My girl friend took me into the local Primark store this bank holiday weekend and I can only describe it as a fashion dest feeding frenzy! For those of you that don’t know, Primark sells trendy, yet non-designer clothes and really low-cut-prices. Recently they have been in the spot-light for the exploitation of foreign labour to achieve these rock-bottom prices, but that is what Primark is popular for. Clothes that you could happily wear and would cost you next to nothing. 

I have probably only ever been in 3 or 4 times in my life, and a couple of those times have been with my current girl friend. She wanted to show me a top I might like. I couldn’t really pay much attention to it. I was too busy surveying the retail chaos surrounding me. Clothes were everywhere. Where that had once been neat ordered arrangements of garments, shirts and jeans, there was now just a scattered mess of devastation where people had been rifling through the clothes looking for the right sizes. It was crazy. Only the strongest survive such encounters. I couldn’t believe A) how many people were in the shop and B) the state of the shop (as a consequence of A).

Reasonable quality and cut prices attracts a flood of business to nearly any high-street retail store. The format is simple in that shop, and has remained so for years. No hugely flashy advertising or new marketing gimmicks. No re-branding or pretentious nonsense. Primark has just earned itself of being well priced for the stuff it provides. It is cheap, cheerful, but most importantly, it’s bloody popular! 

Provide wearable clothes at a price anyone can provide, and have excellent opening hours on a weekend, and the shop floor will turn into a riot, and the laws of the jungle will prevail!

How cool would it be to have that kind of brand loyalty, that kind of raving fan, and riotous spender on your website, shopping on YOUR website? Just imagine as well, your reputation earned you many more of these raving fans, and spend-happy lunatics who came flooding to your site for a great deal? That is partly the success of ebay and amazon, again, living proof that “cheap” is a powerful word when used right. 

Is it the same in information marketing? A friend of mine (Alex Shelton) twisted my arm to make a product with him. We also teamed up with Paul Simpson and came up with a video course and ebook (we also provided some webinar training) which we thought was guaranteed to take any newbie, to 4-figure business person in a few months, selling their own information products. We really thought we had simplified and broken down the process into a science, and blueprint that anyone could follow. Then, for the kicker, we decided we’d sell it at a rock-bottom price. None of that over-hyped spiel of “this could have sold for 297″, we just priced it at $17. 

I was so proud of this product and still believe it is quality content, that any beginner or intermediate business person online could benefit from. I even divulged advanced Joint Venture tips as well, which I had never shared with anyone before! When we launched our Warrior Special Offer, I was excited! I really thought people would get a lot of value from what we were offering, and the price was so low I was sure people would take advantage of the offer. 

This wasn’t the case though, and the sales were no where near as good as we had hoped. To say we were disappointed would be an understatement! We under-priced, over-sold and got our marketing mix all wrong. It was the equivalent of Primark trying to claim they were selling Gucci and Armani products for £10. It’s just crazy!

Lesson learnt. I’ll take this information and apply my learnings to my next venture, hopefully with considerably more success. I’ll update you all on it’s success or failure in the near future.

Take care.