Secure the only spot at the airport that sells water and you can basically stop bothering about how you do business. It doesn’t really matter how good or bad your service is or how clear or confusing your communication is, business is almost unavoidable.
For everyone else, clarity in your communication (what can people expect) and providing great service (delivering on what they expect) turns out to be invaluable.
You might copywrite a text faster than anyone else in town. But on the other side of the planet, I can find someone who writes better.
You might make the best burger in New York. But if I’m living in Germany, I will choose a different restaurant for tonight’s meal.
“Faster” and “better” can have a very different value depending on the arena you’re competing in.
Which arena are you competing in? Does it influence how you communicate why people should choose you?
“One of the biggest strategic mistakes you can make is to fail to make the most of your victories. Yet even brilliant leaders sometimes make this mistake. One reason they fail is if they are obsessively searching for the Next Big Thing.
– Jim Collins
What’s not to like about the Next Big Thing, right? I mean, wouldn’t you just love to launch one?
One of the misconceptions about Big Things is that they would just appear and immediately take over the world.
That’s hardly how it works in real life. The iPhone was a niche product when it launched. Facebook was only available at a single university when it launched. Tesla (which is yet to become an actual Big Thing) launched with an expensive niche sports car.
Most Big Things have actually started small and grown big over time … by rigorously observing what worked and what didn’t and then amplifying what worked and fixing what doesn’t.
When you constantly chase the Next Big Thing, you constantly start fresh (read: small).
Instead of asking what else could work, it might pay to regularly ask what’s already working and then amplify that.
(And, of course, there’s a smart distinction to be made between consistency and stagnation.)
When you decorate a diamond you make it less beautiful, not more. Diamonds need to be polished.
Does your product need decoration or polish?
Average blends in.
Edgy stands out.
For example, there’s this super weird fashion store that draws an ever growing crowd of loyal superfans.
It’s no wonder that imitators started to spread who tried to copy the edginess.
And failed.
Because they misunderstood the reason people fell in love with the original. Which was not the fact that they were edgy. It was the fact that they were specific.
The imitators copied the look but lacked the understanding of the specific needs of the customers. The edgy look was a consequence of being specific. The fact that it felt kind of weird was much more a coincidence than a choice.
Being specific almost inevitably leads you to become edgy.
Specific can be weird, but more often than not it isn’t. Weird is just one way of being edgy.
Can you be more specific about who you serve? And what they need?
This Moleskine notebook costs €13.
At your local grocery store, you can get a double pack of similarly looking, similarly equipped notebooks for €3.
Why would anyone pay 8 times the price for a Moleskine?
Because it’s not the notebook that they buy but this story that Moleskines come with:
“Moleskine is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. This trusty, pocket-size travel companion held sketches, tones, stories and ideas before they were turned into famous images or pages of beloved books.”
A notebook is a simple tool. Yet, there’s a lot to say about it. We can speak about the size, the build quality, the material, the features, the variety, the price, and many more aspects …
Moleskine, the maker of that notebook, chose not to speak about any of those. Instead they told a story.
A story that turned a small Milanese publisher called “Modo e Modo” into a beloved worldwide brand. What started as a small independent book publisher now is exclusively devoted to making notebooks. The initial production was 5,000 copies of their notebooks. Today, the company has changed their name to “Moleskine” and runs signature stores in all major cities of the world. They sell millions of their notebooks each year.
For €13!
As I said, you can get a double pack of similar looking notebooks of similar build quality in our local grocery store for 3€. Again: Why on Earth would anyone pay 8x the price for a notebook? Isn’t it just a bundle of blank paper?
No, it’s not.
Because it’s not just any notebook. It’s the same kind of notebook that creative geniuses like Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used to scribble down their ideas. At least that’s what the story suggests. And just think about what became of them …
What Moleskine has achieved with this story is that this is not just a notebook, anymore. It’s a notebook for creative people. And if you are creative, too, then you need a notebook for creative people, right? It’s what all the great creatives used. Creatives can’t just buy a notebook from the supermarket. They must buy a notebook for creative people.
This is a real masterpiece in communication that achieves two things:
Any sustainable business needs customers.
Not every sustainable business needs more customers.
How about yours?
The first step in creating a movement is to create something that moves.
In a way that it can move – the easier it can move, the better.
A brilliant idea that’s hard to explain can’t easily move.
An idea that has no name can’t easily move.
An idea that doesn’t have a story can’t easily move.
An idea that doesn’t make people feel that they belong to the movement can’t easily move.
When an idea has a great name and a simple story that creates a feeling of belonging, it can move much more easily.
What will you create in 2023?
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?
A unique position is what every marketer dreams of. If your brand occupies a unique position, it can’t easily be copied or challenged by a competitor. The market is all yours.
The pitfall is that “unique” is often taken to mean “different”.
Different is pointless, though. Different has no meaning to your customer. It’s an entirely selfish motive.
If only because your customers are most likely not looking for a different solution (most of them actually like known and proven much better). Customers are rather looking for a specific solution. If you solve their specific problem in a specific way and if that specific way makes sense to them, you’re going to earn the spot for this specific solution in their mind.
This spot is often not the result of spontaneous creative work (what many marketers love) but of rigorous revelation work (what strategic marketers do).
The irony is that while everyone else is busy trying to be different, you are automatically going to end up actually being different. Thanks to rigorous focus that led you to a deep understanding of your specific customers’ domain, you’re going to come up with solutions that no-one else could discover and that are therefore unlike any other solution. Usually, also way more thoughtful and useful.
Don’t be different. Be specific.
