Going back to August of 2002 my old insurance company had a big celebration in Las Vegas NV. Part of the fun included a couple of nights of live entertainment. One night was a great band and the other night there were 3 comedians, one of which no one had ever heard of, a ventriloquist. Personally I love comedy, but a ventriloquist? I had visions of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, which I did not find very entertaining personally. But, it was a free night of fun, food, drinks and live entertainment, I am game. Turned out this guy was incredibly funny and had one of the best marketing ideas I had ever seen.

The ventriloquist’s name was Jeff Dunham, who has went on to become in my opinion and many others the best ventriloquist of all time. At the time he only had a couple of dummies, one he still uses in his act by the name of Peanut. This dummy along with Walter had us all in stitches. He is such a talented and funny comedian ventriloquist but had yet to be really discovered. However, during his act he did what I thought was one of the best marketing ideas I had ever seen. It still resonates with me thirteen years later.

When performing with Peanut, he would make fun of his own name saying he had too many “f’s” in Jeff. He had an unused “f” and Peanut started pronouncing it with two “f’s”. He called himself Jeff fa fa. Then he made fun of Dunham as if it was pronounced Dun-Ham the other white meat. Then he repeated this jeffdunham.com in such a hysterical way that no one realized he was repeating his website www.jeffdunham.com over and over and over until you could not possibly forget his name, spell it wrong or not remember his website. I believe almost all of us ended up checking out his website that night because of this best marketing idea I had ever seen. I believe this marketing idea helped him create his first video that launched his career in 2006 to the fame he has today.

I am always trying to think of clever ideas like Jeff Dunham of how to stand out from the crowd, but his was pure genius. We entrepreneurs are all guilty of being reactive with our marketing versus being proactive. If our competition has a radio ad, we think we need one or my competitor has a billboard, maybe I should buy one. We should be proactive like Jeff Dunham and think outside of our own box and be proactive marketers.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”—Peter Drucker
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at www.freedigitalphotos.net

yourfriend4life.com

Tim Wilhoit is owner/principal of Your Friend 4 Life Insurance Agency in Nashville, TN. He is a family man, father of 3, entrepreneur, insurance agent, life insurance broker, salesman, sales trainer, recruiter, public speaker, blogger and team leader with over 27 years of experience in sales and marketing in the insurance and beverage industries.