Marketing Matters: What’s Your Hook?
October 5, 2010 
Southern New Jersey is definitely Philadelphia sports fan territory. It’s also home to an ever increasing number of corn mazes. New to the local maze business, Jeremy Sahl and his family at Joseph Sahl and Son Farm in Galloway Township, needed a way to make their maze stand out, as two of their neighbors in the township already had well-established agritourism businesses, including successful mazes.
The Sahls are Philadelphia Eagles fans. They struck a fundraising deal with the popular [well, maybe not in Dallas, TX, nor even northern New Jersey] football team’s Eagles Youth Partnership, giving them the rights to carve the Eagles’ logo into their corn patch. Eye-catching aerial photos of the maze published in local papers reeled in potential meanderers. Despite rain three out of four weekends last October and Halloween falling on the fifth weekend of their first season, more than 2,100 Eagles fans came to wander through the Sahls’ 8½-acre maze, just a short distance inland from Atlantic City.
In Guerilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson’s classic small business marketing guide, he describes the importance of understanding the concept of positioning. “Determining exactly what niche your offering is intended to fill” will be the foundation of a successful marketing plan. By keeping a marketing plan, including a clear, concise positioning statement, simple, straight-forward, and easy to comprehend, employees and the entrepreneur will be more likely to implement it. Levinson’s recommendation is to start by writing it all in a single paragraph.
Create Your Niche
The Sahl family has developed their niche market by creating an image and positioning themselves as both avid Philadelphia sports fans, and community supporters. This year they are teaming up with the local hospital’s foundation, expanding their maze to 11 acres with three different trails — easy, medium, and difficult — and will be featuring the Liberty Bell logo of the Phillies baseball team. Their customers are gaining confidence in a consistent quality experience at the Sahl Farm maze, just as Jeremy and his family are confident that the Phils are going to win another pennant this year.
As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words. The Sahl’s front-page photos of their Eagles maze made a bold statement. All that was needed to complete the story was an address, times of operation, phone number, and website, which were included in a brief caption. That was their hook, the attention-grabber that made someone want to learn the rest of the story, or in this case to visit the maze, instead of getting distracted or going somewhere else.
New Marketing Tools
Levinson also points out that each year there are a few new marketing tools created. That’s really how corn mazes started, as new attractions to draw potential customers to visit existing farm markets. Farm markets and other small business entrepreneurs are in a unique position to be flexible and quick enough to react to be able to take advantage of new or unusual advertising opportunities. If they offer a unique or unusual way to get your customers to hear or see your message, give them a try.
Last year, a brightly colored truck was driving through the area. The back end and side panels were large clear windows containing billboard ads. The intriguing part was that after several seconds, the panels would scroll up or down to another ad. Drivers following or alongside the truck were attracted by the movement as much as by the bold, colorful graphics — or at least I was. Unfortunately, “Get Your Ad Rolling” must not have identified their niche, as the number listed in the phone book is no longer in service.
Consumers are blasted with sights, sounds, and other stimuli just about every waking minute of the day. Converting them into paying customers requires breaking through all that background gibberish to grab their attention. Whether using a unique, new marketing tool, or old standbys as simple as classified ads, you’ll never be able to keep potential customers focused on your message until they ultimately are willing to part with their money for your products, if you can’t get them to listen in the first place.
What’s your hook?
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