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Articles filed in: Marketing
What Standout Brands Do
Have you ever noticed how a crowd exits a packed venue? Even when there are three exits most people take the middle one. You see this play out in business too. Take a walk through the running shoe department in any sports store, and you’ll find little to differentiate one shoe from another. When one brand starts designing and manufacturing with a new kind of material others follow suit. The same patterns emerge in marketing.
Every brand aspires to be unique, to stand out and create something meaningful—yet when it comes to executing on those aspirations we imitate, dumb down and deviate towards the mediocre mean. We head where everyone else is headed because the uncrowded edges feel risky. In fact, the opposite is true. You stand out when you stand for something— when you go to a place your peers or competitors aren’t prepared to go.
Image by Zoi Koraki.
The Listening Marketer
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
When I was young, Maeve Binchy was one of my favourite writers. She had this knack of creating characters who came alive. You somehow felt the people who owned the shops and arrived late for mass were real, and you knew them. I learned later from listening to interviews with Binchy that they were—at least their conversations were real. Binchy told stories of riding buses every day just to listen to snippets of conversation. On one if these bus journeys she overheard a young woman telling her friend she was going shopping for a silver wedding anniversary card for her parents. The friend marvelled that at the longevity of her parent’s marriage. ‘They’re miserable as sin together,’ she replied. ‘The worse the marriage, the bigger the card.’ That conversation went on to inspire Binchy’s successful book, Silver Wedding. Hearing the author’s story reminded me of the hundreds of missed opportunities we have every day to succeed by paying attention to our customers. It also reminded me again to wonder why so many marketing books have a megaphone on the cover.
The sales assistant in the running shoe store works hard to convince his customer about comfort, quality and price. The customer doesn’t pay attention. When he finally chooses a pair of shoes, his rationale tumbles out. ‘I like these because you can’t get them back home in Manilla,’ he says. Your customers are no different from the guy in the shoe store. They want to be seen.
When you become a listening marketer you don’t have to guess what your customer wants, you already know. The listening marketer understands what’s motivating his customers to choose and what language will encourage them to buy. What the listening marketer does best of all is make and sell things people want because he’s been unselfish in the pursuit of doing work that’s meaningful to the people he cares about serving. If you’re not listening, you’re not marketing. You don’t need a megaphone to matter.
Image by Jeffrey Smith.
Where Does Your Story Start?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
The easiest part of telling your story is writing it down. The hardest part is knowing what to say and why it’s important for your audience to hear. You must begin by wondering why someone (not everyone), will care about what you’re creating. That very act of questioning forces you to dig deeper and ask what you’re promising to whom. It invites you to get clear about why you wanted to make that particular promise in the first place.
As marketers, we believe it’s our words that create value. But it’s the intention that informs the decisions guiding those words that delights and thus differentiates. Getting clear on that intention is where your story starts.
Image by David Bleasdale.
Where Do Most Brand Stories Come Unstuck?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
We spend a lot of time finding the right words—the ones that will differentiate us from our competitors and compel the right people to covet and click. And yet even though we’ve assembled the perfect words customers can still sense a disconnect. It isn’t our words in isolation, but the intention behind them and the values shaping them that makes a story either gel or fall apart.
When you see an advertising campaign that feels inauthentic or witness appalling customer care in action, it’s usually not because the company didn’t find the right words— but that they weren’t clear about their intention.
We can’t expect to speak and act in alignment with our values if we haven’t agreed on what those values are, why they matter and how they will manifest in the day-to-day operations of our business.
Most brand stories come unstuck in the doing, not in the telling.
Image by Chris Ford.
The Brand Awareness Checklist
In a competitive, commercial environment the logic is the more people who know about your business the more successful it will be. So we prioritise making more people aware. But if ‘awareness’ is your problem then asking how to get more of it is the wrong question to begin with. The better place to start is by understanding why the right people don’t already know about your products and services.
The Brand Awareness Checklist
1. Did we make a product people want to buy and then talk about?
2. Why exactly will they want to buy it?
3. Who are our ideal customers?
4. What do they care about?
5. Where are they spending time online and offline?
6. What motivates them to buy products and services?
7. Where are they researching and shopping?
8. Are we where they are, providing the tangible and intangible value they want?
9. What’s our ‘first ten’ strategy?
10.How will we make sure those first ten come back and bring another ten?
You can only reap the rewards that come by getting beyond the last question on the checklist when you’ve successfully answered and addressed the first nine. There is no shortcut to mattering.
Image by Ivan Rigamonti.
Are You Pressing The Right Buttons?
The guy who knocks on the door at 5 pm is armed with an iPad, a sales pitch and an assumption. He denies he’s trying to sell something. ‘It’s not a sale—it’s a reduction.’ He asks if I’ve looked at the back of my power bills lately. Tells me the prices have risen and he’s just switched a couple of neighbours in the street who wanted to avoid the increases, to his company. When I explain how happy I am with my energy provider, he presses on, mentioning price twice more as the reason people are switching. The assumption being that every person he speaks to will be motivated by price regardless of their experience—that everyone shares a similar worldview.
The salesman is doing his best within the limitations of the strategy his company has adopted. What this energy company doesn’t know about the potential customer (practically everything apart from where they live), affects their success rate. The story the company is telling today leaves it open to being easily disrupted by a new, cheaper competitor tomorrow.
If your growth strategy relies on pressing your customer’s buttons, then it pays to know which ones to press. The flipside, of course, is that if you’re just differentiating and competing on something that requires less insight and effort, then it won’t be long before someone else uses a similar strategy. The harder a story is to replicate the more valuable it is.
Image by Thomas Hawk.
A Simple Truth About Business Growth
We’ve all seen what happens when a business is poorly scaled. The cult restaurant adds more tables and loses its magic. The software is ruined when too many features are added. The bespoke tourist attraction becomes tacky.
Growth doesn’t come from looking for more opportunities to expand, it’s a result of finding better ways to serve. This doesn’t mean thinking small and staying small. It means being more thoughtful about the need to go bigger, instead of going big for the sake of being big.
Image by Roberto Trobretta.
Difference By Design
Yesterday I was registering a domain name online when I noticed the company had tweaked the user interface from cart to checkout. Now when you confirm the purchase, the default option is to register for three years, instead of one. The steps to reverse this are not obvious or easy—which I guess means sales are up by 66%—especially with new or inexperienced customers.
I’m left trying to imagine the meeting where the head of the business development thought this was an excellent growth strategy and a software engineer implemented the change against her better judgement. Would they consider it acceptable if a sales assistant at a bricks and mortar store tripled their father’s bill by adding two additional items to his basket without permission—just because they could?
The data is clearly telling the company they’re winning, but at what cost? We make a difference by design, not by default—when we put our hand on our heart and question whether this is the right thing to do.
*Note: Since I (and no doubt other customers) drew this to the company’s attention they have rectified the situation. They also denied ever having defaults for domain registrations unless required by the Registry, because this would prohibit them from functioning as a Registrar. Again this goes back to the earlier point. Integrity doesn’t require rules.
Image by David Joyce.
The Easy Part Of Marketing
The easy part of marketing is working out what to say, when and where, to whom, in order to sell what we make. We expend most of our energy on the easy part.
The hard part is understanding why it’s important to say what we’re about to say and who will care enough to listen. We should start with the hard part.
Image by sharkhats.
The Power Of Expectations
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
The packaging on the flat-pack garden shed promised fast, easy assembly (80% faster than the competitor’s product), using 75% fewer screws, pre-drilled holes and a 30-year warranty. Taking the manufacturer at their word the customer’s expectation is set. The shed takes two people five hours to assemble, requires additional drilling, a trip to the hardware store to buy a special riveting tool and leaves the weary handymen with a bag of fifty extra screws and abandoned Sunday afternoon plans. There’s a clear mismatch between the expectation the company set and the reality the customer experienced.
Dissatisfied customers are not just created by products and services that don’t work. Dissatisfaction is also a direct result of the stories we the marketers lead customers to believe. Expectations once set are hard to shift. Our words have the power to change so much more than the customer’s decision to click the buy button. We should use them wisely.
Image by Melody Hansen.