Al Ries

Marketing prediction: Welcome to the Age of Insight

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A year ago, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Business Prediction: Welcome to the Age of Aquarius”

In that email, I made the claim that the world has gone through three distinct ages of consumption.

The first was the Age of Stuff. That age was made up of straight-up consumerism — Cadillacs and and Frigidaires and Armani suits — which became dominant after WWII. It was about what you own.

The second consumption age was the Age of Experiences. It began around 1990, or at least that’s when I became aware of it. Amazing Thai food, swimming with the dolphins, a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite bar in Key West. It was about what you’ve done.

My claim was that the third age of consumption, in which we are now, is the Age of Transformation. It’s about who you would like to become. Crossfit, sex-reassignment surgery, Masterclass subscriptions.

Like I said, I sent that email a year ago. A year is a long time. I have been enlightened greatly in that time, and I want to share with you some of the things I have seen.

What I have seen is that, mirroring the world of production and consumption, there have been parallel shifts in the world of marketing and advertising.

What I have seen is that the world has gone through three distinct ages of marketing.

The first age was described by copywriter John E. Kennedy. Kennedy correctly divined that advertising is salesmanship in print. As a result, Kennedy gave birth to the Age of Promise:

“Let this Machine do your Washing Free”

The second marketing age was identified by a clever astrological duo, Al Ries and Jack Trout. According to their occult research, some fifty years after Kennedy, advertising had gotten to a point where promises were insufficient — there were just too many players in the market. As a result, we entered the Trout and Ries age, the Age of Positioning:

“Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us? We try harder.”

And now, if my calculations are right, we are now entering the third age.

It’s the Age of Insight.

Today, a hundred years after John E. Kennedy, it’s no longer enough to make a promise and build up desire.

Today, fifty years after Trout and Ries, it’s no longer enough to give people a mental hook to hang your name on.

Today, the smartest marketers — people like Rich Schefren, Travis Sago, and Stefan Georgi — are doing something different. They are using specific and subtle techniques to take the disgust with manipulation, the disappointment of previous purchases, the confusion and uncertainty and indifference that most of us feel on some level…

… and transform them into something new. Into something motivating. Into something contagious.

Into the feeling of insight.

Maybe you find that idea intriguing. Or maybe you find it confusing.

If so, don’t worry. You are in luck, or rather, you are in the right place at the right time.

I’ll be telling you more about insight over the coming two weeks.

Because, as you can probably guess, I’m promoting something. I’m promoting a series of live trainings, all about the Age of Insight. In these trainings, I will tell you how you can align yourself to this new age in such a way that you prosper and surpass those marketers who do not yet possess this esoteric knowledge.

The first of these live training calls will happen on December 1. So I will be talking the Age of Insight until the end of this month, when registration for this training will close.

If at any point you decide that this is an opportunity you do not want to miss, you can get the full details on my Age of Insight training, or even register for it, at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/aoi

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 capable 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 worth 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 will go BUST. You will 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.

Forming a marketing cavalry without money or influence

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One morning in late October of 2018, professor Samuel Abrams arrived to his office to find that pictures of his family, which he normally kept on his office door, had been torn down. In their place were dozens of notes stuck to the door and lying on the floor.

QUIT
QUIT QUIQUIT QUIT QUITITQUITQUIT
QUQUIT QUITTIT QUIT
QUIT

A few of the notes offered more detail:

“Our right to exist is not ‘idealogical,’ asshole”

“QUIT go teach somewhere else you racist asshat (maybe Charlottesville?)”

A few days earlier, Abrams had published an editorial in the New York Times, titled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” The editorial reported the results of his own research.
​
Among first-year college students, Abrams said, there was a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives. Among university professors, that ratio jumped to six-to-one. But all of that was dwarfed by the ratio of liberals to conservatives among university administration: 12-to-one.

This was incendiary enough to prompt an emergency student senate meeting at Abrams’s university. Abrams said the result of this meeting a declaration calling for him to be stripped of tenure and dismissed from the college.

I got on the spoor of this through an article in the Economist, which looked at the spread of wokeness from universities to the mainstream.

The Economist claimed it took a few key ingredients. The one that caught my sparrow eye was the role of university of administrators.

It turns university bureaucrats have been mushrooming in recent decades, outpacing both student and professor growth. For example, administrator numbers at the University of California, where I went to college, doubled since 2000.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you how to get other people to fight for you. One way of course is to have money and to use that to buy yourself an army. That’s what I talked about yesterday.

But if you don’t have money or power, well, you can still have an army. Or, rather, a cavalry.

Ideal recruits are to be found among newly arrived, low-grade influencers. People who have some power at the moment, but who are very insecure about their position and their future. Like university administrators.

If you can offer these people a new way to shore up and legitimize their position by championing you or your product or idea… well, they will do it, even if you don’t pay them.

“Uhhh… I really don’t get what the hell you’re talking about,” you say. “How exactly would I use this to get other people to promote me or to make money?”

Ok, let me give you a sketch that might help. It’s based on my vague memories of a story told to me by a friend who is active in the crypto space.

My friend was telling me there is some fraction of the crypto world, filled with new businesses and investors. Let’s call it Segment X. People in Segment X are invested in some new crypto approach, and they are flush with cash.

But they also have a ton of anxiety about where their sliver of the crypto market is going, and if any of them will be around in a year.

My friend had started a podcast around crypto. At the start, it didn’t have too much reach or audience.

But he occasionally turned the focus of his podcast to Segment X.

And as a result, all those people, and all their resources, latched onto his podcast and helped push it and promote it.

That’s basically what I’m telling you with all that wokeness stuff above. Find yourself a stable of nervy and twitching parvenus. And then get your saddle ready. Because, in the words of Al Ries and Jack Trout:

“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.”

For more horse-talk, you might like my daily email newsletter.

Blackjack positioning

by

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.

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.

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.

The positioning lesson of the involuntary Nazi salute

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A few days ago, I rewatched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

It’s dark and dry comedy set during the Cold War. Much of it happens in the War Room at the Pentagon.

The President and all his advisors are there, trying to prevent an accidentally triggered nuclear disaster that will wipe all life off the surface of the planet.

Among the President’s advisors, there is Dr. Strangelove himself. He’s a wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist who now works for the US government.

Dr. Strangelove is loyal to his new American overlords.

He tries to serve them well.

But there are things he cannot control.

Like his prosthetic right arm, which fights with him during the entire movie. And in the final climactic scene, while Strangelove is proposing a plan to preserve the United States, his mechanical arm springs up into a Nazi salute of its own will. It even tries to strangle the good doctor when he forces it to stop saluting.

Now, I’m sure this mechanical arm can be a metaphor for many things.

But the one that struck me was simply one of the main rules of positioning, straight out of the original book by Al Ries and Jack Trout. And that rule is:

“If you want to be successful in love or in business, you must appreciate the importance of getting into the mind first.”

In other words, the first cut is the deepest.

That’s true in political ideology…

In actual romance​…

And, as Ries and Trout say, in business as well.

Once you successfully occupy a good position in your customers’ minds, you are probably in for life (unless you really get careless). Even if your customers try to defect…

They own arm will (figuratively) spring up and choke them back into place.

That’s an enviable place to be in. ​​

So how do you get into your prospects’ minds first, so you can create this kind of loyalty?

Well, there are several, equally important ingredients.

And I’m afraid I can only help with one of them, and that’s good sales copy.

If that’s what you’re looking for, then here’s a good way to avoid a real crisis:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/