At some point, anything we buy feels like a bargain. Something needs to be worth more than it costs or we wouldn’t buy it.
So, what makes what you offer a bargain?
Is it that you’ve lowered the price, or have you increased the value?
The Method:
Everyone who disagrees with you is right to do so–based on who they are and what they see
Attention is priceless and trust is worth even more
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem
Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers
Permission is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages
The best time to do promotion is before you need it
Price is a story
You can’t be seen until you learn to see
“People like us do things like this” is the definition of culture
There are only a few widespread human needs
Stories are the original human technology
Resilient strategies work better when we repeat our tactics more often
Positioning is a generous act
Be missed when you’re not here
Make something worth talking about
Do work that matters for people who care
–repeat–
“Feels So Good” and “Chuck E’s in Love” were megahits. They transformed the careers of their creators.
But any fan of Mangione or Jones will tell you that it’s far from their best work. Not even close. And yet, that’s what the crowds came to hear.
In a long tail world filled with browsing, it’s easy to confuse “popular” with “great.”
It’s more productive to aim for great.
Not just similar. Cavendish bananas (the usual kind here in the US) are all clones, each from a tree grafted from a tree grafted, all the way back, from the first tree of the species in the UK.
There are problems with this.
Sure, the banana is the most reliable fruit. The banana marketing folks don’t have to worry about uniformity.
But the monoculture is fragile. When the virus that kills this species spreads, they’ll all disappear.
And there’s little room for innovation, for positioning or to be anything more than a commodity provider. It’s hard to tell a story about a better banana when bananas are all so obviously the same.
My best advice is to avoid being a banana farmer.
They seem like they’ll spread to everyone and stick around forever.
This almost never happens.
In order to spread to everyone, they need to move beyond the people who are looking for a new idea. And that happens when existing users have a powerful reason to tell their friends.
Not only that, but the idea has to solve a real problem for people who weren’t sure that there even was a solution to that problem.
And in order to stick around forever, there needs to be a generous lock-in, a reason to not only keep using it, but to not switch to the next thing.
The network effect plus stickiness almost never happens after the idea is launched. It’s about marketing (in the powerful, design sense) not promotion.
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