Are You Getting Enough?

There is a classic story of a shampoo manufacturer who doubled his sales by making a little change to the usage instructions on the back of the bottle. All he did was adding one word in the end. Of course, you want to know what this magic word is, don’t you?

Well, it's a blog, not a book where you don't know who the killer is until the last chapter. So here it goes, that magic word:

“Repeat.”

Yes, all that guy did was this: Where it said “bluh, bluh, bluh…then rinse.”, he added “Repeat”. Just one word and his sales went through the roof!

Last week I was reminded of this story at the grocery store, of all places. I spotted a stack of boxes of mandarin oranges. Apparently, they came from someone who knew that old trick. The artwork on the boxes prominently displayed a fruit basket (they were smart not to put just mandarin oranges in there – you won’t want your child to eat a whole box of them), and here’s what’s written next to it:

“5 to 10 a day! Are you getting enough?”

Bravo! (I bought 3 boxes, and the mandarin oranges were outstanding, by the way.)

…And Now We’re A Part Of The “Establishment”

Not that blogging has ever been a part of some “underground” movement, but my spell checker never fails to smudge “blogging” with red stain.

A major breakthrough came in last month with the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announcing “blog” being the #1 most popular word that people look up. Here is a link for you to check it out for yourselves: http://www.m-w.com/info/04words.htm.

I guess it doesn’t get any more official that this. So “blogging” is now proper English. Congratulation to you bloggers! And if you’re not blogging for your business, you’re making it struggle for no good reason.

And maybe it’s about time I taught my old spell checker some new tricks too...