Clicksharp Marketing

By solving a problem in addition to the sale of a product, the storeowner has an opportunity to create a truly profitable solution.

I’m going to launch into a discussion of circumstantial profit by making a bold assumption: that every entrepreneur absolutely loves watching their business come to life before their very eyes.

After some meetings in Boston a few weeks ago, I stuck around for the weekend and treated myself to a brunch in the South End with some old friends. Sitting at a cafe’ prior to eating, their 18-month-old son had a “toddler moment” and the parents discovered they did not have a spare change of clothes.

With a flick of the wrist, I pulled up Google Maps on my iPhone, zoomed in on the city block where we were sitting, and queried “baby clothes.” We found a store named Tadpole right around the corner, and within ten minutes, the boy was the proud owner of a dry set of pants and socks (yes, it was an accident of adult proportions), and we all rode off into the sunset (at noon… what are the odds).

Here’s what I saw on my phone:

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While my friend, the boy’s mother, was lining the store owner’s pockets, I couldn’t resist telling him how we found him. His eyes lit up as he replied that, yes, he had indeed hired a search engine marketing company to optimize his business for local search engine queries.

But if this makes sense to you, you’ve probably read similar stories on other blogs… and maybe you’re not impressed. The real insight, though, is that this little anecdote is an illustration of “circumstantial profit.” By this, I mean that the store owner is well-placed to capture business for a very unique, high-margin scenario: the post-accident clothing purchase.

Here are the essentials:

• The South End of Boston is commonly populated by parents of young children. Located just a few blocks off busy Tremont Street, Tadpole is intelligently situated to attract this type of consumer. No surprises there.
• While this experience was driven by an iPhone, it is much more likely to transpire on a laptop computer — and much faster and more efficiently. But regardless, this was no technological eclipse. Apple is expected to be selling 45 million iPhones a year by 2009… and there is a slew of other “smart phones” which can leverage search engine listings to match consumers with their local solutions.
• To be clear, there is circumstantial business — and then there is circumstantial profit. A pair of pants carries its own cost to the storeowner, who presumably conveys the same price to a regular customer as he would to someone in dire straits like my friend. The circumstantial business looks no different on Tadpole’s income statement.

But the circumstantial profit defies measurement. Happy to have a problem solved, the customer’s distress is replaced by a unique sense of satisfaction… a powerful form of goodwill which costs nothing extra to the merchant. She is more likely to remember the name of the store, its location and its inventory. She is even more likely to mention it to her friends, in the context of an earth-shattering consumer conquest.

That increases future sales for the store, without any incremental expense: not marketing, not promotion, not customer retention.

Plus, there’s always the relief that the accident didn’t happen to one of us.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 @ 6:18 pm on the category Local search, Marketing Theory, Pay-per-click advertising, SEM, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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