September 14, 2009 4am

I thought it was simply a matter of making chocolate truffles as perfect as I could make them and offering them for sale. That was when I first started my chocolate truffle business. Then I learned how much of a role packaging typically plays in selling chocolate. What I learned made me want to quit the business. 

I learned that "nice" packaging is very costly and ROI very uncertain. The cost involves not only the material, but also the expertise needed to design the packaging, an expertise that is more costly than the material. 

Chocolate makers usually will take the cost of packaging out of the quality of the product or pass it along to the customer or both. Neither is a good option. So I leaped right through the horns. I decided to focus on making chocolate truffles as perfect as I can while investing as little as possible in packaging, to virtually ignore it.  I rejected the mantra of marketers that "packaging sells" and replaced it with  "Azurelise sells itself."  

"Packaging sells" is a great job of packaging by people who sell packaging. That's all it is.

Selling without packaging is an ongoing and challenging project, to say the least. It makes me reflect on  life and human nature in a general way not just about how I am going to sell chocolate truffles, though selling chocolate is ultimately what it is about.. 

Brief Reflection On "Sell The Sizzle Not The Steak"

Mainly to get my brain going, let me start by saying a few things about the aphorism "Sell the sizzle not the steak" which is due to the remarkable 20th century marketing genius Elmer Wheeler.  I am going to relate how chocolate marketers have applied the aphorism to the marketing of chocolate.

September 14, 2009 10:19pm

Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff"

Shoppers will pick up a box of chocolates, read the ingredient label and all the other information written on it. They will turn the box on all sides to inspect it. Not reading anything. Just looking at it. Then they will pick up another box from the same stack of boxes with the same information written on it and go through the same inspection.

What are they doing?

When Eric Clapton asked Bob Marley to tell him the meaning of his song "I Shot The Sheriff", Marley responded with an explanation Clapton says he could not understand.

It is interesting that Clapton asked the question in the first place. The meanings of "I shot the sheriff" and "I did not shoot the deputy" seem obvious enough.

I confess, however, that the song also has made me feel I really don't get it.  I got that feeling the first time I heard the tune in 1973. I got over it the early morning of my birthday a couple of weeks ago.

I decided to walk to Mosaic wine lounge after losing another game of computer chess at 1:20am Friday, September 4. Mosaic is about a two minute walk from my chocolate truffle shop.

When I arrived, I noticed Clifford Griffin leaning against the outside wall of the three story building that houses Mosaic. Mosaic occupies what used to be the basement of the building. Clifford is a political science professor at North Carolina State University and good friend even though I see him only about two or three times a year.

"What's happening, Reg? How's the chocolate?" He greeted me in his usual Caribbean cool way.

"You know." I answered. "How are you?"

"Just got back from St. Lucia, brother. Gorgeous place."

We talked about my chocolate business and his academic research that took him to St. Lucia.

Clifford had been engaged in a conversation with a fellow Caribbean. whose name is "Earl." He introduced me to Earl and I encouraged them to continue their conversation.

Earl tried to bring me up to speed on the conversation.

"Clifford and me were talking about how understanding our ladies are, Reg." 

Earl went on to explain that their ladies understand their men having close relationships with multiple women. He did not elaborate on "close" and I did not ask him to.

Clifford affirmed Earl, "Yes our ladies are very understanding. They trust us. But we earn that trust."

"Yeah, right." I quipped.

"Reg. I mean it. Our deputies trust us because we respect them. "

Reginald O. Savage

September 16, 2009 1:27am

"I Shot The Sheriff" Continued

If a Deputy is a wife, I conjectured a husband is a Sheriff in the slang of Caribbeans like Clifford, Earl and Bob Marley. I did not ask Clifford or Earl if this was so, because they might have given me an answer that did not comport with this interpretation of "I Shot The Sheriff" I formulated: 

"I shot the husband but I did not shoot his wife. and I did it in self-defense."

Of course (?) it is self-defense if the Sheriff catches him with the Deputy, shoots her and before the Sheriff shoots him, he shoots the Sheriff. It is interesting to note in this connection Marley's self-acknowledged vice of "many women" and Clapton's affair with George Harrison's wife Layla. And he had to ask Marley what the song meant?

When shoppers inspect boxes in the way I described at the beginning of  the previous journal entry, they are not looking for meaning. That might be the case if they thought the boxes were intended to represent the contents. The shoppers are judging the boxes and comparing boxes not contents.

Marketers have rendered the directive "Don't judge a book by its cover" unnecessary. Shoppers don't judge books by covers, they just judge covers. That's because they buy covers (sizzle) not books (steak). Perhaps, sometimes, the cover is a New York Times book review.

To know what the contents of a box of chocolates tastes like a shopper has to open the box and eat the chocolates. Likewise, Marley's song does not represent anything. It doesn't have a meaning.  To understand the song, Clapton only has to listen to it.

Anyway, Clapton says Marley liked the way he performed the tune.

Reginald O. Savage

September 16, 2009 1:45pm

Starting A Chocolate Truffle Business

A significant percentage of visitors to this website is referred by the keywords "How to Start A Chocolate Truffle Business."  The referrals are made because I discuss on the pages of the website some of the things I did when I started my business.

The formula I followed when starting out was very simple: make chocolate truffles and sell them. So I taught myself how to make chocolate truffles and then I looked for customers. I started selling even though there was no demand at all for my chocolate truffles and I had a hard time making sales.  I had no choice. I had to build demand.

Building a demand for chocolate truffles is going to be a serious challenge. The challenge is due, among other things, to the relationship people have in this culture to chocolate. I have heard countless (I mean too many times for me to remember) prospective customers saying these kinds of thing to me:

• Oh, I just love chocolate.

• I have never met a chocolate I didn't like

• Chocolate is chocolate.

• I would eat chocolate if I had to eat cardboard along with it

• Doesn't everyone love chocolate?

How can I build a demand for my chocolate truffles in particular with that kind of mindset being the predominant mindset? The truth is the vast majority of Americans are totally indiscriminate when it comes to chocolate. They will eat any chocolate served up to them and exclaim "Oh my God! That's amazing! I feel like I have died and gone to heaven! It's sinful!"

That is problematic.  And it is not a problem for any other product I know. 

Over the past four years, since it started to look like I was selling a lot of chocolate truffles, I have been approached by many people interested in starting a chocolate truffle business. Their main encouragement has been the fact that others who have tasted the chocolate truffles they make have raved about them. The people who approach me will almost all report something like this: "I made my chocolate truffles for a wedding reception and everyone who had them said they were the best chocolate truffles they had ever had," It is easy to move from this kind of praise to the idea that people, in general, will be willing to pay for the chocolate truffles.

It is much easier for people to praise than it is for them to pay. The question is whether people, and I mean a significant number of people eating the chocolate truffles and praising them, called the mother of the bride and asked where they could buy some more of the chocolate truffles.  In other words, did the eating of the chocolate truffles generate a serious demand for them?

That, in fact, happens sometimes. It happens over and over for some chocolate makers. If it does, the chocolate maker might more formally evaluate the demand to determine whether the demand is great enough to start a business.  If they determine the demand is great enough, it makes sense for them  to pose the question "How do I start a chocolate truffle business based on this demand?"

If there is a demand for your chocolate truffles that is not merely an expression of the general demand for chocolate, a demand that any random piece of chocolate can satisfy, then the idea of starting a chocolate truffle business is well motivated. Otherwise it probably is not.

I say "probably" because really good marketers, and they are rare, will look to see how to create a demand for a product like, for example, pet rocks. We might revisit here "Sell the sizzle not steak."  If that is the case, your question  might be: "How do I make my chocolate truffles sizzle? How do I create a buzz around them?" If you make sea salt caramel chocolate truffles, you might want to send them to the First Family. 

Or if your product is really good and loveable, and you will know if is if you really love it, you can take it out and sell it, sell it, sell it. Sales will generate more sales. That is what I had to do.  And I would do it again because I loved doing it   I do not mean at all that I had "passion" for doing it. Passions fade.

Reginald O. Savage.

September 17, 2009

There are thousands of chocolate truffle makers offering their chocolate truffles for sale online. Almost all of them hawk their products with:

• Tantalizing photos

• Effusive testimonials: "This is THE BEST CHOCOLATE TRUFFLE I'VE HAD IN MY LIFE!!!  Truly Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

• Extravagant claims about an exquisite, extraordinary chocolate being hand made in small batches using only the very finest fresh ingredients.  

The number of exclamation marks varies plus or minus one or two, but the message is the same. It is a message the chocolate makers, or their marketers, think people want to hear.

You would think it would occur to them that most visitors to their websites will respond with a bored "Yeah. Yeah. That's what they all say" because that is what they all say. And the photos of their chocolates look shamelessly the same. So why say it and why display them? Over and over and over to a chocolate eating populace which "never met a chocolate it didn't like." and for which "Chocolate is chocolate."

I am advised all the time to send a box of my chocolates to Oprah. Her endorsements create crazy demands for products. The chocolate maker who sells the chocolate truffle for $2600 was on her show and the demand for his chocolate went so crazy he was encouraged and enabled to create a "new" $2600 chocolate truffle. 

Endorsements from Oprah work. Paula Deen works. The First Family created a sea salt caramel gorging frenzy, probably even among Alaskan Republicans, when they cited Fran's Sea Salt Caramels as their favorite.

Hackneyed, noisy, garish websites that anybody can design and build don't work. They just generate income for web designers who copy one another's work. Marketing and advertising campaigns, in general, rarely succeed. No one has ever been able to anticipate when they will.  However, when they do succeed, they are cited as proof that marketing and advertising work. It is proof that they work: rarely.

Mass market marketing campaigns target markets. As a small company that does not mass market because it does not mass produce, Azurelise targets people, individuals or small groups, not markets. Markets don't even exist for small businesses like mine unless Oprah transports them to that world of abstract objects where they become equally abstract.. 

Reginald O. Savage

September 30, 2009 1:32am

Love and Passion

These are my working definitions of Love and Passion:

"To love a thing is to be aware of its presence and beauty and, as a result of that awareness, to experience a perfect awareness of self and one's power."

"To be passionate about a thing is to be aware of its presence and beauty and, as a result of that awareness, to lose awareness of self and one's power."

Artists are people who know how facilitate the awareness others have of the presence and beauty of things. Some artists know how to do this in ways that make people love a thing. Others know how to do it in ways that make people be passionate about a thing.

There are objects of love and there are objects of passion.  And it is not possible that a thing be both an object of love and an object of passion. Every object has to be one or the other.

Chocolate is an object of love. I do not say this because other people are all the time declaring their love for chocolate. I say it because I love chocolate. Now, when I say I love "chocolate", I am talking about what philosophers have called an essence and how I relate to it.  I will try to make what I have just written less vague with a little biography.

When I was in what was called "junior high school" in Milwaukee in 1963, I either lost my gym clothes or they were stolen. I knew better than to ask my parents for the money to replace them. Alternatively, I decided to save my lunch money and to use those savings to replace them. A part of this plan was to make salad dressing sandwiches, a most un-favorite food of mine. for lunch,

It took me  almost two weeks of salad dressing sandwiches and feigning a foot injury to save the money for the new gym clothes. On the first day I was able to use my lunch money for lunch, the entree on the schools lunch menu was my favorite: macaroni with cheese, tomato sauce and ground beef.  I thought about that meal for the entire morning in school before lunch.

At lunch, I sat with the plate of steaming macaroni and cheese, tomato sauce and ground beef before me. I closed my eyes, put a forkful in my mouth and started to chew slowly, waiting for the "taste good", as I later called it. It never came. I could taste the food, but I could not taste it "tasting good". I tried, but I couldn't do it.

I moved to the jell-o with fruit cocktail in it. Same problem. The milk. Same problem. I had lost my ability to taste "taste good".

Thinking really hard about what was going on is what turned me to philosophy, because it is what made me reach the idea that whatever "taste good" was, I was not aware of it with my tongue but with something else. I started to think about what that something else was and why it wasn't working.

I eventually figured out that I broke it by trying too hard to enjoy the macaroni and cheese with tomato sauce and ground beef. It was like ruining a party by trying to have fun or ruining other things by trying to enjoy them. I had to stop trying and let it happen.

Which was sort of paradoxical, and I knew it.

At 12 years old, I had a really sophisticated taste for chocolate. I was always looking for good chocolate, always comparing different chocolate bars and other chocolate confections like chocolate truffles.  I felt about chocolate in ways that some people feel about their dogs and cats. In other words, that the relationship was somehow reciprocal. I was a child and I was primitive. Like other primitives, I experienced the world around me as full of life and feelings. All sorts of things could like you and dislike you, feel happy for you or sad for you. Things like trees, the wind, the sun, butterflies, ants, cats, dogs...

...chocolate. I believed chocolate really liked me as much as I liked it. and was certain that this fact would be my way back to "taste good."