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What makes your product-offering notably different from others that you compete with?
Without at least one “hook” you will need to rely on “shouting louder” than your competition. That’s a very expensive alternative.
So, what’s this “hook” we refer to (with such affection)?
The hook is an outstanding characteristic (or 2) that makes your product/ or business particularly “special” in the eyes of the customer, and that is not easy for competitors to copy.
The “hook” may be included in any of the elements of the marketing mix – i.e. in any of the: Product, Price, Promotion (Marketing), or Place (Distribution channel). That’s why we refer to the “product offering” above, and not simply the “product”.
SOME EXAMPLES:
• Product hook: A chicken restaurant concept we established in Australia has “flat” chicken & peri peri spice.
• Price Hook: A digital signage software company that we established has the “Worlds First Free Digital Signage Software”.
• Place (Distribution Channel) Hook: Dell computers elected to go direct to the customer primarily through the internet. (Yes … we know that a bricks & mortar retailer alternative is now on the cards. That indicates that every strategy is fluid and subject to change over time & according to prevailing or expected conditions).
The hook may be something as simple as:
• The location of the outlet being particularly convenient (relative to the alternatives) to the target market;
• The speed of service that is provided
• The extent of professional product-knowledge that the store offers to customers
• Etc.
Once you’ve identified the hook, it should be used as the basis for attracting & keeping customers.
Finding or developing “the hook” and implementing it is challenging, and it has substantial repercussions for the business.
It may necessitate a fundamental re-think of the financial and overall business strategy in order for the business to operate profitably with that hook.
For example: If the hook is “speed of service”, the supporting services, processes & infrastructure required to deliver that speed must be in place. This will require a complete assessment of the resources, processes etc necessary to deliver the promised speed, and to ensure that the business can do so whilst remaining viable.
Remember, the market and industry environment in which you operates changes all the time. You must be sensitive to developments in order to change/ modify your hook when required.
Developing a hook is essential to most businesses. Developing one and then failing to “deliver” on it is probably worse than having none at all.
So … What’s your hook?
Michael Marcus – Business and Franchise Help
Saving Franchisees. Assisting Independent Business. BEFORE it’s too late!
The Franchisees Advocate Group - Australia
Business and Franchise Help - Australia
Topic starter
Posted : 09/05/2008 7:14 am
Re: GOT A HOOK? It’s tough without one!
You got me "hooked" on reading the article:)
Posted : 04/06/2008 9:15 am
Re: GOT A HOOK? It’s tough without one!
Michael,
I agree that a hook is necessary, and it should be developed with your target market in mind. A hook that works with one target market will fall flat with another.
For instance, for my textbook business, I use "The best we know to better the good you do." That probably wouldn't work with Internet marketers, but educators who do research and teach relate to it.
One of my web sites, AutoMarketAnalysis.com offers an automatic target market analysis. My hook for it is "Target market research as easy as click, click, click". That works much better for small business owners, especially Internet marketers, who need to automate as much of their business as possible.
Posted : 15/07/2008 3:06 am
Re: GOT A HOOK? It’s tough without one!
Good thoughts, Linda.
Keep up your excellent work!
Paul
Posted : 06/08/2008 9:11 pm
A digital signage software company
A chicken restaurant concept we established in Australia has “flat” chicken & peri peri spice.
• Price Hook: A digital signage software company that we established has the “Worlds First Free Digital Signage Software”.
• Place (Distribution Channel) Hook: Dell computers elected to go direct to the customer primarily through the internet. (Yes … we know that a bricks & mortar retailer alternative is now on the cards.
Posted : 24/08/2008 6:22 pm
Re: GOT A HOOK? It’s tough without one!
CLR 2.0 added support for x64 and IA64. On these platforms the Microsoft compilers only have a single calling convention, which is effectively fastcall (lots of arguments passed in registers; once again Raymond Chen comes to the rescue with a post on the x64 calling convention). The 64-bit JITs take a similar approach to the x86 one, namely using the standard calling convention except without saving some of the normally caller-saved registers.
Writing a Proper Function Hook
Given the above, all you have to do to have a proper function hook is:
* Implement the callee’s half of the calling convention
* Also save the caller-saved registers if you happen to use them
There are many ways to skin this particular cat. You can use just about any combination of the following:
* Pure assembly code
* Inline assembly code (x86 only)
* __declspec(naked) (x86 only)
* Normal C functions
Just a few of the ways you can put these things together are:
1. Write your hook purely in assembly code. This is great if you’re an assembly whiz, have a really small amount of work to do in the hook, and want it to be as fast as possible.
2. Write a little stub in assembly code that saves the caller-saved registers and then chains the call to a normal C function to do the real work. The normal function will of course save the callee-saved registers for you. This is a good option if you need to write the bulk of your hook in C.
3. Write a __declspec(naked) function that uses some inline assembly to save all the registers and then does the work inline. __declspec(naked) just tells the compiler that you’re going to do all work of implementing the calling convention yourself. This option is only available on x86, and it lets you save some call overhead over #2 on that platform. (I suppose it’s technically possible that you might save some registers you didn’t need to with this option, but it’s not likely—on x86 the C compiler quickly runs out of registers.)
4. Write a normal function that uses some inline assembly to save the caller-saved registers. I mention this one only for completeness. I don’t recommend it, because the interactions between C code and inline assembly code in non-naked functions can be weird, and it’s tough to get this right, especially if you’re changing the C part of things at all. #3 is just as fast and gives you a lot more control over what’s going on.
So the whole thing about “these functions MUST be declspec(naked)” isn’t
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