Bacon Salt - The Product Is The Marketing

My favourite business author and blogger Seth Godin is always talking about the relationship between products and marketing. His stance is that the product should be the marketing. It's something that's built in.

So my ears couldn't help but perk up when listening to NewsTalk 980's John Gormley Live this morning. His guest was Dave (or was it Justin?) - the co-creator of Bacon Salt.

Yes. Bacon Salt.

The tag line you ask? Everything should taste like bacon. The header of their blog includes the title "The never ending quest to make everything taste like bacon."

This is the perfect example of a purple cow, and to go along with it they have a story worth telling (straight out of All Marketers Are Liars).

The two Bacon Salt founders were sitting around one night and someone said "Everything should taste like bacon". The next day when they sobered up they still figured it was a great idea so they started registering domain names and going through the paper work involved in starting a business and creating a product.

When it got to the point when they needed to pay for production, they needed to come up with $5000 and weren't sure how they were going to come up with the money. Well, fate was on their side because the next day they received a call from America's Funniest Home Videos saying that the video they entered had just won them $5000 and the cheque was in the mail. (The video is below).

Bacon Salt seems to be getting a ton of media exposure, and so they should. They've created something worth talking about. If you have the right story, a market will create itself because people will tell their friends.

If only we could all take a page out of Dave and Justin's book.

The Purple Cow Christmas

I'm back from Christmas holidays and ready to get back at it. My wonderful wife got me a couple books from my business hero Seth Godin to read. I read his book "All Marketers Are Liars" a while back and wanted to read the rest of his stuff but never got around to it. Katlyn made me get around to it and I'm glad she did.

The first book I read was Seth Godin's Purple Cow. He talks about how most businesses make the mistake of trying (consciously or subconsciously) to be normal to attract the masses. But in the process, those businesses become so vanilla that they aren't attractive to anyone. This book pushes you to be remarkable for a sliver of your target market. If you're truly remarkable for these people, your ideas will spread.

I don't do this book justice. The ideas are so simple, but so incredible at the same time - you need to pick up a copy.

I'm about halfway through Small is the New Big also by Seth Godin. This book is not your typical business book. It contains excerpts from Seth's blog and books, with each one ranging from as short as one paragraph to as long as a few pages. Each entry contains valuable information that makes you think differently about marketing and business in general. It's worth a read.

The thing I love about Seth's ideas are that he never just accepts things the way they are. He always asks why something is the way it is and uses common(?) sense to challenge the status quo. If you don't subscribe to his blog, you should. If you haven't read any of his books, I suggest you do. His blog is currently listed as the 15th most popular blog on Technorati. The numbers don't lie, he has some good ideas.