We live in a world where the average
person experiences 40,000 marketing messages a day. Marketing is a battle for
attention. Your competition is the President of the United States, Brittany
Spears, and anything else that consumes your customer’s brain.
To stand out you have to be engaging,
provocative, and different.
This is why Apple gets billions in
“free” advertising from its PR efforts.
Then millions of people buy their stuff, and then their stock price goes
up - a lot.
Gary Erickson
founder of Clif Bar, Inc. (the wildly successful energy food company) knows the
power of a good story. They put their story on their packing. They have their
story on their website. People eat a lot of Clif Bars.
Most companies, brands, and offerings
are boring. Think about ads for home cleaning products, airlines, rental cars,
pizza, bottled water, computers, tennis shoes, to name a few. Do you care about
one brand more than another?
Even worse is enterprise technology. Can
you remember a recent SAP or Computer Associates campaign? Probably not. Most
technology companies make the mistake of marketing their products, technology
or “solutions”. They think their customers care about that. They don’t.
People do not pay attention to boring,
similar messages. For your story to stick, it must be different. Make people
care. Say or do something memorable, interesting, enlivening,
Say something provocative, engaging, or
controversial and people will talk about your brand. You may even set the
agenda for your industry, drive a breakthrough in growth and kick your
competition hard.
Now let’s be clear, having a great
product or service is critical (if Clif Bars tasted like shit, a POV while
helpful, couldn’t save them). A great product is the start. You have to have a
legendary product AND a legendary POV to drive a breakthrough in growth.
Your point of view should attract the
buyers you want and repel the customers you don’t want. Love him or hate him,
Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota because he had a provocative
point-of-view that differentiated him from the rest of the candidates. Charles
Barkley signed a multi-year contract with CNN and TNT to provide commentary for
NBA basketball games, not because he is the most knowledgeable announcer, but
because he has the most colourful opinions.
This also works when marketing an
enterprise. Oracle Corporation gets millions of dollars a year in branding
value by having an outspoken provocateur as a CEO. While you might not like
him, Larry Ellison keeps people’s attention on Oracle. John Chambers, CEO of
Cisco Systems, while not the lightning rod of controversy that Ellison is,
keeps Cisco front-and-center, by being a tireless cheerleader and spokesperson
for the Internet and the technology industry. Both CEOs and their companies
promote a point-of-view in an engaging way that builds competitive advantage
for their companies..
Just about every product or brand that
you care about has a story that you relate to. That is a big part of why you
buy it.
If your point-of-view is smart,
different, and scares you, you probably have the right point-of-view If you
want to grow your revenue, market share, and stock price – market your POV.
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