#41/111: Attention!

What is it about?

Do you know the five easy steps to own a yacht? I don’t neither but maybe I got your attention. Jim F. Kukral writes about generating attention and how to use it to make money.

Key points?

Be different: To get attention today, you have to be different. Try to draw outside the lines. Let’s take job applications, Jim Kukral saw that his future boss used post it notes to organize himself. So, he decided to write 50 post it notes with positive attributes of him and glued them on a big board. His future boss was impressed and hired him.

Sell benefits: What is in for your customers? Do they really need to know that you product get feature XY? Probably, no. They want to know how they can benefit from your product. Save time, increase productivity or higher the comfort. For example, a car offers lots of features from ABS to a air conditioner. The benefits are a more safety and conformable transportation.

Don’t try to be everybody’s darling: Don’t try to avoid every confrontation just because you could shy away some people. A example is again the iPod. A lot of techies complained about missing features. Though, most people don’t care about the features, they want a simple device for listening to music.

Conclusion

This book is actually interesting but lacks a bit of usefulness. He talks about a lot of one hit wonders from the Pet Rock to the Million Dollar Website. Sure, it’s fun to hear about such products but they aren’t a sustainable business.