Unlock the Magic in Your Story Now
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Articles filed in: Marketing
The Exponential Value Of Being More Than
So I’m standing at the service counter of the hair salon receiving the bad news that my usual stylist is sick today.
“What are you having?” the receptionist enquires. “If it’s just a cut everyone here is capable.”
Of course she’s right. Most clients don’t leave with blue hair they didn’t want. Most shop assistants can process transactions. Most nurses administer the right medication on time. Competence and efficiency are standard now. It’s what we expect but it isn’t what we care about.
Time and again the businesses that succeed find ways to be more than just okay.
Capable might get you to the end of a shift but it isn’t what’s valuable now.
Image by Ned Trifle.
Brand Vs. Branding
Branding is…..
“The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme.”
—The Business Directory
Branding in the traditional sense was designed to create recognition and awareness of commodities. It was the way business persuaded customers to decide.
There’s a difference between being branded and becoming a brand. A distinction between recognition and significance.
It’s possible to shift a lot of breakfast cereal through brand recognition. But if your brand isn’t loved then it’s replaceable.
Branding might enable you to be top of mind. Top of mind isn’t the same as close to heart.
Ask Microsoft.
Image by Luke Chan.
What’s The Point?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Business isn’t about transactions and giving people the thing they want. That box of chocolates, an upgraded phone or the business class flight.
And marketing isn’t about selling them your facts.
It’s about giving people a story to believe in and one that they want to tell. Just like Evan’s.
(Take the two minutes to watch the video below, it’s worth it!).
The point is to take your customers on a journey to where they want to go.
Even if that’s almost to the end of the world.
Image by Palo.
The Second Secret Of Great Marketing
I signed up to an email list of a brilliant and famous author over a year ago and hadn’t hear anything since. No blog posts. No regular email. Nothing interesting or relevant to me. Nothing to look forward to. No connection to each other.
The author had my permission but it wasn’t much of a two way street. Two weeks out from the release of the next book I got an email offering me incentives to pre-order. I began to wonder if the author was excited about the impact the book might have on my life and work, or if I was just making up the numbers on the road to a New York Times Bestseller. I haven’t ordered the book yet.
So the third secret is….generosity first last and always.
If you can’t afford to be generous you can’t afford to be selfish either.
Image by acb.
If You Build It Will They Come?
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing
I spent most of yesterday at Startup Weekend and was excited to hear the feedback from the judges during the final pitches. There were elegant apps and well developed presentations. Some teams had a product ready to roll out this week and others had nothing more than a well validated idea about what was possible.
The team that won didn’t design the elegant app, they hadn’t even developed the product. They had spent their time proving that if they built it people would come. They tested the idea by asking people for money to solve their problem. And their proof— someone actually parted with cash on the spot for a product that didn’t exist (they did give it back).
My friend Mark did this with an email list of twenty friends and neighbours when he started out baking bread as a hobby one day a week.
You don’t have to guess what the market wants or build the product from start to done. You just have to prove that a handful of people will pay for it first.
The better question to ask might be.
If you show them will they pay you?
Image by curiouslypersistent.
Why You Don’t Want To Be The Impulse Buy
Have you ever watched people shopping at the airport? They amble distractedly fingering this, picking up that. Nine times out of ten they put things back. Sometimes the packaging, or maybe the boredom gets the better of them and the buy something they had no intention of buying.
It’s a win for the manufacturer of the laptop bag or souvenir chocolate maker in that moment. But not a sustainable strategy for growth.
And yet we often organise our marketing around the hope of being the impulse buy, with SEO and brochures, banner ads and special offers. Hoping.
A far better strategy is to build your brand around being chosen on purpose.
By creating the thing that people really wanted in the first place.
Image by Geir Halvorsen.
The First Secret To Great Marketing
The first secret to great marketing is knowing where to start.
“Marketers have to move upstream now. We have to stop being the last step in the process and start being the first step.”
—SETH GODIN
Most marketers start by thinking about what they want their customers to do.
“Buy now”, “click this”, “give us your email address” and “while you’re at it like us on Facebook”.
You however begin with an understanding of what your customer believes and how she wants to feel. Then you work your socks off to help her to get where she wants to go.
Image by Matthew Spencer.
Building A Brand Versus Selling A Commodity
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Ideas spread, products become irreplaceable, and businesses grow when they stop being mere commodities and have meaning attached to them. It’s not possible to be a brand and a commodity all at once. Customers don’t demonstrate loyalty to commodities but they can fall in love with a brand.
PRODUCT-MEANING=COMMODITY
PRODUCT+MEANING=BRAND
Anything you care to think about from a book to a city, a graffiti artist to a platform, a store to a TV show can stop being a commodity and become a brand. Hundreds of business have a ‘swoosh’ based logo. Only one has managed to attach meaning to it.
Story (as distinct from just narrative) is how we attach meaning and significance to anything. That’s why the world’s leading brands and savvy entrepreneurs work hard to tell a better one.
Image by Steve Wilhelm.
Perfect
When a Ryanair flight touches down on time a fanfare sounds over the public address system to celebrate the fact. Flights that arrive on time might be cause for celebration for the airline, but that’s no longer enough to delight most passengers.
Just twenty years ago when you made an expensive long distance phone call you probably weren’t surprised to be cut off or to experience appalling call quality at the very least. If you used Skype for free today you expected to see and hear someone who was 10,000 miles away as if she were sitting in the next room.
When everything is as near perfect as it can be the perception of what it takes to be excellent shifts. When we’re used to things working the fact that they’re working isn’t enough to ‘wow’ us anymore.
When standards rise, expectations rise with them. So if everything is good enough, where is the room to delight your customers? How can you possibly stand out and create value in an almost perfect world?
Perfect isn’t what’s scarce anymore. Your customers don’t want perfect. They want you to stand in their shoes, to see the world through their eyes and they want to be touched.
Image by Ed.
What Business Are You In?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
More on those $5 roses that you paid $8 for last week…..
On the Saturday before Valentine’s day I went shopping for single white rose. The florist had none on display, but when I asked she went into the fridge and pulled out two dozen.
“Oh, these are not at their best. You can see they are not going to last long and we can’t use them.” she said.
“That’s a shame, so what will you do with them now?” I asked.
“Oh we’ll just throw them out, but if you want them you can have them for $3 each.”
Contrast that with my experience at the pharmacy just ten minutes before. When they didn’t have the prescribed ointment I needed in stock the young assistant phoned around four other pharmacies (the competition) trying to find it for me.
Here’s the distinction.
The florist thinks she’s in the ‘flower business’ not the ‘brightening someone’s day’ business.
The pharmacy assistant knows he’s not in the ‘drug dispensing business’.
What business are you in?
Image by Paul Cooper.