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Articles filed in: Marketing
Closing The Sale
It was a mid-week afternoon and the jewellery store was empty. Three assistants, and one customer shopping for a ring. A selection of diamonds was presented. The assistant talked about size and shape, colour and clarity, and a twelve week wait when she couldn’t find a ring to fit.
The customer made to leave.
She didn’t have twelve weeks of forward ‘ring buying’ planning up her sleeve.
“When do you need it for?” the assistant asked as the customer gathered her bags.
And then came the answer to the unasked question, that would have made all the difference had it been known.
“It’s our wedding anniversary in two weeks,” said the ring shopper as she walked out the door.
People can find everything they need online in couple of clicks, they no longer need to pay you for access to products. So forget about the emergency of the logistics for a second.
Instead work out what’s scarce. Stand in their shoes and try to understand what’s driving their decision in that moment.
A sale is never an exchange of goods. It’s a transfer of emotion.
Image by Martin Jarosinski.
The Fortune Cookie Principle. The Keys To Telling Your Brand Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I’ve been working to get my new book into your hands for the past nine months, so I’m thrilled to let you know that The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One is now available on Amazon.
The Kindle edition is on sale at the introductory price of $3.99.
So today is great day to buy your copy and to give one to a friend who has a story to tell.
In the book I share the 20 keys that will help you to tell your brand story. For each key I provide examples of businesses big and small who have used that key to tell their story well. At the end of each section I’ve added questions for you to answer which will help you to tell your story better.
In business we talk a lot about marketing plans and content strategies and features and benefits, often forgetting the reason we needed to think about any of these in the first place.
The very first question that Apple asks before they design a thing is;
“What do we want people to feel?”
Apple became the most loved company in the world by telling a better story and you can do it too.
I wanted to give you a place to begin and that’s the reason I wrote this book.
Your brand story is more than a narrative and content. The story goes beyond the copy on your website, the text in your brochure, or the presentation you use to pitch to investors. Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.
People don’t buy what you do, or why you do it.
They buy how it makes them feel.
Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a better way to tell the story of the fortune. Bake a good cookie but spend your time working out to tell your story well.
Everything you do, from the colours and texture of your packaging to the staff you hire, is part of your brand story, and every part of it should reflect the truth about your brand back to your audience. If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, a brand that will garner loyalty and, if you’re lucky, become loved, you have to start with your story.
The most successful brands in the world don’t behave like commodities and neither should you.
A great brand story will make you stand out, increase brand awareness, create customer loyalty and power profits. Isn’t it time you gave your customers a story to tell?
The Fortune Cookie Principle will show you how.
The Opportunity Of The Disconnection Economy
If there’s one thing I really hate it’s queuing. You too? And we’re not alone.
Innovators are spending their time working on projects to make frustrated one-click, 21st century humans worry less about the time they might be wasting, just waiting. There are red traffic lights with countdowns that encourage drivers to be more patient, real time transit information at stations to alleviate uncertainty and automated voices that tell us we are number three in the queue.
We’re designing efficiencies. Optimizing every moment.
This week my local gym installed two electronic self-service kiosks for members who want to book into classes. Swipe. Choose. Click. Then print your own ticket. No more waiting. No more going to a desk to look a person in the eye and pass the time of day.
We’ve never had a more connected society, but as a race we are unwittingly uncoupling ourselves from real intimacy. And what are we sacrificing for the sake of all this urgency? When we strip out every bit of humanity from our lives and our businesses with automation, where will the value lie then?
The opportunity of the future might just be, that we will be falling over each other to pay a premium for a simple, “good morning”.
Image by Jorge Quinteras.
You Don’t Need A Marketing Plan
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every business has a plan.
Even if it’s written on the back of a Post-it note.
The plan talks about the idea. Who it’s for. How to bring it to market, at what cost and how to get the word out. That final piece of the puzzle is your marketing plan, and yes it’s usually tacked on at the end….when you’re done.
Marketing is seen as an activity. Something that lives on a to-do list. A marketing plan is a bunch of actions and tactics designed to get attention for products and services.
Attention guaranteed a decent level of conversion in the days of linear media and the TV Industrial Complex, but in a Googlized world attention doesn’t automatically scale.
What matters now is being believed not just noticed and a marketing plan that comes into play when you’re done building whatever you’re building isn’t going to get you there.
What every business needs now is story strategy.
You don’t need a plan to broadcast, you need a way to change how people feel in the presence of your brand. Don’t start by asking how can we get noticed. Build something worth noticing. There’s a subtle difference.
Image by Adam Fagen.
What’s The Story They’ll Tell About You Tomorrow?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Don’t let anyone kid you. Telling your story, or the story of your business is hard and most people struggle with it on some level (how to write an about page is one of the most visited posts on my blog).
But there’s a trick to tapping into the heart of your story.
Start where the story ends.
Write down the words you want people to share about you tomorrow.
What did they love about your product?
What made them care about your service?
How did you blow them away?
What difference did you make?
And now that you’ve figured out what you want people to say, go and do all the things that will make them say it. You are not the only one who is telling your story.
Image by Jason Short.
Why More Is The Wrong Place To Start
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The end goal of all marketing is more.
More customers or subscribers. More sales and increased profits.
This is the reason business strategy questions and answers often begin, (and end) with the ‘how to’ of getting more.
But more is the wrong place to start for two reasons.
When you begin by asking, “How can we sell more?”
You’re bypassing the question that comes before it, which is—”Why will people want more?”
And, what makes a good business a great brand isn’t just more.
It’s more of the right customers who believe in the story.
Sure aim for more. But remember it’s meaning that scales.
Image by Katia Strieck.
7 Marketing Strategies That Work Better Than Advertising
Marketing used to mean advertising. If you wanted to sell something awareness on a mass scale was the shortcut. Remarkability or transparency didn’t have to be baked into your product. But we’ve come a long way from the days of Mad Men and the blurred line between getting noticed and being believed.
Today anyone can….
1. Make a better product.
Josh uses just two ingredients in his handmade stoneground chocolate.
The Sydney Opera House brings in a billion dollars a year to the Australian economy.
2. Reward already loyal customers. Give them a story to share.
Jamie Oliver created a free pizza giveaway on Instagram by writing the details with a black marker on a plate and posting the photo.
My friend Mark the baker impacted a whole community with his bread giveaway. The side effect for both businesses was a positive brand-building vibe, even with people who didn’t have a chance to take part.
3. Change how people feel.
Warby Parker changed how people felt about how often they should shop for new glasses and how many pairs they should own.
charity: water built transparency and trust into their interface with the 100% model and GPS, showing donors where their money was making a difference.
4. Create content people want to come back for and share.
In the past you had to have access to a printing press to publish a food magazine that people drooled over, not anymore. The same strategy works for companies big and small, check out
My Starbucks Idea and Airbnb Popular Wishlists.
5. Connect your community.
Moleskine created a marketplace for custom designed notebooks connecting one set of fans to another.
One of our local cafes which backs onto the beach sponsored a surfing event last month.
6. Frame your scarcity.
There is no substitute for Christian Loboutin red soled shoes. Loboutin has managed to attach unique meaning to his shoes using colour and design.
7. Deliver value beyond an exchange of goods or a sales transaction.
Snakes & Lattes the board game cafe charges customers for coffee but what they really sell is connection.
What could you do with zero advertising and a better story?
Image by Geoff Jones.
The Purpose Of Data
You know things about how people interact with your business or brand that you couldn’t possibly have known just a decade ago. You know how many people visited your website, from what country last night (or even right this second!). You know who sent them, how long they stayed and what held their attention. Your database can tell you about your loyal customers, when they shop, how much they spend and what prompts them to buy more. There’s no question that data is powerful and that business intelligence can inform better decisions.
But there’s a gap between what we know and what we do, and we need to get better at closing it. Most business owners understand that data is nice to have, but they don’t have a plan for what to do with it.
Data should do three things:
- Confirm or disprove what you were already thinking.
- Make you ask more of the right questions.
- Cause you to act on what you discover.
The power of data isn’t in the information. It’s what you do with it that matters.
Image by Johannes P. Osterhoff.
Is It Time To Stop Advertising?
Last week I passed a moving kid at the side of the road, where cars sped by at 80km per hour. He was wearing a red sandwich board that screamed, “BUY ONE GET ONE FREE,” and had clearly been given instructions to dance about to attract more attention. I was 200 metres past him when I realised he was advertising the unremarkable pizza place on the other side of the road. The dancing sandwich board guy made me question the value of advertising once again.
Advertising by definition was never designed to deliver either value or joy.
advertise (verb)
1. to announce or praise (a product, service, etc.) in some public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use it: to advertise a new brand of toothpaste.
2. to give information to the public about; announce publicly in a newspaper, on radio or television, etc.: to advertise a reward.
3. to call attention to.
Perhaps that’s why we’ve grown to resent it and how it interrupts us so much, not because we are more intolerant than past generations but because we have a choice to pay attention or not. How does it make you feel when a popup appears on a website’s landing page as soon as you arrive? Or when you answer the cold caller as you are stir-frying vegetables at 6pm?
Probably not how you want your customers to feel.
Fourteen years after Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing it’s still okay to interrupt people without any context, for one reason only.
Because we can.
That was never a good enough reason to make people care. Today if we want to survive in a world with unlimited choices we’ve got no option but to work harder to make the right people care more.
I once had a client who came to me having spent $6,000 on an advert in a glossy magazine. She knew the magazine’s circulation numbers, but she didn’t know who she’d reached. The phone didn’t ring once afterwards. I think she chose to advertise because it felt safe. Because if you’re in business that’s what you do to get customers and survive. Maybe that’s why the worst kind of advertising still exists, because businesses are scared that the phone won’t ring today?
I’m sure the dancing billboard sold a few more pizzas that evening, but we didn’t miss not seeing him on the side of the road the next day. And we only care about his pizzas (or those of the three other takeaways within a 5km radius) when they are 2-for-1.
Image by bcline.
Why Your Brand Doesn’t Need A Unique Selling Proposition
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In the 90s Pampers’ ‘unique selling proposition’ (USP) claimed it was driest nappy on the market. Procter & Gamble prided itself on this benefit, investing heavily in research and development to maintain its USP. In the end that singular focus blinkered the company’s understanding about what mothers really wanted. And while they believed that Pampers was the driest nappy, that wasn’t enough to stop mums buying more of the newer Huggies brand which appealed to their hearts not just their heads.
The marketing concept ‘unique selling proposition’ was introduced in the 1940’s by the pioneer of television advertising Rosser Reeves. Reeves invented the term USP to explain how successful advertising, (not necessarily great products and services) could convince the masses to switch brands. The golden rule was that adverts must include a USP that said “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.” More than seventy years later we’re trying to make something that applied to an analog world fit into our digital landscape.
Marketing departments try to pass off cheaper, faster, stronger and longer lasting as unique benefits of a product or service. But in a world where most things are good enough it’s getting harder and harder to turn being different into an advantage. Unique by definition means one-of-a-kind, unlike anything else. That was an easy claim to make half a century ago when there were three kinds of washing powder— not so easy today.
People don’t want to be sold on the reasons why you think your brand is better or best.
They don’t want different.
They want difference.
Starbucks, Google, Instagram, Amazon, Innocent Juices, Oprah, Spanx and on and on, didn’t succeed just because they were different and could tell us how.
What makes a brand unique is the difference it makes in people’s lives.
So organize for difference not different it’s much harder to replicate.
Image by Alan Foster.