Food for Small Business Marketers

Walk into the local AT&T® store and you might have to poke around a while to know that they sell Apple’s venerable iPhone®. The Flash promo on the AT&T wireless store’s home page features smartphones from BlackBerry® and Samsung® with not an Apple model to be found. All of this despite the fact that Apple’s phone is hugely popular, with over 4 million units sold. Apple boasts the fastest growing market share of phones sold in the world, even though it’s not yet offered in many countries.
Wouldn’t your restaurant’s buffet table offer Tofu, if fully one third of your diners were vegetarian? Why push beef to your customers who suddenly want pork? As a customer, I don’t care about 200 kinds of carrot salad and cole slaw when the prime rib is tough or fatty.
If you believe that it’s important to match your products and services in accordance with customer preferences (and/or even anticipate those preferences), you may be happy to know that marketers for small companies actually have an advantage here.
With huge chain of command to convince, no stockholders to placate and no endless successions of meetings to endure, marketers inside small companies should be able to tweak menu offerings at a moment’s notice. And these days, any marketing advantage is nothing to sneeze at.

Parenthetically Speaking (or Writing)

Does attention to detail in your writing make you look smarter? Does it improve your marketing skills? It’s not hard to make a case for that. Just as clean fingernails and polished shoes help make a positive impression, so does your attention to grammar, syntax and punctuation.

So here (courtesy of Empire State College, NY) is a helpful guide to alleviate a frequently heard question: should one put the period inside or outside the parenthesis?

Short Answer: Punctuate correctly in and around parentheses. If a whole sentence is inside parentheses, then put the period inside the end parenthesis. If only part of the sentence is in parentheses, then the period goes outside of the end parenthesis.

Examples: Parentheses are like polite back seat drivers. (They interrupt to explain additional information that the reader should know.) Parentheses can hold explanations, illustrations, or clarifications forty (Byron was 36; Nathanael West, Rimbaud, and Robert Burns were 37; Thomas Wolfe and Pushkin were 38; and Dylan Thomas was 39). I told him I absolutely believe in marriage (as a cure for the temporary insanity of infatuation). Parentheses are also used to set off dates, provide reference information, and to enumerate a list.

• Angela Merici (1470-1540), an Italian, founded the Ursulines in 1535, an unconventional religious order in which women took vows but lived at home and taught in the community.
• The Chinese poet Li Po (c.700-762), a “lighthearted winebibber,” fell out of a boat and was drowned when he tried to kiss and embrace the moon’s reflection in the water (Hendrickson 111).
• The reason there are so many popular bike trails outside of Washington, D.C., is that the land is mostly flat (see contour map on page 6).
• If your toddler does not sleep through the night there are several questions to ask: (1) Have you developed a soothing bedtime ritual? (2) When checking on your child, do you accidentally wake him or her? (3) Is your toddler afraid of the dark? (4) Is your toddler waking regularly in the night hungry or thirsty? (5) Does your toddler use a pacifier or “cuddly” so he or she is able to comfort himself or herself?