MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

A few months ago, a few affil­i­ates sent out a series of emails that caught my attention.

It was a medium sized launch, but they had blogs around the world ask­ing the same question.

It made me drop what I was doing and read that email. I wanted to know:

“What is FeBeNe?”

It out to be part of a pro­gram devel­oped by Jay Con­rad Levin­son, author of ‘Guer­rilla Mar­ket­ing’, co-authored with Paulie Sabol and Ben Mack. Ben was the man behind Think Two Prod­ucts Ahead, an ad man turned inter­net mar­keter. From what I heard, he was also the man who behind the strat­egy which caused the yoyo craze in 1998.

Brand­ing seems a lost art in inter­net mar­ket­ing, so I get excited when some­one does it right.

Peo­ple were say­ing ‘FeBeNe is the future’, ‘FeBeNe is the future of marketing’…but what was it? I actu­ally wanted to buy the book to find out!

What these guys did is a brand-building les­son. They basi­cally caused a wave and rode on it, using their prod­uct name to brand and incite curios­ity. The pay-off? You got to find out, what is FeBeNe.

The word is very catchy, another prod­uct nam­ing prin­ci­ple. Allit­er­a­tion. You’ll find this used fre­quently. Dou­ble your dat­ing. Coca-cola. Sound familiar?

FeBeNe. It just rolls off your tongue. I was baited.

I couldn’t resist, so I Googled it. Some­one revealed the secret on their blog, and it turned out to be a made-up acronym from “Front end” (Fe), “Back end” (Be) and “Never-ending” (Ne).

It actu­ally means just means Front End, Back End, Never-Ending.

FeBeNe encap­su­lates it very well, but it’s all some­thing that we all already know.

It’s not ‘Greek’. It just means what it says.

Front End — cre­ate an ‘edu­ca­tional infor­ma­tion prod­uct that answers your tar­get audience’s ini­tial ques­tions and explains why these answers are so impor­tant’. It also out­lines ‘the ben­e­fits of tak­ing this infor­ma­tion to the next level’.

Back End — any sell­ing point after the Front End, either ‘invit­ing your cus­tomer to an ongo­ing oppor­tu­nity’ or ‘offer­ing an incre­men­tal larger pur­chase’. (In other words, up-sell.)

Never End — any­thing you give with a recur­rent bill.

We’ve been pro­gress­ing and improv­ing on this front. We’re going to prac­tice what we preach, mak­ing sure that we incor­po­rate this key prin­ci­ple when planning/building/selling all our products.

Ok: if you are a long-time Inter­net mar­keter, you aren’t learn­ing any­thing new just yet.

But it sounds log­i­cal, and it falls in line with Mary Ellen Tribby of EarlyToRise.com’s advice.
Every­one should think like a mar­keter first.
FeBeNe.
It falls right into the vocab­u­lary every employee should know.

Let’s face it, it’s a good way for every­one to think of their products.

Think: what is your front end? On your buy­ers list, can you still sell to them on the back end? Do you have any­thing in place to sell ‘never-endingly’?

Focus on this for every sin­gle prod­uct. You can even do all three at once: sell, do a forced upsell (hon­estly and eth­i­cally, of course), and sign them up on a monthly subscription.

A very sim­ple exam­ple would be sell­ing affil­i­ate prod­ucts. Or for a con­tin­ual, resid­ual stream of income, try mem­ber­ship sites.

It’s not exactly rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and I was dis­ap­pointed when I saw this.

But at the same time, what was very inter­est­ing and what intrigued me was this: we talk about FeBeNe, but it’s all over the place. We can pick it up and we can come to a con­clu­sion. It’s def­i­nitely not rocket sci­ence, and you may even have been using it before ‘FeBeNe’.

The dif­fer­ence is this: Ben Mack coined a name for it.

What he did suc­cess­fully was to encap­su­late it in one word.

Hats off to him. He coined a maven term, and now he is the Father Of FeBeNe.

Last 5 posts by

• Are You a Direct Response Gazillionaire-In-Waiting? — Octo­ber 28th, 2008
• 3 For­bid­den Twit­ter Mind Con­trol Tricks to Explode Your Mar­ket­ing — Octo­ber 1st, 2008
• Email Mar­ket­ing Demys­ti­fied — July 24th, 2008
• An Intro­duc­tion to Tro­jan Horse Mar­ket­ing — July 2nd, 2008
• The Paprika Effect: The Brain-dead Sim­ple For­mula to Instant Cus­tomer Delight — June 25th, 2008

About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.