Problem Mechanism

Exploiting the disorder spectrum for marketing mischief

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About ten years ago, Dean Burnett went on TV and invented a new psychological disorder.

The background of the story is this:

Some English TV channel was making a documentary about personality quirks. So they invited Burnett to say something, since he is a neuroscientist with a diploma to prove it. At the end of the segment, they asked if Burnett had any personality quirks of his own.

Burnett was stumped. He had nothing to report really. But he didn’t want to disappoint under the glaring lights of a TV studio.

So he told a personal story about baking a potato, and he turned it into a condition.

Burnett was once baking a potato in the oven. He sat in the kitchen, reading a book, occasionally checking the potato. It looked so lonely, Burnett thought, all alone in the large oven. So he popped open the oven door and threw in another potato to keep the first fella company.

Back in the TV studio, Burnett concluded:

“I only found out later I’ve got what’s known as lonely potato syndrome.”

It was meant as a joke, or something like it. But it took on a life of its own. A crew member in the studio took Burnett aside later. “I might be suffering from lonely potato, too.” The show producer confided the same. Burnett says that now, years later, he still hears of people who feel afflicted by this condition.

In case I’m not making it clear, these people are serious. And they are concerned, or at least intrigued.

And here’s where I want to tell you my idea of a disorder spectrum:

On the one extreme of this spectrum, you’ve got genuine insights.

Some smart and caring person spots that a bunch of symptoms tend to go together. This gives hope for a common cause to it all, and maybe a common treatment. So this smart and caring person gives it a name — attention deficit disorder, shiny object syndrome — and puts it out into the world for people to be aware of.

But then there’s the other side of the spectrum. It’s something I heard marketer Will Ward speculate on a few days ago. It’s where you name a new disorder or syndrome, with no insight, research, or value to back it up.

When Will brought up this idea, I didn’t think it had legs. Not without some kind of real substance. But the Dave Burnett story changed my mind. It seems a new name, along with a bit of authority, is all you need to create a disorder out of thin air.

So where do you take this?

That’s for you to decide. Maybe you can just create a harmless identity for your followers. But it certainly seems like this could open the door to marketing mischief. At least in the hands of the right person, suffering from “uncertain identity” disorder.

Don’t know about uncertain identity disorder? It’s something I discuss in more detail in my email newsletter. But you’ll have to sign up to find out more. Here’s where to do that.

From good-looking and talented to star in one easy step

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In 1969, Robert Redford was a good-looking, talented, accomplished actor. But he was not an A-list celebrity. “Throw a stick at Malibu,” said a Hollywood insider, “and you’ll hit six of him.”

And yet, after a single movie (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Redford became the biggest star in Hollywood — not just for 1969, but for the entire coming decade.

In 2009 (or thereabouts), Rich Schefren was a successful and respected online entrepreneur and business coach. But he was not the no. 1 name in the Internet marketing space. He was certainly not getting mainstream attention.

And yet, after writing a single 40-page report (The Internet Business Manifesto), Schefren became a star in his field. Millions of downloads of his report followed, along with hundreds of new clients, and even the attention of big brands like Verizon.

My point is that a single piece of work can make you a breakout success. It can transform you from somebody who is skilled, prepared, and talented… into a star in your industry.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recipe for you to become an A-list Hollywood celebrity.

I do have a good idea of how Rich achieved such big success with his Internet Business Manifesto. He’s been open with his strategies, and if you start following him online and going through all the content he’s publishing (a good use of your time), you’ll get the idea too.

However, if for some reason you don’t have time… or you hate the idea of following Rich Schefren… you’ll find the gist of Rich’s strategy in Commandment 7 of my upcoming book on valuable ideas handed down by A-list copywriters.

(Rich, by the way, is not an A-list copywriter. He’s just a very successful marketer, and somebody I’m using to illustrate a copywriting technique, which works just as well in the Internet Business Manifesto as it does in a cold traffic sales letter.)

Anyways, I’m making good progress with this little book, and it should be out by the end of this month. If you want to get notified when my book comes out, you can sign up for my daily email 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.”

Teaching emails that make sales

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I talked to my aunt last night. She’s a kindergarten teacher, and she mentioned that she’s going back to work corralling screaming 5-year-olds.

I haven’t been following the local corona news, so this was a surprise to me.

Sure enough, starting next week, all kids up to grade 4 will be back in classrooms throughout Croatia. “Enough is enough,” frustrated parents must have been saying, and the government eventually caved in.

But here’s the thing that got me wondering:

If spending each day with your kids at home gets tiring for the majority of parents… can you imagine how tiring a teacher’s job must be?

Not one kid… not two… but 25 or more? And not for the next few years until your kids become more independent… but for life, each year the same thing?

And on top of this, teachers don’t even get paid well.

I think it was Matt Furey who first brought this fact up in connection with marketing. He used the fact that teachers don’t make any money to warn against over-teaching in your emails.

Instead, Matt’s advice was to motivate, inspire, and entertain.

I can definitely agree with this. But I would add that teaching can work and it can work well.

The key though is to educate your prospect about his problem, and the specific nuances of why he hasn’t been able to solve it so far.

In other words, don’t tell your prospect HOW to solve his problem… tell him WHY he hasn’t been able to solve it until now.

And then of course, you still have to do some selling. But if you’ve done the teaching bit right… the selling should be easy, because your solution will fit like a hand into your prospect’s problem glove.

I realize I’m contradicting my own advice with the past few sentences. That’s why this email won’t make any money. Not a noble thing, if you ask me. Hopefully, you will be smarter and more disciplined about spilling your teaching — and doing some selling – in your own emails.

Send the juices rushing back to your prospect’s manhood with a new diagnosis

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“You start with the pills, next thing you know you got implants with pumps. I think a hard-on should be gotten legitimately or not at all.”

That’s a bit of dialogue from 1999’s Analyze This.

Mafia boss Paul Vitti, played by Robert De Niro, is having problems. Hard-on failures are a part of it.

So he barges into the office of Dr. Ben Sobel, a New York shrink, played by Billy Crystal.

Vitti doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. All he knows is he gets choked up all the time, he cries without reason, he’s uncomfortable hanging out with the guys he’s grown up with. And then there’s the hard-on issue.

“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” Dr. Sobel asks him.

“You mean like seeing your best friend murdered?” Vitti shoots back. “Yeah, I got stress.”

Dr. Sobel shrugs his shoulders and makes his first-level diagnosis: It’s probably the stress that’s causing all of Vitti’s symptoms.

Vitti visibly brightens at this. He smiles and points his finger at Dr. Sobel.

“You… YOU… you’re very good, doc,” he says. “You’re right on the money. I can feel the juices rushing back to my manhood as we speak.”

I rewatched this movie recently. It’s not very good overall, but I watched it specifically for this scene, because it’s a great (if caricatured) illustration of the power of making a new diagnosis.

And of course this goes for marketing too:

Your prospect out there has vague or intractable problems. All he knows is he doesn’t feel right. The symptoms he can point to are not something he understands, or can fix himself.

And then you, as the marketer, kindly sit him down on your couch, and you give him a diagnosis he’s never heard before:

“You’re under stress.”

Or…

“You’re a bright-shiny-object addict.”

Or…

“You have hypothyroidism.”

Once you make your new diagnosis, your prospect sees the fog lifted from before his eyes. For that moment at least, he lights up, and he thinks his problem has been solved, or at least can be solved. He feels the juices flowing back to his manhood… or womanhood.

More importantly, in that moment, he think you, YOU, are very good. And he’s willing to follow your lead, even as you explain how your product or service naturally addresses the underlying cause of his problems.

Of course, in Analyze This, the true underlying cause of Vitti’s problems turned out to be more complex than simple stress.

The same will probably happen in your prospect’s life. But if you do an honest enough job of delivering the diagnosis for the surface-level symptoms… and if your recommendation based on that diagnosis isn’t too self-serving… then your patient, I mean prospect, will still listen to you when you offer to solve the deeper problems in his life.