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Posted on Sun, 09/25/2011 - 01:30 PM by
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 Cover via Amazon It may be the greatest of all business cliches — you have to differentiate yourself. I’ve said it myself more than once. While it is certainly true… many businesses struggle with how to bring the idea to life. And even when a business believes they have achieved that level of uniqueness — their customers can’t see or describe the difference. Many marketing books push you to be different but very few tell you how. That’s what’s fascinating about Youngme Moon’s best selling book Different. (click here to buy it*) It was just released in paperback and I finally got around to reading it. The book’s basic premise is that we humans subscribe to a herd mentality and tend to categorize everything into little boxes. Which is originally unique is quickly copied and becomes the norm. So, if that’s how we are wired — how do we ever truly stand out from our competition? Moon offers three ways to disrupt this herding pattern. Reversal: The first way to be different is to use the “reversal” concept. Back when you hadn’t yet heard of Google, the online portal kingpin was Yahoo. Yahoo’s home page was crammed with news, stats, photos and links. If you wanted to compete with them — you’d most likely be trying to fit even more features on your homepage, not less. That’s how things were done. But Google decided to look at it in a new way. They completely redesigned the search engine experience for billions around the world by having nothing on the home page but the search box. They reversed the norm. Breakaway: What breakaway brands do better than anybody else is leverage this fact by asking you to replace one mental model with another. Kimberley-Clark created an entirely new marketplace by creating the “Pull-Up”. It’s a cross between underwear and a diaper. It’s still just a diaper put on a different way. But they completely remove the stigma of wearing diapers past the age two, and parents are now routinely keeping the kids in these “Pull-Ups” beyond the age of four. Hostile: This method takes some courage. It’s basically when a brand takes its most significant weakness and accents it. A hostile brand “doesn’t lay down the welcome mat, they lay down a gauntlet.” It isn’t marketing, it’s anti-marketing. Mini is the perfect example of this. It took it’s biggest possible wart, and made it even bigger. All of its advertising seems to say “it’s even smaller than you think.” In one famous example of this type of branding executed flawlessly, Mini put one of its cars on top of an SUV and drove it around a busy downtown core for all to see. Where you were used to seeing a ski rack, you saw an entire car. The book has plenty of examples to learn from and will definitely get you thinking about your organization in a new way. It’s well worth the read. *Yup, an affiliate link. Related posts: MORE NEWS FROM DREWS MARKETING MINUTEAre you falling behind when it comes to mobile?I think it is fascinating in a “I don’t get it” sort of way. We all know that mobile is where digital is headed. We’ve all repeated the “by 2015, the #1 way we will access the internet is through our smart phones” and yet… it seems like most people are lollygagging along when it comes to getting onto the mobile train. Going viral = out of your controlIt seems like one of the goals I hear more and more is… “and we want it to go viral.” I translate that to mean — we want a lot of people to see it. 9 Keys to Wicked Awesome Landing PagesNote from Drew: Every once in awhile I like to open up the blog to a guest with a depth of expertise that I think you’ll benefit from. Here’s Jason Well’s take on landing pages. What can you learn from a small town?Turns out, quite a bit. The whole concept of having a marketplace is blurry today. It used to be — you sold stuff to your neighbors because they were the only ones close enough to buy from you. But today the world is one “global small town” where all your customers can talk directly to e... What is the next step?That’s the question you should ask yourself as you create any marketing piece. ”What is the next step I want the prospect to take?” RELATED SMALL BUSINESS NEWSWhat If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRMI spend a lot of time talking to and about the stuff that we do to make it work now. So sometimes it’s a real treat to get to talk to someone that’s so far out ahead of most of us in their thinking that you pretty much just listen with your mouth open when they talk. (I would put my conversati... Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff?Next week is National Small Business Week in the United States and to help celebrate all things small business I’m holding a live webcast where, among other things, I’m going to give a number of lucky participants some awesome business tools like: A copy of Premise Landing Page Softwa... 5 Reasons Why Landing Pages Are a MustOnline marketers have used the term “landing page” for many years to describe a sales tactic focused on getting people to take one, specific action. Today, landing pages have simply become a required element in the marketing toolbox for every imaginable business, including local brick and mort... SBSM Flashback: May 2011For those of you who are new SBSM readers & subscribers, here’s a list of noteworthy posts you probably missed from one year ago. I try to put together a post like this each month to introduce new readers to old content that might be worth reading. Your ValueElectricity is free, but we pay energy companies to harness it. Water is free, but we pay for the privilege of filtering. Air is free, but we pay for the solution of conditioning it for summers in our homes. Natural gas is free, but we pay for the importance of safety in its use. Oil is free, but we... |
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