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Patient Growth
My trusty blender died a couple of weeks ago, or rather I killed the thing with overwork and by overloading. The new blender had a lot to live up to. On the advice of the sales assistant I bought the most powerful one on the market, but was still frustrated by its performance. Why wouldn’t this thing respond the way I wanted it to when I filled it to the brim? It’s taken some trial and error to work out that if I want to optimise the blender’s performance then patience is all that’s required.
I have two choices. I can take the shortcut, overfill the bowl and become frustrated when the motor can’t process the load, or I can gradually feed vegetables into it and watch as they are pulped in seconds.
In business as in life, we seek out what we think is the quickest route to the outcome we want, then we get frustrated when things don’t work out as we hoped they would. When our expectations don’t match our capabilities, or the customer’s worldview, or the marketplace’s readiness, we push harder—trying to hurry things along before it’s time.
Sometimes what we need is more patience and more time to work out how to turn aspirations into outcomes. Slow and steady is often the quickest way to get to where we want to go.
Image by Steven Depolo.
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Hedging Your Bets Vs A Stake In The Ground
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
When we’re having problems articulating our story or making ideas resonate it’s often because we’re afraid of putting a stake in the ground. It seems safer to hedge our bets and easier to be more things to more people, than to commit to choosing who to matter to.
When you narrow your focus and stake your claim to a category or an idea, you must decide who you want to serve and how to matter to only those people. This in turn, helps you to get better at telling your story.
If you make a list of beloved brands you’ll find that they don’t hedge their bets. Spreading ideas isn’t simply a case of telling a better story, it starts with deciding exactly which story to tell.
Image by George Laoutaris.
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The Value Of Challenging Our Assumptions
It’s 6am, and a passer-by bends down to leave a couple of bananas next to the homeless guy who is turning over in his sleeping bag in the doorway of 7-Eleven. When he wakes, he gathers his things and the few coins in his tin. He drops the fruit in a nearby bin and heads into the city.
The passer-by made an assumption about how best to help. But despite her good intentions their worldviews didn’t align.
This misalignment between giver and receiver, provider and user, business and customer occurs all too often. It happens when our understanding of the people we serve falls short—when we’re more focused on our story than we are on theirs.
We can challenge our assumptions about our customer’s wants and needs with knowledge, proof and truth. We seek those out by noticing, questioning, and understanding.
How are you doing that in your business?
Image by Gary Knight.
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Brand Storytelling And The Rule Of One
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Have you ever wondered why movies like Toy Story are so compelling and successful? The best writers in the world speak to universal human themes—the things that drive every one of us no matter what our worldview is.
Compelling storylines work because we see ourselves reflected in the characters. Their story is our story. A great script looks us right in the eye and says, “I see you”. Contrast that feeling with the one you get when you’re speaking to someone at a party, who is looking over his shoulder for the next most interesting person to enter the room. That’s exactly how you don’t want your customers and clients to feel.
Great storytellers make us feel like they’re speaking directly to us. And so it goes for great brand storytelling. The best brand stories make you feel like the company understands and is speaking just to you. The goal is to be more like Pixar and nothing like that guy at the party.
You achieve that by remembering ‘the rule of one’.
Speak to one person at a time. Make that person feel like she’s being looked in the eye.
That’s the foundation of a winning brand story.
Image by Luis Miguel Justino.
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Because We Can
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
It’s a brisk Autumn Monday. The city’s lunchtime trams are busy. As we turn into Collins Street the tram driver begins an unscripted dialogue.
He tells us that we’re at “the Paris end” of Collins street in the world’s most liveable city, reminding us that this is “no flash in the pan” because Melbourne has been awarded the accolade five times. At each stop he mentions landmarks and points of interest. He draws our attention to the “blue sky, fluffy white clouds, birds singing and trams dinging”.
“It doesn’t get much better than this ladies and gentlemen.” he says.
“If only Essendon had won on the weekend.”
And the day is brightened for tens of people in that ordinary moment.
Here is a guy without a script, a rulebook, or permission of any kind doing meaningful work.
Not because it’s in his job description, his boss is watching, or for a financial incentive—but because he can.
It’s an oppotunity most of us are lucky to have. We should take it.
Image by Stephen Beaumont.
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5 Questions To Consider Before Spending Your Marketing Budget
A colleague recently asked my advice about a five-figure advertising spend he was contemplating. Should he or shouldn’t he?
We mapped out the risks vs. the rewards and also discussed alternatives.
It turned out that he needed to ask a different set of questions entirely.
5 Questions To Ask Before Allocating Marketing Resources
1. What’s the best outcome you can hope to achieve as a result of employing this strategy?
2. What does failure look like?
3. Why this medium and not that one?
4. Why do you believe this is the best use of your marketing resources?
5. How could you delight existing customers by devoting these resources to deepening connections with them instead?
Just because it looks and feels like marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best option.
And 3 Action Items
1. If you’re going to read just one post about marketing from Seth Godin, read First ten.
2. Then read Kevin Kelly’s post 1,000 True Fans—still relevant today.
3. Your About Page is probably the most overlooked marketing opportunity you have.
The About Page Guide will help you to write an About Me Page that works for you.
The opportunities for growth are closer than you think.
Image by Angelo Antonelli.
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The Powerful Sales Question We Forget To Ask
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
It was a busy Saturday morning in the department store. Lucy, the kitchen appliance sales assistant didn’t have a lot of time on her hands. She needed to work as efficiently as possible while ensuring that customers felt seen and heard. Lucy’s first customer was shopping for an electric blender. Like many customers, she felt so overwhelmed by the array of choices she was unlikely to buy anything—until Lucy expertly helped her to narrow them down with one simple question.
“What do you want to do with it?”
The ability to understand what a customer wants to do next has spawned countless successful business ideas from Facebook to the Dyson vacuum cleaner. When you are aware of the context shaping the story the customer tells herself, you put yourself in the best possible position to serve her and grow your business.
What does your customer want to do next?
What must you do next to help her get to where she wants to go?
Image by Yassan.
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The Three Steps To Articulating Value
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
It’s tempting to begin with product and service descriptions when you are communicating the value your business creates. Of course, it’s easier to start with what we know for sure. We list features, benefits and specifications—telling the customer as much as we can about ‘the what’.
And all the while we’re doing it backwards.
Intead of starting with our ‘what’ we need to begin with the customer’s ‘why’.
How To Articulate Value
1. Why does the customer need your product?
Reflect the customer’s challenges or desires back to him.
2. How will it work?
Describe the change the product will create.
3. What is it?
Finish with the facts.
Very few of our buying decisions are led by reason and logic, so why seek to persuade by starting there?
Image by Mike Melrose.
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Beyond The Point Of Sale
Many marketing strategies focus on the point of sale.
Most great brand stories focus on what happens before and after the point of sale.
We win by considering who the customer is, and helping him to become who he wants to be.
This happens by understanding his story beyond the point of sale.
Image by Linh Nguyen.
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Optimising For Customer Delight And The Peak-End Rule
Jody and Jim (not their real names) run a small web design studio. Their initial pricing strategy was to keep base prices low, putting time caps on every deliverable during the website design and build. New clients were informed about this policy up front. Things like design time and content population were included in the original quote. If the project became more complex or the client wanted changes, the design team let them know that they would incur an extra charge and got their approval to go ahead.
Despite this, when clients were presented with a ‘higher than expected’ bill at the end of the project they were very annoyed. They were thrilled with their website but not at all happy with Jody and Jim. The result was unhappy clients, negative reviews and fewer word of mouth referrals.
Something had to change. The priority was to leave every client delighted at the end of the experience. A smart move on Jody and Jim’s part when you consider peak-end rule.
The team decided to simply increase prices to reflect the fact that every single web design project goes out of scope. Now at the end of a job, the client is delighted with both their website and the company—all as a direct result of this firm pricing strategy.
The ability to truly empathise with the customer along every step of their experience is what separates great businesses from good ones. How are you doing that?
Image by Leo Hidalgo..