If you own a carwash you are probably looking for alternative ways to advertise your carwash to bring in new clientele from within ten mile radius were you draw 85 percent of all your customers currently. Many carwashes like to use direct mail and services, which put flyers into envelopes and mail them through the U.S. mail to all the people in a given ZIP code.

Generally carwashes will look at the highest income level demographics within the ten-mile radius near their business and concentrate on sending mailings into those areas. Yes, that works. But chances are you are already doing that right?

Well, another thing you can do which is very inexpensive and will give you brownie points in the community is to advertise in the local high school football booster schedule, which is given out or sold at high school football games. In fact there are many sports could have these kinds of advertisements and you should consider advertising in all of them if you can.

All carwashes should concentrate on word-of-mouth advertising and referrals, as those bring the best customers into your facilities. But you also need to bring in new customers and those who may not be associated with your current customers and to do that it may take a little extra advertising. I hope you will consider this in 2006.

What is the best way to advertise a mobile oil change business if you want to get 80 percent of your customers to come from corporate parking lots and fleets of vehicles and only 20 percent of your customers to come from residential services.

Sure, direct mail will work for the residential part of your business but if it is only 20 percent of your market mix then how will you advertise to get to do oil changes on all the fleets in your community and how will you reach all of the corporations in the area so that they will allow you on their property to change the oil for employees while they work?

There are a couple of things you can do which have worked good for our company; Oil Change Guys.com and those include putting a flyer insert into the Chamber of Commerce newsletter, which is a bright color and a half sheet of paper with your phone number in bold at the top. Another way to get to the corporations is to contact a human resource director and ask if there is an employee newsletter that you can advertise in.

If there is not they may invite you in to explain the services you provide and therefore you get in to talk to the decision maker. If there is an employee newsletter it will be some of the best money you ever spend to advertise in it. Please consider this in 2006.

Let's say that you are going on vacation. You're going to Vegas! Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday the store would be closed. You have 2 choices: Worry about how much money you are losing by not being in the store, or using your trip as a way to get a boost in business. This is what we did; About half an hour before we left for the airport, almost on a whim, I took a piece of typing paper & put a sign on the store's front door. Here's what it said;

"My wife Cheryl & I are on a vacuum cleaner buying trip ( & mini vacation ) to Las Vagas, Nevada. The bad news is that the store will be closed Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday. The GOOD news is; If you were thinking of buying a vacuum cleaner within the next year COME BACK SATURDAY! We'll have prices slashed & lots of FREE STUFF for anyone who buys a vacuum from us on SATURDAY. WARNING; When you get here Saturday, the store may be full of people looking for a vacuum cleaner at a great price. PLEASE WAIT YOUR TURN! The longer you have to wait, the better the price. WE ARE ONLY DOING THIS ONCE THIS YEAR. Saturday from 10AM-6PM. Monday, our vacuums go back up to our regular ridiculously high prices. so COME BACK SATURDAY! WE PROMISE IT WILL BE WORTH THE WAIT!"

That was the sign. After the dust settled on Saturday ( about 7PM ) we had sold $4,118.65 in Vacuum Cleaners. I wonder if I'll do the same thing next year?

If you will invest a few cents in a piece of paper (or two), place the sign by your door, you'll have a waiting mob of buyers, greeting you the day of your return. Won't that be fun?

"Sign-up now for my FREE Retail Marketing course "Unfair Advantage Retail Strategies ". About once a week, I'll provide you with valuable retail marketing strategies that have been proven and tested, (mostly by me).

You can opt-out at any time ...and don't worry, I will not share your information with any 3rd parties."

Like I said there shall be enough material to make this ad busting into a series. In fact I have to restrain myself on most occasions when watching some of the “new” stuff on air at the moment.

Millions of Rupees and in some cases Dollars are spent on a few seconds and the following is sometimes what gets dished out. We start with the Fanta commercial with Rani Mukherjee making some weird sounds to an equally obnoxious soundtrack/jingle. The visual realm also suffers here with what seem to be the single most barf inducing graphics ever in an ad. There is no thought behind this project. If there is please let me know and put me out of my misery.

The high point of the ad is when they rhyme the words, “P.K. Bose” with, “Fanta ka dose”. How this ad ever got on air is anyone’s guess. My heartfelt condolences to the client.

Next on this list of shame is the latest Clipsal switch ad where, this lady seemingly a helper dressed in an over sized white frock is going about doing her dusting albeit rather grudgingly. We see a horrible Plaster of Paris statue scaring the crap out of her as well as us, and then for apparently no reason what so ever she flings some books towards this switchboard on the wall. Then again for no reason at all, the entire house begins to crumble. Things around the house come crashing down as if she has hit a switch that controls high magnitude earthquakes. Once again what’s going on here and more importantly why - has got me in a right twist. Maybe one day I shall have answers to my humble queries.

What has to be my favorite or should I say my anti-favorite recently though has to be the new Indica Diesel ad. You know the one that takes forever to setup and flashes you the actual product on sale so quickly that it seems like they almost don’t want to show it to you. Usually teasers are only 5 to 10 seconds long. What we have here is like a 50 second ad with a 45 second setup. And a 5 second product shot, which is so blurry that you, cannot see much anyway.

Why oh why is this happening. May be TATA has too much money and they don’t know what to do with it. Showing a guy setting up a fishing seat in the middle of a lake for so long and then barely showing the actual product that’s on sale seems like an unsuccessful attempt at hoodwinking the masses. Why do we have to be so clever? Why do we need to waste 50 seconds selling something we don’t actually show

There are many theories in Advertising, which we learned in MBA school, yet many fall very short in the real world, where there is competition, changing demographics, intense adjusting of consumer buying behavior and so many more methods of advertising than ever before.

Indeed it is truly amazing that the MBA textbooks can keep up with it all and really they can’t. If you wish to stay up on what is new in advertising you really need to read the research data and white papers on the subject and how the Internet is changing and evolving. For instance AdSense at Google did not exist during the last reprint of college textbooks in advertising and even it is evolving once again you see?

There are so many changes and well I hate to break it to you MBA’ers out there, but I am simply not so interested really in any of your guff, you see I built a small car washing empire and never used the conventional marketing or advertising venues. We built the largest mobile car wash company in the world, without blowing our money on the MBA advertising methods.

In fact I use to be an avid reader of “Advertising Age” yet even so I could have easily re-written a third of those articles with a reality check. No, I am not bragging, but rather trying to get you to think on where advertising theory so often falls short you see? Consider all this in 2006. And no you cannot reprint this article for you next MBA Textbook.