48•


TALKIN’ RADIANT


Not ugly after all Y


ou and I both know that this busi- ness involves heating-and- plumbing products, but the real


focus should be on marketing because our customers have choices. We want them to come to us for what they need, but we know they can go anywhere, especially these days. Our job is to make them really want to come to us, and we call that effort marketing. So here’s a marketing story for you. It’s


about something we did last fall that worked beautifully in the end, but started out butt-ugly. And that was intentional. We wanted this thing to be as ugly as possible. You see our company is a Web site and it enjoys a lot of traffic, mainly because we market it as a place where you can get an- swers in an hour, and that’s true. At the start of each heating season, everyone in this business gets busy be- cause it gets cold outside and stuff breaks. We want those people to come to us for an- swers. The more people we have gathered around us, the stronger our tribe gets. And the best part of building a tribe is that the members who are giving the answers are the same people who are asking the ques- tions. Our site runs on what I call, Perpet- ual Notion. Get enough people together and someone will always have an idea. People buy books, tee shirts, seminars


and other fun stuff from our site. And be- cause the tribe is large, we also have a lot of manufacturers who advertise with us. They’re there because their customers are there. Each year, my goal is to draw even


more people into the tribe, and last year I wanted to see how many people I could attract to our business in a given amount of time (10 weeks), using a very small


budget. It was a marketing exercise and the spending limit was $1,000.


We have a popular bulletin board


called The Wall, and we used to have a section on that board called Heating Hell. It was a place where contractors could post photos of horrible installations and tell about them. Last summer, even when most of the contractors weren’t doing heating, I noticed that traffic on the Heat- ing Hell part of The Wall was greater than it was for any of the other parts (and those parts range from Steam, to Radiant, to Solar, and so on). It seemed that most folks enjoy a good car wreck. They love to look at crappy work because it makes them feel better about their own work. So in mid-October, we launched the


Ugly System Competition. It was a con- test open to everyone, and it was very easy to enter. I opened a room for it on


flange on the circulator. No bolt on that side of the circulator – just the Vise-Grip. We had a winner!


But what did it for me was the Vise-Grip that was holding the rotted flange on the boiler to the


The Wall (it cost me nothing to do that), and told people to post photos of ugly systems, along with a few words about each one. These didn’t have to be jobs they worked on; they just had to be ugly. I’d choose the winner on New Year’s Eve, and send that person a check for $1,000 on January 1. That was the whole budget – one thousand bucks. Here’s what happened: The moment it


went up, people began to enter the con- test. They posted pictures of jobs that would make most of us run screaming from the room. Some jobs were old and


ugly; others were brand new and even uglier. Some involved PEX pipe, which is lovely if you use it in moderation. But if you use it for the whole boiler room, things will tend to sag because PEX is rel- atively light, while cast-iron pumps and other hydronic accessories are relatively heavy. Doesn’t matter; some still piped the whole works in PEX and the result is gloriously ugly. Gravity always wins. One of the guys who entered one of these photos called it “Spaghetti and Heat Calls.” It was a true joy. Another of the photos showed a hy-


dronic expansion tank screwed into a steam-boiler’s riser piping. The contrac- tor who posted it explained the knuckle- head’s thinking. Expansion tanks take up expansion, so an expansion tank on a steam system should be able to cure water hammer. Right? In America, everyone gets to work. Another guy showed a pellet stove that


had as its main plenum a galvanized-steel garbage can. The ductwork went off to the building from the sides of that can. Hey, Moe! One of my favorites was a photo of a


hole in the floor with a contractor peeking out from a nest of pipe inside the hole. You can see the top of the boiler through the hole. The contractor explained how a skinny person could get down there by climbing on top of the boiler and working his way through the briar patch of pipe below. That was the only way to service that thing, and there was a day in America when someone did that original installa- tion and got paid. Imagine that. There were all sorts of code violations


and safety issues in these photos and these prompted lots of discussions about what’s right and what’s just plain wrong. Plenty of homeowners who visit our site got to sit in on those chats, and I’ll bet the comments from the pros will make them think about


•THE WHOLESALER® —APRIL 2011


BY DAN HOLOHAN Wet head


more than just a cheap price the next time they’re hiring a heating contractor. The winner came from Colorado. He en-


tered the contest late in December, just be- fore it closed. When he posted his photos a bunch of the guys threw up their hands and said that was that. No one could possibly top this guy. Just give him the money. The job he showed had, among its many


horrors, a relief valve that some knuckle- head had installed upside-down, and then plugged. It also had most of the burners re- moved from the boiler, so I wouldn’t want to be breathing in that house. But what did it for me was the Vise-Grip that was hold- ing the rotted flange on the boiler to the flange on the circulator. No bolt on that side of the circulator – just the Vise-Grip. We had a winner!


But I digress. Back to marketing. When we started this contest last Oc-


tober, I wrote a short press release for the trade magazines and e-mailed it to the ed- itors. I explained that we were running this contest because these are ugly times and I was willing to pay for the privilege of seeing the butt-ugliest system out there. When asked why I wanted to see this, I said that no matter how bad things get, they can always get uglier, and there’s a certain comfort in that. Just about all the trade magazines ran


the press release, along with the logo we had created for the contest. Some ran it on the front pages of their magazines and others put it front and center on their web- sites. It got us far more attention than paid ads for the site would have gotten us. For the $1,000 prize, we probably got $20,000 worth of ad space, and just at the right time of the year. The section of The Wall that hosted the


contest drew nearly 30,000 people to it during the 10 weeks that the contest ran. Membership on the site (it’s free) surged to more than 33,000 people, which makes it easier than ever for us to keep that an- swers-in-an-hour promise. Oh, and it also attracted a new bunch of manufacturers as advertisers. We followed up after the contest with


another press release about the winner and more people flowed into the site (more advertisers too). Point being, we had this tiny, $1,000


See contact information on page 82 • Be sure to visit www.thewholesaler.com for web exclusive articles and videos! •


budget, but we made the most of it. It was a marketing experiment and it proved that when it comes to marketing, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get results. You just need to think about your customers, and then you need to do something that pleases them — something that get’s their blood pumping.


So what are you waiting for? n


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