If Mainers Aren’t Looking at Ads, Why Advertise?

Only 21% of Mainers say they consult advertising when researching a major purchase.

At first glance, that sounds like bad news for advertising. It isn't.

Our Mindsets of Maine research shows Mainers turn to search, company websites, and friends and family when they're ready to research. But advertising may have already done its most important job before that research starts: making sure your name is one they know, remember, and recommend.

So maybe the better question isn't whether someone responded to your ad. It's whether your name comes to mind when someone asks, "Who would you recommend?"

The Rule of Three

It might sound strange, but there are only three things you could ever possibly sell: an Experience, a Convenience, and a Solution. The trick is figuring out what you sell.

An experience is a novelty, a break from the norm that might reinvigorate someone. But it isn't something that a client might rely on.

A convenience is taking something a client might want, though perhaps not want to do, and delivering it to them- food, cleaning, and upkeep, for example. It's nothing that the client could not do themselves, but they pay a little extra for the saved time. But that's truly what they're paying for: saved time.

What you want to sell is a solution. You want to offer the answer to the problem a client has, and you want to be the one they will turn to when a problem like this arises again. The question then comes: how do you turn what you sell from an experience or a convenience into a solution?

Listen to this week's Briefcase for a little push in the right direction!

Leadership is built on Trust, Grown Through Risk.

Leadership requires a certain willingness to take risks.

For Brian and Kevin Bowman of Bowman Constructors, that meant taking on big projects, showing up before dawn and doing whatever the job required to get it right.

On the latest episode of The Ric and Dan Show, the brothers talk about how Bowman Constructors began, the advantages of working together and, naturally, their professional-level pickleball skills. But underneath the lighter conversation is a practical lesson in leadership: building something worthwhile takes more than being good at the work.

It takes commitment to a shared vision, trust in the person working beside you and the courage to say yes before you have every detail figured out. Brian and Kevin built their business by accepting bigger challenges and continuing to show up when the work became difficult.

Leadership is not always one person standing out front. Sometimes it is two people moving in the same direction, sharing the risk and doing the work together.

Tool to Try: Goody

Goody caught our attention because it fixes the two things that quietly kill most gifting efforts: nobody has the recipient's address, and nobody's sure what they'd actually want.

The setup is simple. You pick the budget, the recipient picks the gift and hands over their own shipping info. No spreadsheet of addresses, no guessing games, no fourth mug nobody asked for.

For client thank-yous, employee recognition or a quick congratulations, it removes the friction that usually turns a nice idea into a task nobody gets around to.

Has anyone on your team tried Goody yet?

Title

Ric Tyler, Audio / Video Idea Engineer

Our rotating team feature continues with Ric Tyler, Audio / Video Idea Engineer who is a broadcaster, writer, idea guy, and owner of a suspicious amount of knowledge about songs recorded between 1965 and 1985.

Hi. I’m Ric and I’m a Broadcaster.

I was a broadcaster before anyone was willing to pay me to be one. As a kid, I pretended I had a radio station in our basement. The ratings were low, but the rent was right.

At my grandparents’ camp in T11 R4, I walked the railroad tracks with a transistor radio held up to my ear, listening to songs I’d someday play as “oldies.” I had an imagination. That, by some divine intervention, became my vocation.

My first part-time radio job was at AM 1230 WBME. I got fired.

We don’t talk about that.

In college, I worked at 91.9 FM WMEB, interned at WLBZ NewsCenter 2 and, in 1984, KISS 94 FM called and saved me from scrubbing the bottoms of boats in Belfast.

We don’t talk about that either.

I did the math a while ago: I spent 11 and a half years doing radio news and on-air announcing at KISS. The night I graduated from college, I didn’t celebrate. I worked on the air from six until midnight. That probably should have told me something, but my headphones were so loud I couldn’t hear myself.

Then came a ten-year detour into television, doing weather and news and getting out just before high-definition television could expose all my flaws. At the end of that long, strange trip, I joined my wife, Elizabeth, in starting what would become Sutherland Weston Marketing Communications.

I thought I was done.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

In 2004, radio called me home. I joined Blueberry Broadcasting, where I continue working morning drive today. My dad, rest his soul, was convinced I was working the early shift at Dunkin’.

All told, I’ve been doing this for more than 45 years. Good heavens, I’m old.

Let’s not talk about that.

Radio has cost me some parties, a lot of sleep and nearly all knowledge of nighttime television. Dan Cashman still makes fun of me for that. But broadcasting has also given me something beyond the near-mutant ability to name nearly every hit song from the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s in just three notes.

It’s given me an ear for how people speak, how stories move and how carefully chosen words can make someone stop and listen.

That experience now helps me write, develop and edit radio and television commercials. It helps me shape podcasts and plan and execute live events. I’ve even had the privilege of writing speeches for a few politicians. Some of them even got re-elected.

Our clients don’t work with a “company.” They work with people. Each of us at SWMC brings a lifetime of experiences, instincts and slightly peculiar talents to the table. Mine happens to have been forged behind a microphone, often before sunrise.

Maybe I belong in a support group that meets every other Tuesday in an abandoned convenience store up in Old Town.

“Hi. I’m Ric, and I’m a broadcaster.”

“Hi, Ric!”

But the truth is, I think, simpler: I believe I’m doing what God made me to do. That belief has carried me through some dark, snowy mornings, a lot of missed celebrations, and, still to this day, weekends that seem way too short.

After all these years, the view from here still looks best from behind a microphone.