Positioning

To be Home Aloned

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The original Home Alone movie cost $18 million to make. It went on to gross over $476 million.

For a while, Home Alone was the third highest grossing film in history. For an even longer while, it was the no. 1 money-sucking comedy of all time.

According to screenwriter William Goldman, Home Alone was such a success that Hollywood insiders began to use the term “to be Home Aloned.” It meant to have your movie screwed because it was released at the same time as a runaway blockbuster.

The point being that success can have more to do with who else is in your market… than the inherent quality of your product. This is the essence of why you need positioning. Many fine films, including Look Who’s Talking Too and Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, never got much of an audience because they competed head-on with Home Alone.

But that’s enough on the matter of positioning for this holiday. I only bring up Home Alone because, as I publish this post, I too am home alone. Except my home is an empty room at an airport hotel, with probably no other guests on the same floor.

But much like Kevin in Home Alone, I’m making the best of my situation. In fact, I’ll try to use the fact I’m traveling on Christmas (again) as fodder for my new side-project.

I wrote about this project yesterday. It’s an email newsletter about travel during corona. In case you’d like to see it, or you’d like to subscribe, here’s the link:

https://masksonaplane.com/

Gimmick positioning

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The Schmo and The Pro is a series of YouTube video interviews.

The Pro in this case is a professional mixed martial artist, usually signed to the UFC.

The Schmo is the interviewer. He’s a youngish guy, wearing BluBlocker sunglasses… dressed in a patterned Hugh Hefner-style blazer…. and sporting a Zangief haircut.

When the Schmo asks his well-researched and reasonable questions, he bares his teeth. He twists his face out of shape. He makes claw-hand gestures.

It’s an example of gimmick positioning. In other words, a Mickey Mouse coat hanger to hang your product/service/hat off.

Stupid right? Why would anyone want to humiliate themselves by hiding behind a gimmick?

Well, how about a million dollars:

Copywriter Will Ward recently turned me on to the story of Blue Kirby. It’s some anonymous guy’s Twitter handle.

All summer long, Blue Kirby posted memes related to a crypto project, creating a ton of hype.

A few months later, Blue Kirby cashed in on the hype and disappeared. Along with about a million dollars’ worth of ethereum in his digital pocket.

Now it’s possible this could have been done by just some guy using his real name, say, Jesse McAverage.

But my gut feeling is the Blue Kirby gimmick was instrumental in the attention this guy got… and the million dollar bubble he was able to create.

In case I have your attention now, maybe you’re wondering how somebody — not you, of course — might go about creating a gimmick for himself.

Well… I shared a few ideas about this with my Bejakomaniacs. That’s the name I’ve just coined for subscribers to my email newsletter, following the example of Hulk Hogan. If you too would like to be in the rank of Bejakomaniacs, so you get all my positioning ideas, here’s where to go.

Hard-work positioning

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Three quick positioning stories for good night:

In 1960, Crest toothpaste had a 10% share of the market.

Not bad, but not great either. After all, Crest at that time was the only toothpaste with fluoride, which helped prevent cavities. But nobody cared, or nobody believed Procter & Gamble.

So P&G approached the American Dental Association. They showed the dentists a bunch of science. Crest was suddenly “the only toothpaste with the endorsement of the ADA.”
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​​Within two years, sales of Crest tripled. And Crest became the no. 1 toothpaste brand in The Land of The Fruit Stripe Gum.

Story two I won’t tell in detail. Because if you’ve been in marketing for a bit, you’ve probably heard how Tom Monaghan used smart positioning to create a billion-dollar brand out of a bad product.

The bad product was a low-quality pizza. The smart positioning was to say, “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free.” The brand was Domino’s.

Third and final story, also about pizza:

John Schnatter started out making pizza in an oversized closet. The pizza was good and John’s chain grew to 1000 locations across the country. But you ain’t seen nothing yet…

Because in a meeting with positioning guru Jack Trout, Schnatter mentioned offhandedly how he used Dino’s sauce.

“Dino’s sauce?” asked Trout. “But Dino only sells to mom-and-pop shops. He doesn’t sell to chains.”

Trout called up the Dino in question to confirm. It was true.

So Trout said, that’s your story. Papa John’s new positioning became, “Better ingredients, better pizza.” The company grew five-fold in the years following the positioning change.

There’s a common positioning strategy hidden in each of those stories. You probably see it. But in case you don’t, then you might like to get on my daily email newsletter. That’s where I share these kinds of stories — but I also spell out the hard-work lessons hidden within.

Blackjack positioning

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Al Ries and Jack Trout invented the term positioning. They then wrote a book with that title. In it, they say positioning is a hook in your prospect’s brain from which you can hang your product.

Fine. That’s once you’ve got an established position.

But how do you get that hook in your prospect’s brain? Throwing a clothes hanger at somebody’s head will only make it bounce off.

What you need instead is a spear. Something with a very small, very sharp point, which can pierce your prospect’s thick defenses (his skull) and lodge in the soft gray matter inside.

When people talk about positioning, they often talk about taking control of a part of the market. “We want to be the Apple of dog nail clippers.” Meaning, we only want a sliver of that market that’s willing to spend like crazy.

That’s one way to do positioning.

This is the flip side. Instead of thinking about cutting down your market… think about cutting down your product and its functionality.

Once upon a time, Perry Marshall was an experienced and successful online marketer. But that’s a floppy, blunt object, incapable of piercing any skull.

So Perry dropped all his copywriting knowledge… funnel building knowledge… positioning knowledge… and became “The AdWords Guy.” At least to people who had never heard of him before. His business exploded, way beyond his previous success.

Because it can be easier to sell a fragment of the thing rather than the whole. At the same price. Or even for more.

Many people rebel at this. No wonder. Our minds work additively. If you have A plus B plus C, then that’s at least as much as A alone, right?

Not in positioning.

Positioning math is more like blackjack. You know how the game goes. You keep getting cards, trying to get as close as possible to 21. But if you ever go over, you’re BUST. You lose.

Same thing with positioning. Keep adding ideas to your position, and you’re BUST. You lose. And you don’t need to go over 21 ideas either.

So swallow your pride — or fight your client’s pride. The dealer will offer to deal you more cards. Wave him off. One, sharp, deadly idea. No more.

And now a confession:

I used to have a daily email newsletter on copywriting, marketing, and persuasion. No more. From now on, it’s a newsletter on positioning. For today only. Click here to subscribe.

Challenging the “easy” norm in direct response marketing

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“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
— Apocryphal Ernest Shackleton ad

I had a miserable hike up a mountain yesterday.

Right at the start, I had to scramble up steep boulders. I was soon out of breath. Then the wind picked up, and whipped my ears until my head hurt. Then the fog rolled in, and it got cold and damp. Large frost crystals appeared on the occasional plants. And yet I, along with a growing mass of other people around me, trudged up in silence to the top of the mountain.

At the top, all that waited for me was a tiny and steamy hut, where they served hot tea. It was great, and totally worth it.

My point being:

A good number of human beings want a chance to prove themselves, to test their strength, even to suffer in order to achieve some goal.

And yet direct response marketing is all about making things easy and push-button, and appealing to the greedy sloth in people.

Is there space for a little noble sado-masochism in the slothful world of marketing?

Maybe.

​​I remember reading how marketer Sean D’Souza accidentally made his article-writing course much harder than he first intended it to be. I forget the details, but he mistakenly told his course attendants to write much more, in a much shorter period of time, than what was reasonable.

People taking the course suffered… lost sleep… got tense and nervous.

​​And when it was all over, they raved about the course, and became evangelists for it. Sean now has a waiting list for the course, which he markets as being famously difficult.

Direct marketing industry norms say that you have to provide easier, cheaper, faster solutions. But as marketer Dan Kennedy says, norms reinforce average.

​​So maybe, if you are looking for a market position that gets you above-average results, then promising your clients and customers struggle, expense, and many weeks and months of it, well, maybe it’s not a crazy idea to try.

Speaking of which:

Men (and women) wanted to subscribe to my daily email newsletter. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours spent reading the emails I send each day. Marketing lessons doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. If interested, apply here.

Why don’t people like salesmen?

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I was walking through the streets of an Eastern European capital this morning, when I heard a pleasant melody.

Keep in mind today is Saturday, and this morning at 9:51am there was practically nobody out and about.

But among some sycamores in the center, I heard an accordion playing. An old man had taken a bench by himself in an otherwise empty park, and was playing a nostalgic tune. He wasn’t playing for money. Just for himself.

I found this very pleasing. Better to sit outside in a warm and sunny park than to play your accordion in a tiny apartment with the neighbors banging on the wall to get you to quit.

But here’s the dark thought that occurred to me:

It wouldn’t be so quaint if the guy were playing for money. Then it would be desperate. Right? ​​Sitting in abandoned park, while everyone else is having breakfast at home, playing an accordion in the hope somebody will pass by and like your squeezing and buttoning enough to drop a few coins in your leather case. It’s like a scene from some 1950s Italian melodrama.

So what’s the moral of this story?

I’m not sure. But I think it has something to do with how people see you if you are in the position of selling yourself or your services, and in particular, of appearing needy.

Because selling something and appearing needy are not the same. But for many people and in many cases, they seem identical. That’s why salesmen are often so unpopular.

But you can get rid of the neediness and the stigma of salesmanship, while still continuing to sell.

There are lots of ways to get to this desirable place. The easiest in my opinion is to introduce standards — who you sell to, what you sell, how much you charge — and to not deviate from that. Suddenly the aura of desperation lifts from you, even if you could use a few extra coins in your leather accordion case.

For more tips for selling yourself and your services, you might like my daily email newsletter. It’s free. It’s for freelancers, copywriters, and business owners. And you can sign up for it here.

Sweet inconsistency in copywriting education

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“The most important thing — you can know every copywriting technique in the book, you can read every book — the most important thing is to understand your audience.”
– Parris Lampropoulos

At the start of this year, I got a job to rewrite a VSL for an upsell of a successful offer.

A bit of background:

The offer was in the real estate investing space. It basically showed newbie investors how to get their leads for free using a secret resource.

​​Once people bought the frontend offer, they were shown the upsell. The upsell was about how to hire virtual assistants to automate much of the work involved in the frontend offer… so you can make more money in less time.

The question was how to position this upsell VSL.

My copywriting coach at the time said something like, “This training is the quickest way to become a millionaire real estate investor.”

That might be true. But my feeling was, for this audience, it was not believable. Most of these people had never even completed their first deal. Lots of them were retirees, or people who just wanted to quit their crap jobs and spend more time at home.

If these folks heard “You can be a millionaire,” my gut feeling was they would say, “No, that’s not me.”

And so I wrote that VSL around the promise of, “Get your first deal faster by doing less.” And that positioning turned out to be a winner. It beat out the control by 50%.

Here’s why I bring up this story from my client annals:

Copywriting wisdom is full of sweet inconsistency. Many top copywriters will tell you to make the biggest promise you can — and they will show you million-dollar ads to back up their case. Here’s a famous one from John Carlton:

“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks And Slices… And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight”

But then you have other top copywriters, who will tell you the opposite — to make modest but believable promises. They will also show you successful ads to back up their case. Here’s one from Gary Bencivenga:

“Get Rich Slowly”

So who’s right? The “biggers” or the “modests”?

Neither, of course. Instead, it’s Parris who’s right.

As he says in the quote above, you’ve got to know your audience. Some audiences will believe any promise, so the larger it is, the better for you. Other audiences won’t. So make the biggest promise you can — as long as you’re sure your audience will find it believable.

Want to get better at copywriting slowly? I have a daily email newsletter where I share more information like this. You can sign up here.

People will pay to see someone shut your mouth

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Back when I was sexually illiterate — and by that I mean, back when it took me a minimum of two months of “hanging out” to maybe take a girl to bed — well, back then, I knew a guy named James.

James and I spent enough time together that I began to notice an uncomfortable thing he always did.

In any group of people, assuming there were any girls around, James always made some offhand sexual comment. Perhaps a fragment of a bizarre story that happened to him between the sheets. Or how he didn’t have a lot of time to cheat on his girlfriend before she came back from vacation. Or just about some impressive breasts that were passing by.

Like I said, I always found these comments uncomfortable. Tacky. Unnecessary. Why would James say these things?

Well, I now know. But this isn’t a pickup newsletter. Instead, it’s a marketing newsletter, so let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, personal branding.

Yesterday, I watched an eye-opening video on YouTube. It’s called Villains in Wrestling: The Art of Making People Hate You.

The video is great. Fun. Full of detail and story.

And it tells you the exact steps these TV entertainers take to become hated. And course, why they do it. In the words of Gorgeous George, the first TV wrestling heel and somebody who influenced Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and Bob Dylan:

“People will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”

Gorgeous George was a star on par with the biggest entertainers of his era, including Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. He was paid obscene amounts of money, and he single-handedly made television into the entertainment medium it is today.

And that’s the connection to my story with James above. James had a pretty girlfriend, and from what I saw, plenty of quick success with random other girls on the side.

Fact is, there are proven ways to take girls to bed quickly, which have nothing to do with making more money or having six-pack abs.

Likewise, there are proven ways to grow a personal brand people will pay for, which have nothing to do with giving away more value or being helpful and friendly.

Maybe these ways make you uncomfortable. Maybe you’re all about expanding your comfort zone… but not if it means being hated or being tacky.

Your choice. But the knowledge is out there. And, speaking personally, that YouTube video on wrestling villains is worth a watch.

One last point:

I write a daily email newsletter. But it’s exclusive and therefore it’s not for you. For everybody else, the link to sign up is here.

Being authentic is overrated

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In 1976, David Bowie got accused of supporting fascism. How could anybody say that of Bowie?

After all, a few years earlier, Bowie claimed he was gay. Then he was an alien. Then he became one of the few white singers to perform on Soul Train.

This certainly doesn’t sound like your typical fascist. Why would anybody think different? Well, there is the following quote:

“I believe very strongly in fascism,” Bowie said in a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. “Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”

People are always telling you, be authentic, be authentic. That’s how you will connect to others. Share your geeky stories. Be vulnerable. Be true to yourself.

And yet there’s David Bowie, who became a huge star by striving to be plastic, artificial, and impossible to pin down. He made up stuff and he lied for his own amusement and profit. He provoked and played the media. Bowie again:

“The only thing that shocks now is an extreme. Like me running my mouth off, jacking myself off. Unless you do that, nobody will pay attention to you. Not for long. You have to hit them on the head.”

And it’s not just Bowie or his rock star spawn like Madonna and Lady Gaga who get away with this. Look at the world of online marketing.

​​Ben Settle has admitted he consciously plays up his crotchety persona online. ​​Matt Stone has an oversexed alter ego he writes under, named Buck Flogging. The greatest copywriter of all time, Ross Manly, is not even a real person.

Fact is, authenticity is overrated. It’s much better to be entertaining, or at least interesting. If you are boring or unpleasant by nature, there’s no need to push that pollution out into the world.

​​Rather than being consistent with your “authentic self,” assume a new, more exciting viewpoint and unflinchingly defend it — for as long as you find it amusing or valuable to do so. ​​As Bowie put it:

“The only way I can be effective as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view. […] Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Email newsletter. I have one. Every day I write an email and share ideas that are not consistent with each other. But you might find it interesting anyhow. It’s available here.

The hottest girl on an empty beach and other ways to sidestep competition

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I went for a walk this morning next to the sea, and I saw the most amazing girl.

Let me set this up by saying the tourist season hasn’t started yet. The town I’m in is empty except for the locals. There were a few people walking dogs in the morning, but there was nobody, absolutely nobody, on the beach.

Except her.

The early morning sun lit her up from the side. She was in a bikini, standing in the water up to her ankles. She seemed to be testing out the temperature and questioning her resolve to dive in.

I walked by, spellbound. A man coming towards me seemed equally absorbed — he was staring and his jaw was hanging open.

Now if you asked me what this girl looked like, I’d have to say she was between 15 and 35 years of age. She had hair on her head. She was not visibly obese.

Beyond that, I can’t say much. For one thing, I couldn’t see her all that well. For another, I was so blinded by the fact that she was the one and only girl for a mile up and down the beach, and probably, in the entire town.

The point of this is the value of being in a marketplace of one.

Of course, one way to be in that lucky position is to find a group of people who aren’t being served by anybody else — the equivalent of an empty beach town before the season starts. That definitely works, but there might be drawbacks. There’s a good chance your prospects will be slack-jawed oglers. And there will be inevitable competition as the season heats up.

But there’s an alternative. It allows you to create a marketplace of one for yourself, even in the face of ostensible “competition.”

I’ve talked about this already a few times. It’s a trick known as helping your prospects experience a moment of insight.

There’s a lot more to be said about this topic. So I won’t do that here. But I am putting together a book about it. If you want to get notified when it comes out, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.