On May 25th, literary appreciators across the globe stood together to remember the phenomenal and hilarious writer, Douglas Adams, for International Towel Day. For those who do not know who Douglas Adams was, he was the writer of the very popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and was known as an advocate for environmentalism and conservation. His books contain numerous quotes that are both funny and can be applied to your business. For today’s post, we’re going to take a look at three of them:
“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”
When building your own business and brand, you will of course want to strike out on our own and blaze a new path where you believe no one has ever walked before. However, more often than not, not only has someone already walked that path, someone has already built a car to get you down that path faster. You don’t need to spend the extra time to reinvent the wheel to get yourself started. If you listen to others who have gone through the process before, you will save yourself a lot of potential headaches. Whether it’s developing a tool to post your thoughts to all of your social media pages, building a business plan, or finding curated content, there are a plethora of tools that can fulfill your needs.
Of course, when you are building a brand for yourself, you will have the desire to create everything from the ground up. But, if you instead spend the time researching the right tool for what you want to do, you can accomplish much more than starting from scratch.
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
This may seem like a “duh” point, but make sure your product works and your services produce results. It doesn’t matter how slick your website looks, how great your copy is, or how dedicated your employees are, if your product doesn’t work, people won’t want to buy it. As an eCommerce business, you have to remember that customers have gathered a lot of power in the buying process since the boom of the internet. Don’t underestimate them. They will find out whether your product works whether you want them to or not. They will compare your product to other similar brands, read third party reviews, and talk to others who have used your product. What every customer wants is a product that works and if you don’t have one, they will find someone else who does.
“The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a great civilization built an incredible computer to calculate the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything and after 7 and a half million years of waiting is answered with the cryptic answer, 42. Of course, the answer doesn’t make any sense and when asked, the computer states that once the people who designed it understand the question to Life, the Universe, and Everything, the answer would make perfect sense (ironically the question is said to be "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?")
Regarding your business, your product or service is the answer to a question. If you don’t help your customers understand what that question is, they won’t understand your answer. This is where great marketing comes in to play. By building a strong inbound marketing strategy, you can help your potential customers understand how your product or service can help them.
Towel Day?
To end today’s post we’ll leave you with The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’s quote about the usefulness of towels.
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
Happy Towel Day!