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How Do I Sell My Idea?
This is probably the question I get asked the most. The truth is it’s the wrong place to start.
You actually begin with a different question altogether, and that is.
How am I going to help people to care about this?If you understand that you’re more than halfway there.
Image by Pimpthida.
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The 11 Whys Of Product Development
In my work with companies, entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes, here’s what I’ve found.
We mostly get stuck not because we don’t know the right answer, but because we haven’t begun to ask the right questions. Here’s a handy list of questions to ask before you bring your product, service or idea to market.
1. Why are we making this?
2. Why doesn’t this exist already?
3. Why us?
4. Why now?
5. Why do people need this product?
6. Why will people want this product?
7. Why will people pay for this?
8. Why will this make people do/feel/be, what they want to do/feel/be?
9. Why would people buy from our competitors?
10.Why will people cross the street to buy from us?
11.Why does this idea matter?
The truth is that often we don’t know the answer to all of the questions. Sometimes even after we’ve answered the questions we’ve just got to take our best guess and go.
Image by David Shackleford
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The Difference Between A Good Idea And A Great Idea Is Just One Thing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Actually, the difference between a good and a great anything, (business, movie, hotel, product, blog, book, packaging, design, app, talk, school, song, art…..keep going), is that the great stuff, the things we give a damn about have the heart left in them.
Heart the verb, not the hollow muscular organ that pumps blood around your body. The empathy and emotion. The feeling and yes, vulnerability. Yours, not the marketing department’s.
Good products work. Great products become part of our story.
A good speaker leaves us with food for thought. A great speaker leaves his heart on the podium.
Good marketing tells the story. Great marketing is the story.
We don’t notice or respond to greatness, most of the time we can’t even explain it.
We simply feel it. We just know.
And that’s what makes it matter.
Image by Tomasz Kulbowski.
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Your Work Is A Gift. Talking With James Victore
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Your work is a gift. Doesn’t this stop you in your tracks for a second? That’s what it did to me when I saw James’s Victore’s talk on the subject (well worth bookmarking to watch later).
James runs an independent design studio in Brooklyn, he is known for his original thinking and unforgettable work. James’ clients include Esquire Magazine, The New York Times, Moet Chandon and The City of New York. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I’m thrilled to to able to bring you this video interview* with him today, as we talk about why telling your story and doing work that matters, starts with understanding the truth and being true to yourself. If you want to start thinking about designing your own future this might be a good place to begin.
(*Receiving this post by email? You may need to click on the headline link and view in your browser).
James Victore : Your Work Is A Gift from Bernadette Jiwa on Vimeo.
James’s links as promised. I’d love to hear how you are putting more of you into your work and telling your story in the comments.
Website.
Burning Questions.
Dinner Series.
Image by Filmatu.
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Being Undervalued Vs. Being ‘The One’
Design is undervalued. So is journalism, and songwriting, and the guy who wrote the code that made the balls in the app bounce. I can have a logo designed for $249 using one of many crowd sourced design platforms. I’ll get 30 designs to choose from and although many will dispute this, it will probably be good enough. It’s a problem for sure.
And yet designer and letterer Jessica Hische is sought after, she gets to choose who she works with and names her price. If I want to apply design thinking to a new innovation, of course I go straight to IDEO because, well who else would you go to but the best? Nancy Duarte’s company designs presentations for people like Al Gore and Bill Gates, and companies like Twitter and Hewlett Packard. If you want to shine at TED Global hiring Duarte is a no brainer.
Every day people are being well paid to use the skills you have, not because they are better than you, but because they decided that’s what they wanted and they worked towards it. They recognised the truth about their talents, they taught themselves how to see what people really wanted and they executed with difference.
Should the Samsung CEO spend his day punching his desk, while lamenting why we fall in love with anything Apple designs and brings to market, every damn time? Or should he just get on and lead the company so that it creates difference for its customers.
The answer is not to sit around imploring the industry, or the customer to give us back our value.
It’s not up to our customers to value us. It’s up to us to show them why they should, and to do work that communicates our difference. There is no more business as usual for musicians, or journalists, designers and [insert your profession here, for it’s sure to be next].
No cushy numbers. No get out of jail free card. There is only work that matters.
The way forward for designers, creatives, and maybe you or your company, is not to be lumped in with the competition. It’s to demonstrate your difference. To be ‘the one’. You must do what it takes not to be just another creative or professional, but to be the creative or professional that people who want the particular must have. You might not be able to change how the world values your profession, but you can change how you are valued by doing work that matters. Work that changes how people feel, not just what they think.
We have two choices. We can stand around looking at the train wreck of what was, or we can design our own futures.
Which are you going for?
Art (or is it graffiti?) by Banksy.
Image by Wally Gobetz.
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Attention Is A Two Way Street
Do you know what’s really ironic? Businesses spend thousands of dollars, manpower, head space and creative energy trying to get the attention of potential customers, and when they get it they waste it. The question for all of us, (not just in business but also in life) is how can we expect what we’re not prepared to give?
You can test out this theory anywhere you do business today, in the cafe, grocery store, cinema and on and on. Everywhere you go people will be multitasking. Having their morning tea break while they fill orders at their desks. Answering the phone while they delete email. Serving a customer while they talk to their colleague at the next checkout.
We work hard to get people over the line, then we don’t even bother to give them eye contact. There’s no excuse for this, even if your business is online you have to find a way to give people virtual eye contact. Zappos built a billion dollar business on that single difference.
It seems that hardly anyone takes the time to properly pay attention anymore, to do just one thing. Your customers want to be that one thing. They want to feel like they matter. If you don’t make them feel that way when they walk through the door, what’s the point of opening the door in the first place.
All the marketing tactics in the world, won’t save us from our own indifference.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
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Don’t Make Things That People Want
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
On a gorgeous hot summer day at the beach you might kill for a Mr Whippy ice cream cone.
But no matter how much you wanted an ice cream today, even if that ice cream was the best you’ve ever tasted, you probably won’t give Mr Whippy a second thought tomorrow. Why is that?
When you buy ice cream from a van by the beach, you don’t really want the ice cream at all. What you want, is to experience the feeling of eating ice cream by the beach in that moment. After all these years I finally understand that the tinkling music of the ice cream van that visited our neighbourhood forty years ago, (before many of the homes on our street had freezers), didn’t just tell us that the ice cream van was close by. It reminded us how it felt to reach up through the window in the side of the van on a long summer evening, and trade two coins for five minutes of joy, with a chocolate flake stuck in the top.
You might think that this is all very well if you are The Lemon Ice King of Corona, but the same rules apply to anything you can think to market. When Steve Jobs was working with his team of engineers to bring the iPhone to the world, the brief wasn’t to make a touch screen phone that could do xyz. Jobs simply charged his team with creating the first phone people would fall in love with.
The products and services we come back to over and over again are designed for feeling, not just function. They are not made to be used or consumed. They are made to matter.
It turns out that Mr Whippy, like Steve Jobs understood that marketing is a love story.
Image by saeru.
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Creating Difference And Why It Matters
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
So, I’m sitting in a café writing my next book and thinking of you (this is a sneak peek at the cover, the subtitle isn’t even set in stone yet). I’ve found that thinking about (actually obsessing about) you, and what matters to you, is how I can make the most difference. But let me back up a bit. The reason I’m at this café and not tapping away in my lovely, whisper quiet home office at the moment is that Craig the builder is ripping out a bathroom and breaking up concrete in the process. Not much quiet in the office right now.
There are ten cafés within spitting distance of where I live on the coast, many have gorgeous ocean views, okay coffee and wifi. They are all ‘good enough’. And yet here I am in a little suburban branch of an international franchise with a view of the car park. The decor is the same as that of the four branches of this café that operate within 10 km of this one. The seating, cups, napkins, crockery, coffee, menu and uniforms, are all identical to every other Dome franchise, but as soon as you walk through the door here you experience difference.
It’s in the way that whoever is serving at the counter looks up the moment a customer walks in and says good morning. The way they make sure to say “see you again” when you leave. The posture of every single person who works here tells me they understand that they matter, and that they can make a difference to someone’s day. In fact the difference is hard to describe because it’s something you feel. Of course I want to know how they consistently pull this off and ask to see the manager. She arrives with a confident smile looking ready to solve any problem I could throw at her. When I ask how this manages to be the best Dome in Perth she laughs and without missing a beat she says, “I hire for personality.” Essentially what she’s telling me is that she hires for difference. And by golly does it show. She doesn’t rule people out because they have tattoos, funky hair, or wacky nail polish, she’s only concerned with how they will show up and bring their difference to work every day. And she wants them to have fun while they are doing it.
Difference doesn’t just mark you out as being a better choice than the competition.
It makes you the competition.
That’s what this next book is about. Showing you how to tap into your difference however big or tiny your entrepreneurial dreams are, whether you’re a one man band or the marketing manager of a Fortune 500. Because it turns out that the people and companies who organise for difference are the ones who tell the best stories and create ideas that matter.
If you’ve already bought Make Your Idea Matter or The Fortune Cookie Principle, thanks for being my reason to dodge the concrete drill this time around. Without you there would be no reason to write, and no excuse to have deep and meaningful conversations with random café managers .
And if you haven’t got either of the books yet, or you’d like to give them as a gift,
you can buy them today for just 99 cents on Amazon.
No Kindle required.
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The Value of Soft Data
We assume that the most valuable data is static and lives on graphs and in spreadsheets. Turning to the graphs first, last and always to get to know your customers, is like looking at a child’s development purely on a growth chart. You’re definitely not getting the whole picture. While we’ve been busy analysing the data for information, we’ve forgotten that what we wanted all along was the insight.
It turns out that the truth of what we need to know, and the questions we might not have understood we needed to ask—some of the most valuable data, is living in plain sight.
The wrinkled nose of the diner. The sigh of the shopper waiting in line. The posture of the customer as she walks out the door. What she packed in her bag before she left this morning. How she goes about her day. Noticing what people do is often more valuable to us than listening to what they say they think.
It might be time to close Google correlate and head down to the supermarket or the local cafe.
Because the trick to bringing things that matter to the world is not just to absorb information, but to make meaning from it.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
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Why You’re Stuck And The Perils Of Peer Gazing
filed in Strategy
There’s so much cool stuff ‘out there’. So many great ideas already being brought to market.
And plenty of people who have done the things (or similar), that you want to do. The trouble is you can’t find a way to stop marveling and being just a teeny bit overawed by them. The Internet has not just opened up our minds to possibilities, it has also enabled a kind of weird collective peer gazing. We’re so busy looking over there, that we can’t see what’s great about what’s over here.
If you’ve ever watched women, watching women walk into a room you’ll know what I mean.
There are many days when we literally trap ourselves into inaction by getting lost in comparison based on what we think we know, but actually don’t. I work with people and companies every day who have sat on great ideas for months, or even years because they are so busy looking at how well the competition is doing that they forget to begin.
Here’s the thing, if you spent as much time looking at what your potential customers and the people you want to serve do, instead of what your peers, or supposed competitors are doing, you’d be well on your way to executing on your ideas and making them matter.
Do yourself a favour. Close Facebook and Twitter and go write the book, start the blog, open the online store, build the app. You don’t need more proof, you just need to begin.
Image by Reza Ghobadinic.