Sex and Marketing!

Do you remember the days before supermarkets were invented?
Those were the days when the owner of the business was pleased to see you.
Instead of cold impersonal shelves full of merchandise, the shop owner would often greet you personally and welcome you into his shop.
He would find out exactly what you wanted, and then do his best to supply it.
No ultra modern, plush interiors, just the basics for his trade.
The great thing was, you felt you were a person not another number.
You were the owner's reason for his existence, and he knew it.
You were treated like the most important thing in the proprietor's life because you were.
The shop owner was grateful for you visiting him and would do his utmost to make you feel wanted, and cater to your every comfort to make sure you stayed. Deliver your goods for you.
Quite simply, the customer was his business, not an interruption to it.
Sigh those were the days.
Not a lot different from the recipe for success in the world's oldest profession.
Customer satisfaction is high on the list of priorities for every call girl, street walker or prostitute, call them what you will.
A happy customer is a satisfied customer, and satisfied customers come back for more, no matter what you're selling.
Remind you of something?
It should.
Because if you remove the mystique and secrecy spun by the so-called internet guru's, it is exactly like the internet today.
On the internet, the customer is king, or queen, or in some cases both.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the mystery of the internet is a fallacy put about by those who stand to make money by perpetuating that myth.
Snake oil salesmen I called them, and so they are.
Rather than the wonder of the modern age, the internet is a great lesson in going back to basics.
Where Mr Entrepreneur sitting in his bedroom in front of a computer monitor can compete fairly with the biggest multinational company.
Providing you supply the right goods, of the right quality in the right place at the right time you can compete with the biggest and the best.
That quotation is attributed to Gordon Selfridge, an American, who opened Selfridge's store in Oxford Street London in 1909 because he was unimpressed with the standards of service offered at that time.
His maxim, "The customer is always right" summed up his attitude to a service industry.
His staff was taught to do everything possible to make the customers visit enjoyable, which would in turn ensure the client stayed to spend money.
This is the blueprint for the internet today. It's exactly what many of the internet "experts" preach.
There is no secret formula, except supplying your customer with what they want.
Gordon Selfridge had a very basic work ethos, and that attitude towards his customers is summed up in the title of a book he wrote, "The Romance of Commerce" which traced the sales process as far back as Greece and China.
Ancient merchants would travel the trade routes with their donkeys loaded with rugs and spices, tools and clothing to satisfy the needs of their customers.
They studied their market and bought the right goods to satisfy that market.
Trade at its most basic level.
Two thousand years later. Gordon Selfridge was using the same principles to serve his customers in his Department Store. And now, one hundred years on, the internet is using the same basic principles.
Customer satisfaction is the name of the game.
You see, things really haven't changed.
It's all about having the confidence in yourself to embrace what is effectively just a new design to the traditional shop.
Whether it be a street barrow, shop, upmarket boutique, or a high-class call-girl, the principles remain the same.
The creation and satisfaction of customers.