National Sandwich Day – November 3rd

November

National Sandwich Day is yet another marketing opportunity for small business to take advantage of. Sit down for a few moments and decide if this is an opportunity you’d like to pursue with only the resources of your business or an opportunity to collaborate with other small businesses in a Coop Marketing Campaign. Either path can open amazing ways to engage with your customers.

Wikipedia’s page defines sandwich as: “A sandwich is a food typically consisting of vegetables, sliced cheese or meat, placed on or between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein two or more pieces of bread serve as a container or wrapper for another food type”

Of course you can create a sandwich anyway you like, even Oscar Mayer is now trying to say a hot dog is a sandwich, and has found itself embroiled in an online Twitter battle of what constitutes the definition of sandwich. Update: At 9:00 A.M. the company tweeted there final decision.. No matter what you say they are going to promote the hot dog as a sandwich. An interesting side note in this little debate is that National Hot Dog and Sausage Council has posted an update to their 2015 declaration on their website that the hot dog is not a sandwich. And all this comes down the day before National Sandwich Day.

You called and we listened. You almost changed our mind… but this is where we still stand. Hot dogs ARE sandwiches. pic.twitter.com/gDBh8azKd9

— Oscar Mayer (@oscarmayer) November 2, 2018

Almost everyone loves eating and creating sandwiches and national sandwich day opens a myriad of avenues for marketing campaigns and customer engagement.

As readers of this blog already know I’m a huge fan and promoter of coop marketing that brings together 3 or 4 small business to help share the energy and creativity needed for a successful marketing campaign. For National Sandwich Day I’m suggesting a contest where your customers create there best sandwich and bring it to your business on sandwich day for a taste test and the awarding of prizes to the category winners.

National Take A Hike Day – November 17

November

Take A Hike

Often the phrase Take A Hike is thrown out into the world with negative overtones, it’s mostly spewed by those of us who can’t be bothered with what another person thinks or says. It seems humans are quick to ignore and condemn others for infractions to the code, but not so quick when it comes to self introspection of our own thoughts and behavior. National Take A Hike Day is the perfect antidote to misunderstandings and the daily stress of things not going our way.

As a small business owner Take A Hike Day offers you an abundance of avenues to travel down for your business marketing and customer service campaigns. This day is tailored made for businesses to help there customers de-stress and expand there horizons, resulting in a stronger customer relationship and deeper loyalty.

Start out searching for nearby trails using one of the online resources I’ve listed below. Be sure to choose a number of different trails that will accommodate beginners, intermediates and experts alike. And don’t forget jot down length and diffuclutly ratings as a way to plan for both the young an older people who may take part in your event.

Hiking Project – Trails and Community
Hiking Trails – With over 60,000 trails listed
All Trails – Resource with over 50,000 listings

Suggestion One: Think about hiring a nature or hiking expert that you can make available to your local schools. A school event could be created that invites parents to their child’s classroom to hear the hiking presentation. The school will love it and you can get lots of mileage as the sponsor Don’t forget to create posters and banner that clearly showcase the name of your business in conjunction with extolling the benefits of Take A Hike Day.

Suggestion Two: Connect a series of trips along local hiking trails for all ages with your school event or do it by itself. Find a few experienced hiking guides that are proficient in leading groups of kids, parents and older adults and also are good at story telling and being able to point our interesting info along the hike. Local scout leaders might be a good resource.

Suggestion Three: If hiking trips is too large an undertaking for the size of your business you may want to consider Coop Marketing where you team up with a few other businesses to help defray the marketing and employee cost.

However you decided to celebrate Take A Hike Day make sure things are fun and educational for all involved, after-all your goal is strengthening your ties with your customers and creating a marketing event that benefits the community at the same time.

Hint: As part of your event think about including some information about the upcoming Winter Solstice. The coming of winter along with it’s cold and shorter days connects perfectly with a talk about hiking in the fall and nature in general.

Is It Destiny To Distract And Amuse Ourselves?

November

Yesterday while walking around the perimeter of the local public golf course I was struck by the dichotomy of playing golf within an area surrounded by a neatly built stone wall, and the outside world we all inhabit. The reality within the golf course was created within thoughts and plans constructed, ordered and focused while the world outside the stone walls is built upon a growing cacophony of distractions and amusements.

Like most thing the golf course was created to distract and amuse, and at the same time focus and meditate our daily thoughts and emotions.

“Once Art Served To Educate And Edify, Now It Distracts And Amuses”
James Rozoff

This is not a Chicken Little moment but instead it’s a moment to slow ourselves long enough to catch our breaths and inquire about how our creativity is affected by the current climate of distract and amuse.

Fro a moment sit with this question, how does it feel to live in a constant state of distraction? How does it feel? And while it’s a simple question you may find it somewhat difficult to crystallize a clear answer in your mind.

It may feel tedious and boring

National Day Of Listening Quiet Your Thoughts

November

“One way to meet new people
is to listen more carefully to
the people you see every day.”

Robert Brault

Each and Every Day we interact with many different people yet we really know little to nothing about them. This year the National Day of Listening falls on November 25th the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S. What better day to stop or at least slow down from your frantic work and shopping to listen to someone you see on most days. Listen, even for a little bit.

Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers cross your path every day. Lawyers, doctors and teachers interact with you and your family every day. Artists, poets and creators of all stripes stoke your imagination each and every day, are you listening? The number of people most of us come in contact with each day is amazing, with many of those contacts being repeat contacts stretching across weeks, months and years. Have you listened to some of them? Any of them?

And as with all days set aside in the calendar for fun or for something of a serious nature there are significant opportunities for businesses of any size to promote the day and their business at the same time. There are many opportunities to connect to a day such as this National Day of Listening that allow for your business to develop closer ties with your customers and your community.

When we look around it seems clear that the trend over the last few decades has been for businesses to ignore their communities and by extension their customers. What better day than the National Day of Listening to turn this trend around and connect on a deeper and more human level than just goods and services.

A good place to start becoming a better listener is becoming more aware of our own thoughts. Check out this blog post Be Aware of Your thoughts on the What Is Dialogue website.

“If we can share our story
with someone who responds
with empathy and understanding,
shame can’t survive.”

Brene Brown

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Absurdity Day Makes No Sense At All

November

“If at first the idea is not absurd,
then there is no hope for it.”

Albert Einstein

Absurdity Day is a wonderful opportunity to shake up your business marketing map resulting in a good cleaning out of the cobwebs of resistance that you cling to with white knuckle intensity. Everyone holds onto their ideas thinking they point in the direction of success and recognition, but as Einstein notes in the above quote, if we don’t start from the absurd nothing new will be revealed.

So drag your marketing team into a room with no distractions of any kind and let them know you want a pile of original and dynamic ideas before the end of the day. It may be a good idea to hand each of them a sheet of paper with the Einstein quote in bold type printed on it. And remember no distractions allowed; no phones, no TV and only one tablet or laptop for the team to share for research. Make this about brain power creativity. It’s Absurdity Day for crying out loud. (any day can be Absurdity Day if you’re the boss)

This is another great day to tie your business to. Restaurants can rework part of their menus to be absurd and give a discount if a customer orders the absurd. Auto dealers can bring a car for a drive to your office along with a box lunch. Coffee Shops can close down the drive through and have wait staff (in doctors lab coats) take and deliver orders in the parking lot.

My suggestions above are very tame and only a little absurd, the fun and orthogonality I leave up to you and your team. Make all your marketing projects absurd (at least at the start). Stretch out what is possible, what is interesting and what is engaging to your clients and customers. Enjoy Absurdity Day all year long.

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National Vichyssoise Day November 18th

November

French Chef Louis Diat created
Vichyssoise in 1917 at the
Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City

Cold Soup, now here’s a great opportunity for businesses with a strong cultural or regional slant to create a promotion celebrating National Vichyssoise Day. Restaurants could add it to the menu for one day and promote it, do make sure you let people know it’s served cold… I’d suggest that establishments nearby to a Ritz-Carlton use a bit of humor in an advertisement like: Opps Looks Like The Ritz-Carlton Forgot Vichyssoise Day, or maybe We’re celebrating National Vichyssoise Day Even If The Ritz-Carlton Forgot. Do make sure they forgot first 🙂

A little ribbing and humor makes for a great ad campaign and playing off something like National Vichyssoise Day is a natural. Another angle might be to use something like: You Don’t Have To Be In New York City To Celebrate National Vichyssoise Day or November 18th Is National Vichyssoise Day, A Day Everyone Loves The French.

“Louis Diat was the chef at the hotel for most of the first half
of the 20th century. In 1950, he recounted to The New Yorker magazine
the potato and leek soup of his childhood, and how he would cool it
off during the summer by pouring in cold milk, which resulted
in a delicious summer soup. He decided to make
something similar for the patrons of the Ritz-Carlton.”
Read More

At the bottom of this post you’ll notice a collage of photos that celebrate Vichyssoise Day on Twitter. The collage is created by Twitter using their embed feature within their category called Moments. Creating a moment around a meme (idea) somehow related to your business is a great way to create a small and easily shareable story and a great collage for future use down the road.

Potato Leek Soup Day – Nov 18th

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