Follow the Flow Down

This week’s reading of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow lead to a discussion about how to reach your audience when your initial strategies fail. This one idea, in a sea of many, resonated with me, my group, and our current situation. Basically, we have a lot of product, we wasted a week of precious time to ultimately futile ends, and now only have a week left to sell enough product to pay back our investor and hopefully make a profit. Our flyers yielded little to no responses and when one of our members attempted to sell by means of a table we only sold one bottle. As team leader, I am getting desperate as I look for ideas and new strategies to kickstart a reinvigoration process as our deadline looms.

One method Godin mentions is to find someone in your industry who has a track record of successfully launching remarkable products and then them help you. Although we are merely a group of high school students, not yet players in a major industry, this idea still applies. We are selling a mainly athletic product, so we can consider the athletics sector of Brookline High School to be our “industry.” Now, finding someone who has their finger on the pulse of almost every athletic team in the school sounds difficult, but works out perfectly in this situation. Alex the Trainer is a contact for any and all athletes in need of his assistance, he has several fans inside and outside of the athletic community and has contacts in the BHS superfans. If we approached him with the new “standard BHS water bottle” we could sell it to him wholesale to distribute or we could use his contact list in the form of both popular student-athletes or teachers to get the word out.

Our team of sellers does not exactly consist of the most outgoing individuals, and selling these bottles to students has proved harder than we thought. If we can brand our bottles as the “standard” design for the school and then sell them to athletic administrators or coaches, people who students will follow and listen to, we could find success. We have been approaching this from the ground-level, which is most likely from the wrong angle, if we set up our supply at the top of the ladder, selling down will be much easier.