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Articles filed in: Strategy
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.
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.
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.
The Future Of Storytelling And The Currency Of That Future
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
So there we were gathered together on an island, (the best kind of place to feel that you’re truly gathered) to talk about the future of storytelling. Some of the best and brightest in the storytelling business from Burberry CEO (soon to be heading up the retail story at Apple), Angela Ahrendts, to Robert Wong from Google were there.
It seemed that almost every person I spoke to was wrestling, not with the future of storytelling, but with the future of their story. How do traditional businesses born in the industrial age, those that thrived in a Mad Menesque world, adapt and find new ways to be heard? How do digital businesses create intimacy, when what they probably want is scale? How does anyone stay relevant, in a world where expectations shift daily beneath our feet and fickle people change their behaviour?
The future we seem to be imagining is about tactics, and platforms, and technology that makes us feel somehow more able to connect and less relevant all at once. That paperless and scary place where our messages and stories seem to lose permanence. We’re running in ever decreasing circles to try to catch up with the future before it gets here, just so we can stay ahead of the game.
And the irony is that the answers we’re searching for lie in the past and the present, in looking each other in the eye, and ourselves in the mirror before we try to preempt the future.
Before paper, ink and white space we had only words. The words and stories we paid attention to had to mean something to us, otherwise they didn’t get passed on. We gathered around campfires to listen, and sat at tables talking and drinking tea, or got comfortable with a book on our mother’s lap, the medium didn’t matter, what mattered was the connection, the animal warmth and the trust. Now suddenly we feel a bit lost as to how to recreate that at scale in a digital world, so we focus on the tactics instead of the truth.
As our circles of intimacy contract, and our circles of influence expand, it’s getting harder and harder to look people in the eye, to let them know that they can trust us. And yet that’s what we have to find a way to do, not because our businesses won’t survive if we don’t, but because we won’t survive without that connection to both doing work that matters and to each other.
The currency of the future was also the currency of the past, it’s simply about intentionally creating deeper connections to each other. Before we imagine a world through Glass, or a future of wearables, digital storytelling and connection platforms of every kind, we need to acknowledge the truth about where we came from and why we’re here.
The future might not be as unpredictable or complicated as we think.
Image by Antoine Walter.
Value Is A Story We Tell Ourselves
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Value is what we believe in the moment and not simply a measure of gain, relative to units of currency.
Value is a story we tell ourselves based on what we perceive and what we think is true. Our framing of the value story is the reason that passers by walked past original works of art by Banksy worth over $40,000 each, which were for sale on a stall in Central Park for just $60.
Value is how your customers feel, not what you convince them to think.
Image by Steve Rhodes.
Marketing Is An Art
When you walk into the Bedford Cheese Shop in New York, you’re not seeing cheese sold by the pound, you’re witnessing art being made. A business owner who goes to the trouble of writing these kinds of descriptions on his product is not just a marketer, he’s an artist, practicing with intention, and generosity and most likely out of love.
Every day business leaders ask the people who ‘do’ their marketing to create campaigns that will make people love their brand. The question on everyone’s lips is, “how do we get people to care about us?” The answer is that you don’t sell them, you care about them first.
Your products and services should feel like a gift.
You can market all you want, but in the end it’s your intention, not your marketing that shines through. The truth is that people will know and that’s not a drawback, it’s an opportunity.
Image by A.J. Kandy.
What Focus Groups Can’t Tell You
Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
The committee might be able to tell you what they think is working, or what’s broken, but they can’t tell you how to matter. And no committee ever in the history of the universe knew what the world was waiting for. Right and wrong answers are facts, and as Robert McKee will tell you, “facts are not the truth.”
Focus groups can give you an opinion, but they can’t tell you how to make meaning from it.
You don’t find the truth by asking for answers. You uncover it by learning how to see.
All you have to do is trust yourself to do that.
Image by Jay Raz.
The Trouble With Positioning
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Do you remember when President Obama came to office first time round and negotiated with the secret service to keep his BlackBerry—Bush and Clinton didn’t even use email. In 2004, three years before the launch of the first iPhone, BlackBerry, who pioneered the smartphone had a market share of 47%. Four years ago Blackberry was the fastest growing company in the world.
Today it’s market share is just 2% and BlackBerry is facing obsolescence. The company had identified, occupied and dominated a product niche by developing a phone that could email. It was perfectly positioned to stay top of mind for years to come.
I think where BlackBerry came unstuck was in believing that their job as innovators was to change how people felt about their product, instead of wondering how smartphones might shape culture beyond accessing email on the go. In the end they didn’t lose out because of Apple and Google, they lost out by failing to understand how their brand would enable connection going forward.
The trouble with positioning is that it doesn’t take into account that business is symbiotic, that the relationship between brand and customer really is interdependent. That’s because positioning is less about considering what people value and more about telling people what to believe.
It’s not enough to be first to market or top of mind. The brands that we care about don’t just make innovative products, they shape our culture and make us feel like better versions of ourselves. They take account of what we believe, how we act and who we might want to become. Which is very different from riding the wave of first mover advantage.
Brands big and small connect people through a culture that’s bigger than themselves, provenance, adventure, sustainability, entrepreneurship, self expression, conscious consumption, sisterhood and real food to name a few.
So tell me, what beliefs are you connecting your customers to?
Image by Lindsay Turner.
You Don’t Have To Matter To Everyone
We weren’t meant to be sitting next to each other. The European blonde, who didn’t want to be separated from her boyfriend for 10 hours overnight between Perth to Dubai, asked if I would mind moving to the middle seat in the row behind. So this is how I got chatting to a the chap in 36C.
He was a self proclaimed ‘left-brained engineer’ and partner in a growing business.
In situations like this (at the end of a long flight) I tell people I’m ‘in marketing’.
I should know better.
“That’s all smoke and mirrors.” he said.
I smiled.
He talked a little more about the challenges that he and his partners were having in their business as they grew. I asked questions and told some stories.
Before we touched down in Dubai, he asked for my card. I warned him that it had a heart on it.
Takeaways for me and for you too
1. There is no excuse for being lazy about telling your story. You may not get another chance.
2. A lot of people think marketing is advertising.
3. Marketing is a transfer of emotion. We buy with our hearts and justify decisions with our heads.
4. People make judgements based on their world view.
5. Don’t try to convince people that they are wrong because you want to be right.
6. Listen twice as much as you talk.
7. Be yourself.
8. Generosity scales.
9. Always carry cards.
10.You don’t have to matter to everyone.
If people don’t believe you can help them, you probably can’t. When they ‘get it’ you’ll know.
Image by Sam Breach.
Demographics Vs. Worldviews
It’s impossible now to presume everything about your customers just because you know their age, sex and postcode. In a digital world, that enables ever increasing possibilities and choices, people are no longer constrained by location, age, or gender, and they are not so easy to put into a box either.
It’s far more helpful to think holistically about the people you want to serve. To consider not just their problems or needs, but to understand what they value, and how they think and feel.
Five questions to ask yourself about your customers
1. Who are they?
Not age, sex, income, no, much more than that. Tell their story as if you were about to create a new character for Breaking Bad.
2. What do they care about and what do they value?
Time, money, convenience, belonging, generosity, giving, people, planet, freedom and security.
3. Who do they trust?
People, brands, networks, platforms and on and on.
4. Where do they spend their time, online and offline?
Think about where they choose to belong, and how do they engage there.
5. Where do they spend their money?
Why?
The businesses that succeed tomorrow, will be the ones that invest time today to work out how to be able to say, “we see you” to their customers.
Image by John Fraissinet.