Using custom postage stamps to call attention to your PR messages

Print up a few hundred custom photo stamps with an image of a sleek Light Rail Vehicle in full color. In quantity, regular first-class postage stamps with custom images will cost you about 80 cents apiece. Use these stamps for all your correspondence, especially to non-modellers, and certainly to mail your PR efforts to NON-model railroad, non-traction magazines. If you’re not sure what they look like, we’ll send you a letter with one glommed on until we run out. Write to: Electric Railways Network, P O Box 208, Ellenton, FL 34222, USA, OR eMail me at HNILS@msn.com

Give your product away --- very carefully and with much fanfare

Send a sample model trolley to the White House as a gift for the children of celebrities or other prominent people this coming Christmas. Follow this up with a professional press release explaining this gift to --- NO, not Model Railroader or Railroad Model Craftsman or even one of the fine trolley specialty magazines --- but to a carefully chosen selection of newspapers of general circulation (the N.Y. Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, and the equivalent papers in Chicago, St. Louis, and so on) and other national magazines, as well as newscasters at TV networks and cable TV shows. Press releases are essentially free. If they are written in proper style (obtain advice from one of the many books on the subject in your free public library on how to achieve that professional look) they will probably draw attention and just might get printed.

One Hundred Ways to Get the Word Out about Traction Models

ELECTRIC RAILWAYS NETWORK
Quondam Transit Futurque



Get an attractive LRV model running on a popular teenage TV show (anything and everything from Hannah Montana to whatever your teen-age son watches) by giving a set free to the producers in return for placing your product in some appropriate slots on the show… even better if it can be woven into the plot, somehow. Professional PR people call it Product Placement and practice it all the time; it ranges from subtle (the hero of an action film is driving a sports model Toyota, and at least one scene is shot with the Toyota logo in the center of the shot) to obvious (the four critics on American Idol take long sips at frequent intervals from their soft drink cups prominently marked “CocaCola” when they perceive that they’re on camera).

I make a good product; why don't people buy it?

Significant quote from a Marketing professor at Harvard Business School :

“The customer should be at the center of any company’s universe.

A good product doesn’t always get you there.

You need marketing, sales, and customer service to sell it.”

We are astonished at the number of small manufacturers of T-to-the-Fourth-Power products that don't understand --- or refuse to acknowledge --- this simple, basic tenet of marketing.

"Marketing?" they reply, "you mean advertising, right? Gee, I place those one-inch high, two-column ads in every other issue of Traction & Trolley Chatter magazine. I don't believe that I've ever gotten even one inquiry on those ads ... and they've been running for two years now. I'm sorry that I ever started that product line."

There's an old saying in church circles, "You can't get many converts if you preach only to the choir."

I would say that "preaching to the choir" is endemic in model railroad circles, especially in model traction, and trolleys.

1. Marketing does not mean only Advertising .

2. Those specialty periodicals --- very few of them are ever displayed on newsstands or super market shelves. This means that only those specialty hobbyists who subscribe to these magazines ever even get to open the magazine and peer inside, so the only ones who see those ads are people already involved in the hobby.

3. Dedicated hobbyists flip through the pages looking for articles that they've already determined are pertinent to their part of the hobby --- and please don't fool yourself into thinking that, even in the small universe of model railroaders, there are very many that specialize in traction. The probability that they will stumble onto your tiny two-column-inch ad, with its almost invisible graphics, tiny typeface, and extremely limited appeal is smaller than a quantum particle.

This is not to take away the value --- or even the necessity --- of those tombstone ads in traction specialty magazines. BUT that's no way to launch a new product or a new concept or a new scale, as I'm urging you to do.

What is the answer ? Stay tuned over the next few weeks and we'll explore ways to accomplish your goal.

MEGA-SCALE TROLLEYS

NO, that's not a trick shot or a photoshopped picture. There's this guy in British Columbia, Canada (urban21) whose grandfather built incredibly large (three-inch-to-the-foot, OR one-fourth full size) very detailed trolleys, to run on 15 inch gauge track. Definitely one-of-a-kind, an outstanding example of just what I'm suggesting as one of the new mega-gauge, OR mega-scale, traction models. The photo of the builder and the Birney, standing in front of his model trolley barn, was taken shortly before the builder passed.