I bet you thought the movie “Daddy Daycare” was a kid’s comedy, right? Wrong… It’s a marketing strategy movie! When Charlie and his friend Phil are fired as product development/brand managers for a cereal company, they decide to fill a need in their community.
On the road to success, they demonstrate several strong marketing strategies, equally applicable to online, offline, and integrated businesses. Take these lessons to heart as you develop plans for your business.
Lesson 1: Research the competition
The future entrepreneurs visited all the nurseries in the area. As they did, they got a glimpse of their daycare competitors. By knowing your own competitors, you will be able to find a better way to compete effectively.
The investigation of the competition does not have to be considered as a “guerrilla war”. In many industries, competitors work together by partnering, cross-promoting, sending business to each other, or even manufacturing each other’s products.
Lesson 2: Know your customers’ values
Charlie and Phil understood that price is not the only important factor for their target market. Based on their own experience and client research (talking to other parents), they recognized that concerns other than price played a role when parents chose a child care provider.
While price is almost certainly a consideration for your customers, don’t get sucked into the mindset that customers will buy from you only if you have the lowest cost. If you think of your own service/product as a set of attributes that have unique value to your customers, you will be more successful.
Lesson 3: Identify opportunities
Charlie and Phil discovered an unmet need in the marketplace by combining competitor research and insight into customer values. You can do the same when looking to develop new products/services or improve existing ones.
Lesson 4: Develop Opportunity-Based Positioning
Using the knowledge from the first three lessons, they positioned themselves as the quality alternative and focused on delivering benefits that were different from their closest competitor. In the movie, Daddy Daycare stole all of the competition’s customers and bankrupted them.
In real life, customers choose the product/service that best suits their needs. Consequently, competitors can coexist when each is valuable in different ways to industry customers.
Lesson 5: Create a catchy slogan
The slogan “Who is your dad?” helped advertise the new business. Often a concise and catchy tagline can go a long way in building brand equity, communicating benefits and features, and/or conveying a sentiment/mindset that your target customers can identify with.
Some examples:
“Do it.” (Nike)
“Life without a script” (TLC)
“Naturally sweetened whole grain oat cereal with real berries.” (Berry Burst Cheerios)
“He makes everything possible.” (Craftsman)
Lesson 6: Spread the word
Phil and Charlie put their slogan on t-shirts along with their company name. They also printed and distributed brochures explaining the positioning of their new company.
A few more ideas you can use to get the word out about your business:
Word of Mouth – Give customers an incentive to tell people about your business.
Advertising – Use both online and offline methods. Online options include pay-per-click search engines and ezine ads. Offline methods include radio ads and newspaper ads.
Philanthropy: Donate money, services, and/or time to nonprofit organizations or host your own event.
Lesson 7: Be ethical and honest
New business owners fully cooperate with the daycare inspector. They treated him like a source of information instead of “Big Brother.” This resulted not only in better business, but also in a valuable ally. In the long run, your own business will be more likely to prosper if you focus on improving the business rather than skirting regulations.
Lesson 7A: Subterfuge is a bad long-term strategy
In addition to being unethical, subterfuge tarnishes your reputation. In the movie, the competing nursery collapsed and ruined a fundraiser… spilling critters, releasing animals and drenching visitors. In the short term, it worked. Phil and Charlie were broke, with seemingly no way to continue their adventure.
In the long run, Ms. Subterfuge had such a bad reputation (for this and other business tactics) that her business failed.
Lesson 8: Implement until you’re blue in the face
At first, the new daddy daycare was a complete disaster. Charlie and Phil did their “homework” and knew they had a good idea. However, when reality hit theory, some not-so-minor details got in the way. Like all successful salespeople, they worked out the problems (okay…the disasters) and kept trying (and trying, and trying) until they got it right.
Keep the lessons from Daddy Daycare in mind as you develop and implement your own marketing plan. Don’t give up, strive for continuous improvement and your business will surely be a success.