Jordan’s Furniture, a small chain of four furniture stores in New England, has been a marketing powerhouse for decades.  While other chains and mom-and-pop stores advertising 30% off, everything must go, going out of business sales are commonplace, Jordan’s continues to expand and acquire new customers.  They’re not the cheapest stores (while they used to brag about their “underprices,” they’re not as cheap as the discount stores), or always the best located ones, people still travel from far and wide to have their Jordan’s experience and, of course, buy furniture.

To get people to come, the stores are open late every night and are virtual entertainment meccas.  One has a moving movie ride, another a trapeze school where visitors can try out their circus act.  Still another has an IMAX theater.  Each of the stores has a playful layout for young and old – our local store has a recreation of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, including Disney-esque robotics.  There are also restaurants in several of the stores.

The people who run Jordan’s, Barry and Eliot Tatelman, are household names in New England.  Their television ads run round-the-clock.  They’re witty and fun and people perk up when they see the ads air.  These two are the ones responsible from moving the one-store family furniture business (opened by their grandfather in 1918) into the powerhouse it is today.  Several years ago, Jordan’s attained the level of having the highest sales per square foot in the country.  They were then acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.

Barry and Eliot still run the show, apparently, and they remain as wacky and savvy as ever.  They continue to do all the far out, innovative stuff that you’d never expect from a furniture retailer and are constantly attracting more customers.  There new promotion is totally wild . . .

“Consumers purchasing a mattress, dining table, sofa, or bed at a Jordan’s store location between March 7, 2007 and April 16, 2007 will receive a rebate of the purchase price paid for the Deal Merchandise if (but only if) the Boston Red Sox® win the 2007 Major League Baseball World Series®.”

The television ads supporting this promotion feature Barry in a mock post-game interview.  Wearing Red Sox garb with microphones and reporters asking about the deal.  He explains it and is then asked by a reporter, “but how do you do it?”  Barry replies in deadpan, “insurance.”  Classic.

Of course, when you attach anything in New England to a potential Red Sox championship, it’s a winning combination.  People are crazy for the Red Sox in the Boston area.  Jordan’s uses this to garner loads of attention in what seems to be an absurdly great deal.  All without taking any real risk.  After all, the Red Sox have won the World Series only once since 1918 (the year Jordan’s Furniture opened).  But still, since all Boston fans have hope this early in the year, I’m sure people believe that they’ll get their furniture for free and it’s driving business to the stores.

What can we learn from Barry and Eliot of Jordan’s Furniture?  Even in a cutthroat, low margin, me-too industry like furniture retailing, unique and innovative marketing pays off big time.  Just think about what such tactics could do for your entrepreneurial business with its more apparent differentiation.  Be unconventional.  Marketing in your industry or market place doesn’t have to fit the rules laid down by everyone before you.  If you’re innovative, you can break through the noise and confusion and capture the attention of your customers and, even more importantly, of your competitor’s customers.  The only one who sets the rules to this game is you.

One of the big challenges that young companies face is how to let the world know about their great product or service.  When the company is well funded and the founding team has the wisdom to plan for their big marketing push, there are generally funds available to run all sorts of marketing programs.  Most often, though, the lion’s share of the money invested in the company is used for the creation of the product or service and there never seems to be enough left over to make potential customers aware of it.

Recently, a company that I am an investor in and director of, AccuRev, invested a couple of thousand dollars into creating a series of short videos that they placed on YouTube.  The videos mimic (rip off may be a better term), Apple’s “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac” commercials.  As you’d expect, AccuRev is the ever-so-cool Mac and AccuRev’s biggest competitor, IBM’s Clearcase, is the stodgy, slow, un-hip and very un-cool PC.

The first video in the series has already had almost 3,000 views.  The company is tracking the lead data closely and will attempt to correlate leads and sales that are initiated by the videos.  At the very least, exposing 3,000 sets of eyeballs (clearly not all those of existing customers) to singular competitive messages, clearing stating a specific advantage of the company’s product against its biggest competitor raises awareness of the product and company and can lead to being considered for purchase later.

Pretty nice way of leveraging a small marketing budget.

As you’ve undoubtedly read a thousand times in the reams of pages of management books that you’ve consumed, it’s vitally important that when you build your management team, you don’t just pick good people, but instead, pick good people whose skills fill in for weaknesses in the team.  For this reason, the first person I look to add to any team that I’m on is a marketing person.

Try as I might, I can’t create marketing.  As every marketing person who has ever worked for me knows, though, once a marketing idea is brought forth or a program created, I have no trouble analyzing it and expressing my opinions about it.  Sometimes my analysis even has value.  I believe that I know good marketing when I see it.  Witnessing good marketing for me is an experience similar to what I have when in a gallery or art museum, I appreciate the beautiful works, fully recognizing that I struggle drawing a legible stick figure when playing hang-man.

I rationalize that one doesn’t have to have the ability to do something to appreciate the skill and beauty demonstrated when someone else does it.  Yet, as a business person and entrepreneur, I can’t quite get over why I suck so badly at marketing.

Rob over at Businesspundit, whose marketing ideas I find fascinating, has a terrific post titled, Marketing is Math: A Heretic Questions the Gods of Grassroots, Viral Messages and Sacred Purple Cows.  In his post, Rob exposes several marketing myths and popular errors.  While Rob doesn’t know me, I felt that he was shining a light on several of the reasons why I make the same marketing mistakes again and again.  This thought from his post, in particular, rang true for me:

“The first crack in the foundation of my marketing apotheosis came when my partner and I decided to advertise in a local business publication. It was expensive to advertise, but we both read it, so we assumed that other people like us read it as well. We committed a major chunk of our budget to a series of ads that ended up landing us… a single phone call. It was time to regroup. I had learned my first lesson – everyone’s behavior isn’t like mine. To this day it’s the hardest thing to do – to keep that in mind when I pursue new ideas. What I like, what my friends like, what my family likes, may end up being irrelevant.”

Doh!  You mean that not everyone likes what I like and thinks like me?  No wonder I can’t come up with a reasonable marketing program that attracts other people.

Rob ends his post explaining the mathematics of marketing.  In doing so, he gave me hope that a quantitative, left-brained guy like me can retain some hope that I’ll one day understand the art of marketing.  If you’re wondering why your current programs aren’t working or you’re betting the ranch on viral marketing, this post and the others on Businesspundit are definitely worth a look.