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.