Welcome to Marketing Mondays.
When was the last time you bought a luxury product? Be honest. Why did you buy it? Because you needed a belt? Increase your status? Was it something else?
- Why buy a drill? – You, me, us. We're all illogical.
- Collaboration can be dangerous. Especially the hype person.
- Quote of the week – Keep testing.
🧠 Logic vs psycho-logic.
Back then I made a video to explain why we should sell benefits, not features.
I used the example of a drill.
Logic says I wanted a drill because I needed a hole in the wall to hang a mirror. If you sell drills – you'd tell me how effective the drill is at making holes right?
But that's not quite it.
Sure I wanted the mirror hung. But I could have gotten my contractors to do it. They were still working on the house at that time.
No, I got a drill because I wanted to impress my wife. I loved the idea of being this perfect, all-capable husband. But after making a hole and putting up a mirror, I started wandering around the house, looking for excuses to drill holes in things.
How would you sell me a drill?
The takeaway here is to realize that humans are illogical.
As a marketer, you're taught to ask customers for feedback. But most of the time, customers give you bullshit feedback. They tell you what you want to hear, and what feels correct to them.
The best way to get feedback is to ask indirect questions around a problem – not a product.
My favourite questions:
Imagine you're interviewing a prospect to learn about problems you can solve.
- Tell me the last time you tried to solve this problem.
- How did you feel at that time?
- What products/services did you try to solve the problem?
- How did you feel about the solutions/product you bought?
Remember: People usually can't tell you what they want, but they can tell you how they feel.
📍 The dangers of collaboration.
Remember that drive you had when you started a new startup with a partner?
It was you and your partner against the world. Everything seems great. All signs show that you guys were going to disrupt the market – hard. "We got something great here, man!"
Months later, and still no customers. Sp you decided to kill the startup.
What likely happened was groupthink.
I've definitely experienced it.
A partner and I started a marketing agency, rented a new office, and hyped ourselves up – only to learn that we didn't have enough skilled executives on the team.
When I was with LEAD, our team hyped each other up that data science courses is going to stay relevant forever & explode no matter what. AI will not be adopted in many years, because it's still in its infancy. People will continue buying data science courses. Bad move.
At client meetings, I see bosses use their salesmanship to get everyone to buy their idea & direction, without validating it with ACTUAL CUSTOMERS! Some team members just agree because they want the meeting to end, and to go home. (I personally talk to everyone later, so I know!)
Be careful of working or collaborating in a group if you're generating ideas. It can be very dangerous.
⭐️ Nuggets
Things that you might like:
- The better way to scale services is to Productize. If you run a service-based company, like a marketing agency – I recommend you read the book.
- After remote working, the future of work is async.
- 6-years old website making USD8,576 per month is asking for USD350,000. I knew the founder and made a video review for them before. What I wanted to share is that it's possible to build a website and then exit at 3.4X its annual profit.
- How marketers are handling backlash on LGBTQ+ branding.
💬 Quote of the week.
Your landing pages and ads don't suck. You don't suck. You only suck if you stop testing and give up.
