Heading into 2023, here are two important questions worth reflecting upon:
Why do the people you serve deserve your effort?
Who do you proudly exclude?
If you don’t try to please everyone, you can serve the ones who deserve your effort so much better: in your communication, in your marketing, in your development, in your support.
Wishing you a great start into 2023.
Keep lighting the path!
Elegance might get you attention.
But relevance creates interest.
Elegance without relevance is meaningless.
By all means, make it elegant. But never at the expense of relevance.
Maybe it’s even 17 reasons. It doesn’t really matter. Because no one cares.
When you’re at reason #7, we don’t even recall #2 anymore.
The more relevant question to ask is what’s the real reason a customer would choose you.
Part of the brilliance of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign was that they made that exact shift from a plethora of good reasons to one real reason.
Make no mistake, each of the 323 spots that had been shot for the campaign focused on one of those good reason for why a Mac would be better than a PC (66 of those actually aired, source).
But they were not about the good reasons.
For one, I’m sure for each of those you can find people willing to dive into a heated discussion about whether that reason would even be valid.
Apple skipped that discussion and went straight into an argument about the real reason: Mac users are cool while PC users are not.
When you resonate with that message (which you might not, I know a lot of cool PC guys), the beauty of that approach is that the good reasons are all there.
This is the crucial aspect: The good reasons are never the problem. If you’ve done a great job and built something that’s actually amazing, you’re always going to have enough good reasons on your side (if you don’t, it’s probably better to fix your product before you fix your communication).
But any of these good reasons will always be considered in light of the real reason that makes us choose one product over another.
If you ignore this and instead only focus on the good reasons, even 66 good reasons won’t be enough to convince your audience.
Finally, if you need 66 reasons, or even just a dozen, to tell me why you are the superior choice, you’re devaluing the weight of each one of those reasons. Give me one heavyweight reason and we’re playing a totally different game.
What’s the real reason people choose you?
As a child, my mother would often read a bedtime story to me that went something like this:
“It’s a beautiful morning with a little breeze of fresh wind blowing. As the sun dawns, Susie grabs her red jacket, takes it on and goes for a refreshing morning walk.
When the sun and the wind see her, they get into a heated argument about who of the two would be quicker to make Susie take off her jacket.
The wind gets to make the first attempt. It builds up. Mighty clouds assemble. The wind blows stronger and stronger … until it grows into a full-blown storm.
But Susie only grabs her jacket ever tighter to protect herself from the wind and the storm. No matter how hard the wind tries, it can’t get Susie to take the jacket off.
The sun tries a different approach. As the clouds dissolve, it starts to shine bright and warm. Susie smiles. She enjoys how beautiful everything looks in the sunlight. Then, she takes her jacket off and starts hopping and turning around, her arms stretched wide.
What a beautiful day.”
Marketing is the same. It’s not how hard you try or how loud you shout, it’s how strong you resonate.
A great partnership is one where both sides rightfully think they got the better deal.
However, the way to get there is not by searching for the better deal but by being the better deal.
If you give more than you take, the partner will probably do the same. (If they consistently don’t, it might be time to re-calibrate the relationship.)
For people who try it the other way around, i.e. by first wanting the better deal before they are ready to contribute their part of the equation, I find it hard to believe that they’re going to be a valid solution of the equation.
You don’t look for the perfect match. You create it.
Some salespeople love to make decisions on behalf of their customer. Their favorite one: the purchase. These salespeople have already decided that their customer wants the deal, long before the conversation has actually started.
And it’s fascinating to see them succeed by sheer will.
For this breed of salespeople a “no” is just another word for “needs more info”. They are trained in objection handling and equipped with honey traps to make an offer the customer “can’t resist”. They just won’t stop pushing until they get the deal.
And it works. They make another deal. Often enough.
The deal might even be in the customer’s best interest.
Or it might not.
That’s not what drives these salespeople, the closure of the deal does.
And yet, the sad part is something else: This kind of behavior is the consequence of some deep insecurity. This salesforce doesn’t really believe in their offering. They don’t trust their offer to be strong enough that they can trust the customer with the decision to buy.
Last week, I’ve worked with a company that has no salesforce at all. They trust in their offering to be so good that the customer doesn’t need to be persuaded. If a customer has the problem that this company solves, they will choose that company to solve it. Not because someone pushes them to but because they want to.
The ingredients for this kind of offer are:
If these are really the problems and your solution really solves them, then you can skip persuading and start resonating.
Or is it?
Because maybe it’s too cheap.
Price is a story. A cheap price tells a different story than an expensive price.
It’s too cheap when your customer chooses the competition over you because the story your customer derives from the price has destroyed trust in your offer.
Price is also an enabler. Higher prices enable more premium offers.
It’s too expensive when the service you provide can’t live up to the story your customer derives from the price.
What if your customer is right in choosing the competition?
What if your team is right in being skeptical about the strategy shift?
What if your website visitor is right in not clicking the call-to-action button?
The answer to these questions might not be to try harder or shout louder. After all, it might very well be that the team has a point. Or that the customer is looking from a slightly different angle than you thought they would.
Most people ask “How can we make the customer choose us?” But turning it around to the more useful question above, we force ourselves to change our perspective and walk in their shoes.
Good marketers make their marketing different.
Great marketers make their marketing specific.
Which is why it’s different by default.
Great marketing doesn’t bother to make anything different. They make a special product that does special things for special people. And that’s why it is different.
Good marketers get creative. Great marketers get specific – about the people they serve, their struggles, their desires and a solution bridges both.
Great marketing is largely rigorous revelation work.
The phone you own, why did you buy it? The career you chose, why did you pick it? The coffee brand you obsess over, why that one?
It’s good to reflect at times on why we, as a customer, really choose one thing over another. I’m not talking about all the good reasons we use to justify the decision but about the real reasons that pre-determined the decision. Here are a couple of the more common reasons:
– loyalty: we always buy from this brand
– recommendation: a friend who we trust recommended it to us
– bad experience: we tried something like this before and it didn’t work, so we’ll never buy from them again
– ethics: we refuse to buy from this sort of business
– sympathy: I don’t like you
– budget constraints: my boss won’t approve the budget so I need something cheaper (and won’t say so)
– status: this thing will boost my status
– belonging: my friends own this, too
– aesthetics: it looks gorgeous
– fear: bad things can happen if I don’t buy this
– … and many more
When we choose a thing – for whatever reason – our brain is super good at finding all the good reasons for why this is a good decision. Yet, these are hardly ever the real reasons we made the decision in the first place. It turns out that, as humans, we’re pretty good at finding good reasons for the things we do – as opposed to doing what we find good reasons for.
The same is – of course – true for your customers.
Marketing gets way easier if you understand the real reasons why your customers buy from you.
