Alison Burns, Thomas Keller and James Taylor outside The French Laundry

Mr Keller has four restaurants in Yountville; The French Laundry, Bouchon, Ad Hoc and Bouchon Bakery.  Many people aspire to eating in The French Laundry but with an average bill of $500 per person it’s out of reach for all but those with the fattest wallets.  This is where the role of pricing comes in.  You can access the Thomas Keller experience by going to Bouchon Bakery and buying one of their delicious $10 pastries.  If you are looking to spend in the $100 range then you could go for a finer dining experience at his Bouchon Restaurant or Ad Hoc.  In having this tiered pricing Keller is doing something that many of the world’s great brands do.

You may aspire to have the Armani suit for $5000 but you can ‘get into the brand’ by buying that $50 Armani t-shirt or the $200 glasses.  The music industry is just starting to understand the value of tiered pricing by offering experiences around their artists than range from 99cent iTunes downloads to $250 Limited Edition merchandise to $10,000 VIP packages for the artists show where you have dinner together afterwards.  So how could you add a higher or lower priced option to the product or service you currently offer?

Most noted as a member of acclaimed Heavy Metal band Racer X, platinum-selling Hard Rock band Mr. Big and a recent member of the G3 guitar super tour, “guitar deity” Paul Gilbert’s distinctive playing has influenced and inspired an entire generation of guitar players across the globe. Gilbert’s new Rock Guitar School features a complete course of beginner-to-advanced guitar lessons – ranging from classic riffs and guitar licks to Paul’s signature blazing arpeggios and string skipping.

Paul Gilbert and James Taylor

The team here at ArtistWorks have done a great job on the creation and marketing of the first rock guitar school that will use Video Exchange™ technology.  The initial marketing of the school has been about getting Paul’s current fans, shred guitarists and guitar magazine editors and bloggers excited about the site.  The marketing campaign now begins to implement the wider marketing strategy that will focus more on SEO, Affiliates, advertising, referral marketing, content marketing, conversion marketing, email marketing, public relations, social media and PPC.

Check out this video about Paul’s online guitar school.

Someone recently asked me what drives me?  When I was a child I was told by my grandfather that you should never do anything because of the money so subsequently financial reward has never been a big part of why I get up early and work late.  No what drives and excites me is having the freedom to learn and to grow by working with big ideas and great people.  If I’m not learning in one area then I move onto an area where I can.

The first part of this is the importance of freedom.  I was heavily influenced by writers like John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin and more recently Tim Ferriss.  Each wrote about how we should cherish our freedom and the ability to do what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we don’t harm others.  I would argue that this concept of freedom, of not being constrained by others and having the space to live our lives as we sit fit, is central to living the good life (however we define it).

Learning and having the time, opportunity and resources to do so is what I primarily want to do with my own freedom.  If I feel I am no longer learning and growing as a person then I change my situation.  This attitude which many will find selfish is behind all of my most important decisions.  I will forgo financial or other rewards as long as I am doing something that is stretching me.  Some people thought I was mad to leave the music industry in the UK and travel 6000 miles to begin again in technology startups in California.  The reason for that was my work in the music industry no longer challenged me and I needed to go to new places and learn new things.

The next important component for me is the opportunity to engage with big ideas.  My current role as a director of an education startup allows me to work with others on the big idea of how technology can transform education and learning around the world.  EdTech, e-learning or online education is one of the hottest topics and investment areas in Silicon Valley just now because the rewards for investors and humanity are potentially huge.  Having the opportunity to work in this field at a critical time is incredibly exciting and I feel grateful for living at this point in history.

The final thing that makes me go above and beyond are the great people that I get to work with and help.  A thread that has run throughout my life is my ability to help others achieve their goals and potential.  Whether that be working with a pop artist to reach more people by playing bigger venues or an online teacher by enabling them to positively impact students from Shanghai to San Francisco, all are about helping them achieve their goals.

So what drives you in your life?   Why not leave a comment below.

Direct-to-fan is a business model that has been around for a while, where musicians bypass the major label system to sell direct to their fans.  In a similar way the Direct-to-Learner™ model allows teachers, instructors, educators and brands to provide education directly to their students and customers and bypasses traditional institutions such as universities, colleges, schools or education publishers.

Direct-to-Learner™ allows anyone to build and leverage a community of learners throughout their career and lets the instructor (or the team that supports that instructor) create interest in their method or lessons directly with their students, identify those students, market directly to and develop relationships with those students, sell directly to and monetize those relationships, and use those relationships to expand their student base.

An example of this is the Luis Conte School of Percussion that was launched this week.  The ArtistWorks platform allows Grammy Award-winning, master percussionist Luis Conte to teach directly to his fans and students online.  Check it out.

In fact Gary’s message is much more than that.  Gary’s book is part of a wider trend against mass and push marketing and towards genuine engagement with customers and slightly old fashioned marketing traits albeit using modern platforms like Social Media.  It’s about the power of Word of Mouth, of transforming customers into advocates.  The highest praise I can give this book is that if Benjamin Franklin were alive today and writing about marketing, this is the kind of book he would have written.

Having said that I am not a fan of Gary’s writing.  Gary is an incredible verbal communicator and his passion, chutzpah and humor get lost in the written format of a book.  I don’t think this book will age well but the ideas contained within it will.  It’s like seeing a great live band and then being disappointed by their studio album.

Now if Gary and I were sharing a bottle of Pinot Noir now he would probably be verbally laying into my opinions of his book and I would take it in good humor. However I would still recommend you read the book or even better watch one of his talks online because the ideas that he crystalizes in them are part of the future of marketing.

Get your copy of The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk here. (Amazon affiliate link).

As an immigrant to America I am still getting to grips with its history, culture and major political figures and decided to start with one of the founding fathers, Ben Franklin.

In many ways Benjamin Franklin reflected the country he went on to create as well as its founding principles.  Franklin invented, and continually reinvented himself.  He was America’s first public relations master and in his life and his writings, he consciously tried to create a new American archetype.  The values he projected of himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, diligent, frugal, honest, benevolent and entrepreneurial were those that he wanted to instill in his new country.

Isaccson picked up on the same feelings I get of Franklin, that of a man that would be perfectly at home with the uber-networked Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, inventors and technologists of today who value enlightened curiosity, progress, democracy and free-speech highly.

Whether you are a history buff, politics nerd or marketer this book provides a fascinating biography of a fascinating man.

You can get your copy of ‘Benjamin Franklin’ by Walter Isaacson here (Amazon Affiliate link).

By the end of this book I can guarantee that while you may have concluded that Steve Jobs was not a particularly nice human being you’ll be left in no doubt what a genius he was when it came to design, marketing, technology and business.  Walter Isaccson’s masterful biography does an incredible job of painting a picture of a towering figure in technology and someone who stood at the intersection of humanities and sciences.

One of the areas I found most interesting was Apples Marketing Philosophy which stressed three points.  The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer. The second was focus and eliminating all of the unimportant opportunities.  The third was impute, or the signals that a company or product sends to affect the customers perception.  Like other areas of his life, Jobs had an obsessive attitude to marketing and image that extended to Zen-like simplicity in product design.

Don’t read this book if you are looking for an example of how to live a good life. Do read this book if you want to learn about the complex workings of a genius and the relationship between product design and marketing.  This is a book about how art and technology can be combined and one mans vision of that.  Here’s to the crazy ones.

I highly recommend reading ‘Steve Jobs’ the autobiography by Walter Isaccson and you can get your copy here (Amazon Affiliate Link).

Politics and Marketing

Now you may be upset when I talk about parallels between political parties and the business of marketing but as Mandelson says in the book ‘Both had products, in politics they are called policies.  Both competed in the marketplace and for political parties as much as businesses, if you forget your customers they would soon forget you.’

As a marketer I picked up a number of insights from The Third Man including the development of Tony Blair as a great communicator and big-issue leader and Gordon Brown’s focus on tactics at the expense of strategy.

If you are politics nut, regardless of your affiliation, then you will find this book interesting in terms of the high drama, history and personalities involved.  Marketers will also find the book very instructive in how to plan campaigns and combine broad marketing strategy with tactics, especially PR.

You can get your copy of the book here.

Favourite Quotes from the Book

“He said he felt that while Gordon had the intelligence and the ideas, the drive and determination, to make a success of government, ‘none of that is the most important thing for a politician. It is intuition – what to do, when to do it, how to say it, how to bring people along.”

“Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.”

“I learned three basic rules of spin-doctoring that remained with me. Don’t overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story.”

“I was especially impressed by a ministerial trip to the United States, on which I saw at close range an array of business success stories. During a visit to Silicon Valley the boss of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt, threw a question to me about the Labour government being anti-success, and opposed to rewarding entrepreneurs who took risks and grew rich. ‘We are intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich,’ I replied, ‘as long as they pay their taxes.”

Dollar Shave Club is the brainchild of Michael Dubin, and his concept has just got backing from heavyweight VCs including Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins.  The way they are marketing Dollar Shave Club could have been taken from the classic marketing textbook ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing‘.

It also left me wondering if the ideal company would have its products designed by Scandinavians, built by Germans and marketed by Americans?  Anyway well done Michael for a great video to launch Dollar Shave Club.

I was super excited when I heard that Tim Ferriss, author of one of my favorite books ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, had written a guide book to rapid fat-loss, fitness and becoming superhuman.  First of all ‘The 4-Hour Body’ is a BIG book, weighing in at 570 pages and with chapters like Building the Perfect Posterior, the 15 Minute Female Orgasm and How to Sleep 2 Hours Per Day.  You quickly realize this is not your standard diet and fitness book.

I’ve tested a couple of the chapters personally including the Slow-Carb diet and Kettlebell exercises and they do work.  This is not a preachy book and if you liked Tim’s previous book and his ‘work smart not hard’ philosophy you will love the The Four Hour Body.  Whether you are looking to lose a couple of pounds or aspire to superhuman fitness then you’ll find it all here.

Tim takes an almost obsessive attitude to measuring what works.  My only criticism of this book is that the editor could have done a better job in pairing down some of the chapters.  Some of the sections in the book feel more like blog posts and vignettes than chapters but I’m willing to forgive Tim because this book packs so much valuable information.

The biggest insight I took from The Four Hour Body is around the Slow-Carb diet and the concept of the Minimum Effective Dose.  I’m not a fan of diets but I gave the book a shot and not only did the pounds fall off me but I also gained more energy.  A word of warning.  If you are a vegetarian like me you need to supplement the diet outlined in the book with vitamins and minerals.

So once again the book is The Four Hour Body and it’s by Tim Ferriss and you can get it here.