Marketing Lessons From a Garage Sale

As commerce becomes increasingly digitized and customers become increasingly sophisticated, I spend plenty of hours trying to get my business clients to understand which marketing strategies make sense for them. My wife and I hosted a good old-fashioned garage sale over a recent long weekend, and I was amazed—and amused—at the lessons I relearned. They’re easy to forget these days. Here’s a handful:

It’s not what you’re selling that counts; it’s what they’re buying. As we rummaged through our home in preparation for the sale, we found several dozen cell phone chargers, computer cables, telephone cords, and spools of speaker wire that no longer worked with any of our gizmos. We were tempted to recycle them, but as a lark we dumped them in a box and tried to sell them. It was one of the first things to get snatched up. The lesson? Value is in the eye of the beholder.