Marketing | Monkey Business

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Today we heard from a potential partner that “you should delete your webpage” and get some concrete going on. Also we should get “some more meat around the bone”. Whuh. Heavy stuff. At the same time he cancelled our meeting planned for Thursday morning. Well, we kind of had a feeling that this may be a tricky partnership but still the reaction from him was little surprising.

Anyways, it was about time to hear some negative comments because Tom Peters on his book Project50 says something like this: “Think sometimes if you have pissed off people lately, because if you haven’t, then you are either not working hard enough or not being radical enough.”

And this is what also Jari Parantainen says in his Finnish blog that we need not to be afraid to divide people into two groups because if we get haters then we also got lovers.

Furthermore, practically the same thing from Guy Kawasaki: Do not be afraid to polarize people (point no. 4 in his post about the Art of Innovation).

The third similar minded comment is in this excellent and inspiring TED video by Richard St. John. This is actually what I wanted to share in the beginning. See the video below.

He says that one secret of success is persistence. He says that if we want to succeed we need to persist CRAP – which stands for Critisism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.

And this is what we say when people ask us about the marketing: Be brave, dare to make marketing that may piss off people. But I have to admit, that when the guy calls you and tells you to delete your website and get some more experience, it doesn’t feel good and kind of it puts me down. Anyways, I am happy to know we got loads of supporters out there and this is probably just one guy, who didn’t get what this Monkey Business is all about, maybe?

Keep it yellow everyone! Peace, Ville

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Tags: Marketing, Monkey Business, Talk, TED, Video
Posted in Books, Marketing, Monkey Business, Video | 2 Comments »

Don’t Eat Yellow Snow! VillaWool Beanies available now

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Heyhou All friends of Monkey Business!

Do you remember our Beanie campaign from last year? Even though it was only two that were sold, and the other customer was myself, the beanie got into an English street fashion blog and the brand was also exhibited in NYC later on. Outo wear is doing well and kicking, I think.

We are proud to bring you new beanies to warm your precious heads this year. Sometime ago Janne came to our office smiling and clearly excited about something. He told us that he had found something explosively fantastic from shop yesterday. Well, he didn’t share us directly what is was but the next morning he walked into our office wearing a hat that had big letter writing on it: “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow!”

We were really excited about the new beanie not least because we found out that it was made by VillaWool, a 35-year old family company from Finland. We had been using their other hats for years already. And as the freezing weather doesn’t seem to get much warmer we thought it is time to contact the company for little co-operation. Also the trigger for the contact was that our friend Soren who bought the hat last year told me that his beanie got lost… So Soren et al. here is what Matti from VillaWool says about the hat:

deys (Don’t Eat Yellow Snow) slogan was originally used by the first and only original Helsinki based Ski-Store called SkiSystems somewhere in the early 70s. SkiSystems were our first customers in this beanie business. real tough guys back in the days.

We are proud to say that you can order your own DEYS beanie now. Price is 30€ including Finnish VAT and mailing all over the world. Let us know which color your prefer: white, gray (my favorite) or black (Janne’s beanie is black). You should make the order by tomorrow 12pm in order to catch the first round of orders. If you somehow missed this message do not worry but just make an inquiry for the beanie as we will order couple extra to be sold from our office directly.

Peace, Love and Bananas,

Ville

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Tags: Beanie, Family Business, Marketing, Merchandise, VillaWool
Posted in Cool and Important, Friends of Monkey Business, Monkey Business, Products | 1 Comment »

Solo Experience in Finland in Summer 2010

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Happy new year everyone also from my side! The blog has been a little sleepy last days just like the bears sleep and hibernate over the winter. And Moomins do the same. Nevermind that, because we are thinking warm thoughts and next summer.

1.5 years ago we did a brave experiment with our friends Ralf, Charles, David and Marie. It was called a Penquin Expedition (a pdf) and it included a special thing called Solo Experience. Solo may be familiar to you for example through books like Syncronicity and Presence. Our experience was very good, we have a special place by the lake Saimaa where we can work and the summer in Finland is spectacular.

This coming year we are planning to open solos. The first one is in the first week of June and the second one will be together with a Penquin Expedition and during the last week of August. Here are some slides about the first one!

Solo Experience in the Finnish Forrest by Monkey Business

View more documents from Ville Monkey.

Loads of yellow! Ville

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Tags: Coaching, Courage, Encourage the heart, Learning Expedition, Marketing, Monkey Business, Slides, tribe, Workshop
Posted in Dialogue, Marketing, Products, Travelling, Workshop | No Comments »

Ten Steps on Tribe Marketing Offline

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Hey all and especially Jaana,

this morning when I biked to our yellow office I saw a vision of a blog post with then steps or principles about marketing to your tribe. This list is about building your tribe outside the internet and web 2.0. That list will come a little later on. So here we go!

1. Make meaning. (Guy Kawasaki)
2. Come up with a good name. (Guy Kawasaki)
3. Find a good slogan. (Like a core promise a la Thomas Gad)
4. Print the slogan on an ecological and fair trade T-Shirt.
5. Find a cool artist to draw a logo for you.
6. Print the slogan and logo on a notebook and distribute notebooks to your friends and customers.
7. Make cool stickers and hit them on the streets.
8. Make pins.
9. Get busy meeting (new) people.
10. Have fun doing all the above.

This is what we have done. Well, we also bought yellow jeans. Did I forget something?

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Tags: Marketing, Monkey Philosophy, tribe
Posted in Cool and Important, Marketing, Monkey Business | 2 Comments »

New Design Coming Up for Monkey Business

Monday, September 21st, 2009

We’ve made a deal with Jaakko from Kuvituskonttori to design a new image for Monkey Business. But he is not the only one visually talented friend of ours. Also, there’s a very promising young designer working currently at Intotalo who has a skill hard to match when drawing monkeys and other illustrations. Juha-Matti has drawn for example a great comic strip about Tupsu the Monkey and a superman Monkey.

This is our latest Design by the Tiimiakatemia bookshop host Esa. He gave it to us in the first page of a small notebook at the Team Mastery Arena (which was quite a success, by the way!) I think it’s rather cool and maybe this will be the design for our next T-shirt. And yes, the point of this post was to say that if there are some eager designers and or people with some eye for the visual candy please let us know. We are building a roster of artists, and we need loads of graphics in the future. My inspiration has come for this kind of organization and style initially from Mambo from Australia and and more recently also from Control Clothing from Finland. Cool stuff indeed by both of them, I think. Story by Ville Monkey

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Tags: Artists, Breakthrough, Co-creation, Creativity, Design, Marketing, Monkey Business, Monkey Philosophy, Tiimiakatemia, Y-Generation
Posted in Cool and Important, Design by Monkeys, Monkey Business | No Comments »

Slowly back in Monkey Business

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

It’s the time of the year that the Finnish summer gets warm and people get back to work. I wonder why our holidays tend to start from midsummer and end by the early August. Anyways here we are. But now worries it ain’t serious. Let’s start with a looong meeting over coffee, then go for lunch and ice cream. We had ice creams at the kiosk owned by three guys from Team Academy. They don’t take their business too seriously. Somebody went and did a tag on their wall but boys just added a little note under it saying… Well, see below for the photo.

Also I got a picture of Janne and Tatu. Here we go! Tonight we’ll have some crepes at Janne’s place and I am looking forward to that. Janne and Tatu had a good talk about if we should define our products or not. Janne made a connection to restaurant that also has a menu, so we started to talk about menu of Monkey Business.

Janne and Tatu.

And last, there’s a nice video I found through Makenubs videoblog which I originally found through Demos Helsinki Blog. I like it a lot, both the dance and the song. It’s something by Brodinski and Noob. I think we’ll use this video somewhere someday. Good stuff, enjoy!

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Tags: Brand, Funky Business, Marketing
Posted in Cool and Important, Monkey Business | 1 Comment »

Strangers, Friends, Customers & Salespeople?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Something that’s been in my head recently is the idea from
Seth Godin. Or let me phrase it here as three questions: How to turn strangers into friends? How to turn friends into customers? How to turn customers into salespeople?

After reading this idea from Seth’s book Small is the new Big I realized that I had become all of a sudden into a salesman for a friend. Here in Jyväskylä there’s a man who organizes parties. Or not just ordinary parties but clubs with music that is not normally played in the nightclubs we’ve got here. Such as Funk, Soul and Drum’n'bass. And I happen to like such a music a lot. I didn’t know him until half a year ago when my former flatmate Bram met him first. Then Bram introduced me to him. Now he’s my friend. And I promote his events to my friends. By the way, the clubs are named sharply: Wake-Up (not organized anymore) and Remedy.

Let’s analyze this phenomenon a little bit. Why do I promote his events? First of all because I would go to them myself. I trust his skills on making good events. Also, it’s rare to hear real good more marginal kinds of music in here. I want other people also to enjoy Drum’n'bass. Also, I know that the event is better for me as well if I know people who are there. I like to dance with my friends. I think we can generalize this into making meaning. When you feel that something is meaningful in a way or another you will promote.

Another aspect I wanted to elaborate about Seth’s theory is the idea of turning friends into customers. This may sound harsh to many. It used to me as well. Because I used to have a mental model that business exists in order to make money for it’s owners and only for that. But how about social business? Or team company where you actually make business with your friends? The idea is to redefine what making business means. I like to know people I do business with. I like them to be my friends. And then there’s a change that these friends become also my salespeople. Is it ok? I think it’s ok as long as business is based on something else than money. If it is transparent and aims on creating benefit for all. Our business is not a zero sum game. Story by Ville.

Ps. The next Remedy is on the Friday 3rd of April in Ilokivi, Jyväskylä
Ps2. Photos courtesy of Joonas Nissinen

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