Decoration and polish
When you decorate a diamond you make it less beautiful, not more. Diamonds need to be polished.
Does your product need decoration or polish?
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.
Stories are powerful.
Which is why they are often misused. The more emotional, the greater the potential for misuse.
A couple of years back, at a conference, I listened to a speech about water problems in mega cities. The speaker started with a story about a poor family who suffered some severe diseases due to contaminated water. It was a touching experience. She really made us feel the pain.
Which earned her harsh criticism during the coffee break.
Because it turned out that she had been misleading us. The problem: The story wasn’t representative of the situation. Not at all.
It was a story that was meant to evoke emotions (which it did). But it was a dishonest story in the sense that the speaker had picked a very specific, very special situation that painted an unusually dark picture. One that wasn’t representative of the situation at all. It was purely there to evoke emotions while not making the proper point.
That’s a crucial difference: The best stories are such that they are representative of the whole picture despite highlighting only a specific part of the picture.
Skilled communicators pick stories that paint a vivid picture.
Great communicators pick representative stories that paint a vivd picture. A story that is powerful because it evokes emotions and captures the essence of the complete picture.
I’ve met quite a number of businesses who told me that they have never needed to do marketing, all of their business would come from doing great work and being recognized and recommended for it.
Which means that most of these businesses are actually doing quite a lot of marketing. They make useful things that beautifully solve people’s struggles and they make it easy to spread the word.
That’s the foundation of any good marketing.
Advertisements and other forms of communication are amplifiers. They work best (and are way easier) if the foundation is great. But it’s not all of marketing. It’s the topping.
If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you know what it feels like to play the game.
Which is the point of this brilliant new campaign by KesselsKramer. They want us to be reminded of what it feels like to play Monopoly by showing us what playing the game looks like.
Yep, this is us. (Isn’t it?)
Most business communication is different. It stops at what but doesn’t show us what it looks like.
The business tells me about their latest innovation and why it works.
But is it for me?
Sure, they explain … and continue to tell me how elaborate their approach is.
But is it for me?
They let us figure this out ourselves.
As opposed to making us see what it looks like to struggle so that we can immediately identify as their customer.
Yep, this is us. This is exactly what we’re struggling with.
If you want to be seen by your customer, see them first. And tell them what you see … what does it look like?
When they recognize themselves, they will want to hear the details.
(PS: Speaking of board games, I enjoyed this video about “The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends”)