Marketing Lessons from Dr. Seuss

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If you have kids, nieces, nephews, or were ever a kid yourself chances are you’ve heard of Dr. Seuss. For most of us Dr. Seuss stories are nothing more than funny characters who help children read, learn the alphabet or teach life values. However some of his stories directly relate to business and marketing in ways that the author may may not even have intended.

In the book Star Bellied Sneetches there are two groups of sneetches, those with stars on their bellies and those without. The ones with the stars are considered the upper class, the ones without aspire to have stars. Along comes an enterprising chap named Sylvester McMonkey McBean who can put stars on the bellies of those without for a nominal fee. Once everyone has stars it’s now high fashion to not have a star. Fortunately Mr McBean can also remove the stars for a nominal fee. He continues taking stars on and off until he has all of the Sneethches money. The Sneetches are now poorer but wiser having learned the lessons of discrimination. While that’s a noble lesson to learn it’s not where my focus lies, I want to look at Mr. McBean. McBean found a market and catered to it. He then went on to create another market in direct opposition to the first market, in fact in the end he controlled both sides of the market, a favorable position to be in.

When I build a website whether I use my own home grown CMS or something like Wordpress building the actual pages is very easy. Researching the topic and writing the copy is the most time consuming part of the project. To leverage that time spent to my advantage I’ll create two or three websites around the topic. What I will also do is create another website or two with an opposing viewpoint. For example build one site pushing payday loans and high interest credit cards, then build another helping people clean up their finances. Another example is build a website for diet pills then build an opposing website with organic healthy products. This provides some stability to your income when market conditions shift.

This approach however is not without some risk,like when AdWords and Overture account reps squeal to merchants exactly who’s buying that competing advertisement for their trademark or product name. Lets just say getting those calls from affiliate managers aren’t any fun. Additionally you’ve got to create a nom de plume or pen name for your opposing viewpoints (which has it’s own set of problems). However my philosophy is best expressed in a quote from that classic film Muppet’s Treasure Island, where Floyd the guitarist says “don’t get involved in the politics man, just play the gig“.

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