Positioning

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.

Unique, slightly gross positioning through “whale fall”

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A whale is denser than water. When a whale dies and stops breathing, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. It then forms something called a “whale fall.”

A bunch of shrimps, crabs, and sea cucumbers suddenly appear. Some of these creatures specialize in eating the whale’s soft tissues. Some suck the fat out of whale bones. Others colonize the whale skeleton. In short, a whale fall creates a whole new ecosystem, which can last for many years.

Do you think this could be a way to create a business?

I once read Craigslist was basically an Internet whale that sank to the bottom. When it did, a bunch of creatures crawled out and started feeding off its carcass. So Airbnb scarfed up the vacation rentals. Indeed.com sucked in the job listings. Tinder ate the “casual encounters” section.

Maybe that’s a way for you too to start a business right now. Today’s whales like Facebook and Google are becoming less popular. Many of their services don’t work well. Maybe you can peel one off, and simply do a better job.

Or if you want personal positioning, why not turn your hungry eyes toward a whale influencer?

Guys like Jay Abraham or Frank Kern have been around for a long time. Over the years, they’ve had lots of different angles and ideas. They can’t focus on all of them. So you could pick one that appeals to your appetites, chomp into it, and make it into a steady stream of nourishment.

Maybe this whale fall discussion is getting a little gross. But the basic idea is sound. Few things are new in the world. We mostly take what came before us, and recycle it to new purposes. So go forth and prosper, you ambitious sea cucumber, you.

Are you still here? I don’t have any more whale facts for today. But if you want more marketing and business ideas, click here and subscribe to my daily newsletter.

Positioning remarkable ideas against popular incumbents

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In 2005, Wired magazine published an article titled, “GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age.”

It was about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This was a productivity system, which Allen first described in a 2001 book of the same name.

The basic premise of GTD was that we are all flooded with more and more distractions and tasks. The old ways of dealing with all this work, such as todo lists or goal-setting, are not enough.

As the Wired article describes, a few frustrated knowledge workers found Allen’s book. They identified themselves with the problems he described. And they adopted and promoted the GTD system with evangelical zeal.

By 2005, GTD had become a kind of cult. But this was still not the high point of Allen’s success. Interest in GTD kept building and spreading in all parts of American society for the rest of the 2000s.

Then, in 2012, a guy named Cal Newport wrote a post on his Study Hacks blog. The title was “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.”

The gist of Newport’s post was that GTD was great — if you’re a secretary or a mid-tier manager. But if you do any kind of creative, thought-intensive work, GTD will fail. In Newport’s words:

“Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires […] a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.”

Newport came out with his own solution to the problem behind GTD. He called it “deep work.”

Interest in deep work rose as interest in GTD declined. According to Google Trends, the two crossed paths, one on the way up, the other on the way down, in 2014. Today, if you check on Amazon, you will find Deep Work has knowledge workers’ attention, not GTD.

I don’t think Cal Newport did this consciously, but he hit upon an ideal way to position Deep Work. And that was in contrast to an existing, popular solution.

This is something smart marketers have been doing for years. I first heard Rich Schefren talk about this. Rich says this is one way he was able to get millions of leads and thousands of high-paying customers.

Rich’s advice is to go out into the marketplace and find a successful offer. Then, figure out how to make that offer a part of the problem — rather than a part of the solution.

You can go out and do that now. And you might have the same success as Rich Schefren or Cal Newport.

But here’s a nuanced point that might help you out even more.

After Cal Newport wrote his anti-GTD blog post, he got over 100 comments on the post. Those comments were very divided. A few said, “You might just be right.” But many more said, “You don’t understand GTD, or you’re not using it correctly.”

This corresponds to the Google Trends info. By 2012, interest in GTD had peaked. But overall, GTD was still very popular.

So if you want to position your product against an incumbent, that’s the moment to strike. Not when the incumbent is at the peak of popularity… but also, not when most people have already moved on. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“To truth only a brief celebration is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”

One extra step that conjures sales out of thin air

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Three quick stories today about something valuable and important:

The first story is from the Dan Kennedy talk I shared a few days ago.

Dan needed a new closet. A closet salesman gave Dan a rundown of the features and benefits of the available closets.

But Dan didn’t buy. He had the money and he needed the closet, but he wasn’t moved. “It didn’t align with my interests,” he said.

At the same time, Dan’s wedding anniversary was coming up. So Dan says… the closet salesman should have asked about upcoming special occasions. He could have easily sold Dan the new closet as the perfect anniversary present. (Apparently, Mrs. Kennedy loves a good closet, and it would have been convenient for Dan.)

The second story I heard Rich Schefren tell on a Zoom call last week. The interviewer brought up how some businesses are suffering during lockdown. For example, Airbnbs.

At which point, Rich jumped in to say his wife’s Airbnbs  have been thriving. She’s been renting out her largish Airbnb houses to apartment dwellers — from the same town. These folks want more space during quarantine to avoid a 2020 re-enactment of The Shining.

The third story is also from last week and comes from my work with one of my clients. They sell a bunch of ecomm products to a large email list. One of these products are wool balls that are supposed to replace dryer sheets.

The first email was four weeks ago. We sold the wool balls as a reusable, money-saving dryer sheet alternative. That email did ok.

Then last week, we sent out a second email to sell the same wool balls. On average, the second time we run the same offer only does about 60% as well as the first one.

Not this time. This time, the second email did as well as the first email. That’s because instead of leading with dryer sheets, it lead with acne. Didn’t you know? Acne is caused by clogged pores, which happens when you get wax all over your face, like from the pillow case you dry with dryer sheets.

The point of all these stories is that you can conjure up sales out of thin air. Sometimes many such sales. All you have to do is get one thing right. And that one thing is…

​Positioning. Selling what people want… rather than what you have.

But here’s a warning. Positioning requires effort. One whole extra step, beyond what everybody else is doing. Or in Rich Schefren’s words:

“As the marketer, you have to connect the dots for people. You can’t sit on the sidelines hoping that someone else will do it.”

Sharing news about new in five minutes or less

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There are two things I want to share with you today. One is news, the other is new. Let’s start with news:

I read an article today about how the media failed to predict the corona situation — and that’s why their initial reporting was so complacent.

To which I made the Scooby Doo “huh?” noise. Because from what I’ve seen over the years, the media doesn’t do prediction, at least not seriously. Instead, the media reports on the status quo.

Before the corona situation exploded, the status quo was complacency. Now, the status quo is panic, and the media is reporting accordingly. When the pandemic begins to wane and it’s time for things to go back to normal, the media message will likely be obliviousness that anything bad ever happened.

Which brings up this distinction between news and new. I first heard it from computer scientist Alan Kay. Says Alan,

“News is stuff that’s incremental to what we already know. This is why you can tell the news in five minutes. ‘Hey, a train just crashed.’ We all know what that means. […] New is by definition not like what we already know. There’s no news about new. There’s nothing you can tell somebody in five minutes about what new is.”

So I got two takeaways for you:

First, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do a good job predicting the future. Perhaps, among enough people, a few just get lucky.

But, if it is possible, then like Alan Kay says above, it’s unlikely you’ll find the future on the evening news, on Facebook, or on Vox.

But really, we’re here to talk about marketing.

So the other thing I want to tell you is how this news vs. new business can make you money. This is something I heard from marketer Todd Brown.

I didn’t know who Todd Brown was until recently. Apparently, he’s a big name in the IM space, and he’s worked with Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, and Rich Schefren.

Todd’s message was that, whenever you’re positioning a new offer, you should never present it as an incremental improvement over the status quo (ie. news). Instead, always look for a way to present your offer as something entirely new and different — a marketplace of one.

“But hold on,” you might say. “Your offer should be something new… and yet there is no way to share news about new. So how do you convince prospects to buy in?”

That’s a good question. And it’s something I’m trying to answer in my new book on the use of insight in marketing. I’m making good progress on this book, and I hope to finish it in the next six to seven years (just kidding, hopefully another month or so).

If you’d like to get notified when it comes out, sign up for my daily email newsletter and you will get more emails from me about it.

Averting the condom catastrophe

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A few months back, I was driving on the highway when I realized I’d seen the same billboard over and over. I forget exactly what it said, but it was along the lines of,

“It’s time for great HEX”

It turns out Hex is a new brand of condoms. They claim to be revolutionary and better than the status quo.

Now, maybe Hex condoms really are so good that they will spread by virtue of the product quality alone. That’s their best shot, because their marketing sucks.

Condoms suck in general, and you’ve already got a bunch of brands out there. Trojan and Durex are the default, depending on where you live. Then there’s Magnum for the talented guys, as well as a bunch of alternate no-name brands you might pick up in a convenience store at 2am.

So there’s no place for Hex — unless they find one for themselves through clever positioning.

Maybe they could try to be the “Apple of condoms”… or the condom what women prefer… or the condom for the climate-conscious. But all those ideas are contrived. The real place to look for positioning is in the market.

And if you do any reading about the, ahem, male performance market, which I’ve done plenty of, you will see that most men do not complain that their condoms aren’t classy enough… or that they turn women off… or that seagulls are choking on runaway rubbers.

But there is something that many men do complain about.

Fact is, there’s a significant group of men who simply lose their erection once the condom comes on.

So maybe Hex could target the guys with poor blood flow. “Hex, the condom for pre-diabetics and others who want to avert the condom catastrophe.” Hex could even copy one of the most successful positioning campaigns of all time and say,

“Hex is only no. 4 in condoms. So why go with us? We make you harder.”

Now that’s a campaign I’d like to see as I’m driving on the highway next summer. Maybe I’ll write to the CEO of LELO, the company that produces Hex, and suggest it.

The fact is, long gone are the days when you could simply say, “New product! Why don’t you try it?”

If you are promoting something, you need a new mechanism into the mind. And often, that’s not found in the product itself. Keep this idea in your own mind, and you’ll have a much better shot at success, whether you’re promoting your own condom brand or something less shocking.

Get yer own Falkor

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One of my favorite books as a kid, and even now, is The Neverending Story.

If you’ve seen the Hollywood movie that was made from the book, you might know there’s a boy in there named Atreyu.

Atreyu lives in the great land of Fantastica, and he has to go on a quest all around the borders of this immense kingdom.

How’s a little boy gonna be able to cover these vast distances?

No problem. Atreyu hitches a ride on the back of Falkor, a benevolent, furry, white “luckdragon” who happens to fly at great speeds.

Now I think this is a good image to keep in mind in your own life as well.

Because as much as I like The Neverending Story, these days I like another book even better.

It’s called Positioning, and it’s written by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Positioning is all about how to market products, and how to find a mental slot for them in your customer’s mind.

But one part of the book also talks about positioning yourself, and achieving personal success. And it’s here that Ries and Trout make a throwaway comment that I found very meaningful:

“The truth is the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.”

Like I said, I found this very significant.

Maybe because my tendency is to try to always do everything by myself. It’s very natural to me. But it’s also very slow and ineffective.

So if you too have similar tendencies, then maybe you’ll get some value out of the Ries and Trout quote above.

And maybe you’ll consider finding yourself a horse to ride. Or even your own Falkor.

The counterintuitive secret of effective positioning

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Today, I ate a handful of jujubes.

These are little fruits, kind of like dates. I grabbed some from a bowl and as I went to wash them, one jujube fell, hit my foot, and rolled off under the counter.

“No matter,” I said to myself, “I’ll get it in a second.”

A second later, I looked under the counter. The jujube wasn’t there.

I kept looking. Nothing.

I reached under the counter to see if it was there but I couldn’t see it. Nothing.

I changed positions to see if I could see it better from a different perspective. Nothing.

Maybe you know this maddening.

W​​hen you think you know where to look for something, but it’s not there.

Maybe it’s your keys, which should be at the bottom of a bag… except they’re not.

Or somebody’s name, which almost certainly starts with the letter “A”… except no “A” names sound right.

Or maybe it’s even a marketing situation.

Such as, for example, deciding on how to position a product, a brand, or even a person.

Many business owners think they know where to look for such positioning intel.

After all, it seems very intuitive that the positioning for their products must be hidden somewhere in the product itself.

Similarly, the positioning for their personal business must be lying somewhere inside their own person.

So they keep looking and looking…

And even though they are sure they are looking in the right place, they never find the positioning answer they’ve been searching for.

Why is that?

Simple. Because the positioning they are searching for won’t be found inside their product, or even inside themselves.

Instead, it’s found in a rather counter-intuitive place.

Maybe you know what I have in mind.

And if you want my help in searching in this counter-intuitive place, and helping you come up with a winning positioning strategy for your business, brand, or even person, then simply write me an email and we can talk.

Are you violating the basic rule of positioning?

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I’m still in Istanbul and I’m getting sick of the place.

Every restaurant, every bar, even every apartment I’ve stayed in, has a great view.

A view of the grey waters of the Bosporus… of the millions of lights that go on at dusk… of the dozens of monstrous-sized mosques that line the horizon.

Now of course, I’m being a little facetious.

I like a great view just like your average gadabout.

But the fact that EVERY place in Istanbul has a view actually complicates my job of being a tourist.

Because deep down, I keep remembering something that a frequent traveling partner of mine taught me:

“I won’t eat in that restaurant,” he would say, “because it has a good view. A restaurant can either sell the view or the food, but not both.”

That might sound simplistic, but it’s the basic way the human mind works.

At least if you believe one of the most influential marketing books of all time, Positioning, written by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

There’s a lot in this book about how companies, brands, and even individuals can carve out a position for themselves in a crowded market.

But the basic image that Ries and Trout give is simple:

Your position is like a hook in the customer’s mind that you hang your product on.

And if you try to hang multiple things from that hook, or try to hang your product from multiple hooks, that’s when trouble starts.

In other words, you want to position your restaurant as either having good food…

Or a good view…

But not both, because your customers’ brains simply won’t follow you.

And the same thing holds if you’re not in the restaurant business — but in any other business.

Of course, you can offer, say, great prices as well as a dedicated service.

But put just one of those forward as your main position. And if Ries and Trout are right, you will create a position in the market that allows you to win customers more easily and keep them around for longer.