Cool, fun, awesome, amazing, and other things you're not

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 31, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing | 4 comments

Marketing pet peeve of mine: someone who has to append the word cool (or its variants) to any marketing effort.

• Share this cool video!
• Tell your friends about this cool product!
• Try our fun new service!

Cool, in the sense of being popular, is a rigidly one-way label. Nothing you ever do is cool. Nothing you ever say is cool. Only other people can judge you to be cool, fun, awesome, amazing, trendy, hip, wicked, or some other adjective.

So why do so many marketers insist on using these terms in relation to their own products? I suspect it’s because they fear if they don’t try to set the initial tone of conversation about their product or service, the wisdom of the crowd will apply a very different label, like “same old crap” or boring, unoriginal, uninteresting, bland, or depressing.

So what’s a marketer to do? How do you define a product without resorting to slapping canned labels onto your products, services, content, etc.?

Here’s an easy thing to try: gather up a small cadre of evangelists, the people who love you and talk about you without any prompting on your part. These are the folks who retweet you all the time and are not on your payroll in any way, shape, or form. Chances are if you’re legitimately good at what you do, they’re your best customers, too. These folks love you, and they’re desperately hungry for more of anything you’ve got.

Take this strike team and give them sneak previews of whatever you’re trying to drive attention to. Give them exclusive access, early opportunities to test and give feedback, and then listen. Listen to the words they use. Listen to how they talk about whatever it is you’re launching. Ask to use their words, their testimonials, their everything when you go live with your product or service or whatever.

Doing this will accomplish three things. First, it will free your marketing department from having to try to define a product using tired old labels like cool and fun. Second, it will build ever increasing loyalty among your evangelists because they’ll get early access to everything. Third, if you listen and pay attention, your evangelists (if you give them permission to do so, and you should) will help to shoot down a horrific product launch before the general public sees it and lights you on fire.

If you’re really clever, your evangelists may even put a unique new spin on what you’ve created and help you to take that product, service, or content all the way to insanely great.

Now that’d be cool.

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Exoteric, esoteric, and surviving in the knowledge economy

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 29, 2010 in Awakening, Buddhism, Ninjutsu | 7 comments

There are fundamentally two types of secrets in the world.

Exoteric secrets are surface level secrets. They’re the kinds of secrets that are easily transmitted, easily learned, easily shared, and thus easily stolen or imitated. Examples of exoteric secrets are things like the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices or the formula for Coca-Cola. If the secret, the recipe, got out, there’s no practical way for these companies to ever put the genie back in the bottle.

Esoteric secrets are deep secrets. These are the kinds of secrets that require extensive training, knowledge, and experience to even be able to comprehend, much less make use of. Esoteric secrets include things like the process for building a nuclear weapon, which are so common you can find them online. The challenge for the non-nuclear physicists among us isn’t learning “the recipe” as much as it is having the means and the ability to make use of that knowledge. Another example is a black belt martial arts technique. You can show it to someone who’s not a black belt, but only the time, experience, and wisdom of a black belt will let someone execute it successfully.

If you, your product or service, or your company relies solely on an exoteric secret of any kind as your profit engine, you’re basically one step away from extinction at all times. If the secret gets out, it’s game over. There are countless companies out there that were either put out of business by a megalithic corporation or bought outright to leverage the exoteric secret that the company had.

The trick for long term survivability in a knowledge economy is building the esoteric secret. You can flaunt it in front of people all day and a sliver of a slice of a fraction of a percentage of your audience – including your competitors – will ever even grasp the secret, much less make use of it. This makes your company, your product, your service indispensable. There’s no way to imitate it successfully and no way to easily steal it.

What’s esoteric about the way you do business?

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How did I ever live without this?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 26, 2010 in Jedi mind tricks, Sales | 7 comments

Ever heard someone say that? How did I ever live without this? How did I ever do business without this? How did I ever make money without this? I’ve heard parents say that they never planned to have children, but now they couldn’t imagine their lives without them. I’ve heard people speak of products, of locations, of other people, of virtually everything and anything in the “how did life work without this” phrase.

So why, when we’re facing new possibilities, do we so routinely and firmly cringe from them? I just saw in my Google Buzz feed someone saying that they’re still on the fence about using a salesforce automation tool. My experiences with CRMs and SFAs has been that if you have a good implementation of one, you’ll wonder how you ever did business without one. Why do we hesitate?

We hesitate because of pain. The perceived pain of change, of doing something new, of trying something new, is usually much greater than the perceived pain of staying as is, of keeping the status quo. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. It’s buyer’s remorse up front, when you fear regretting the change before you even have a chance to pull the trigger, or when you only dip your toe into the water half heartedly to make a show of trying it out without actually jumping in.

So how do you make the change? How do you make the jump? How do you push yourself over the line?

You sell yourself the change.

Go and learn this pile of closing techniques that powerful, effective salesmen and saleswomen have been practicing on you for decades. Learn them, become minimally proficient at them, and then figure out how to sell yourself on the change you want to make.

For example, let’s say you want to lose some weight and you’re a fairly rational person most of the time (as opposed to an emotion-driven person). Grab a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, and then list all of the benefits you’d get out of losing weight (healthier body, longer life, more energy, etc.) and list all of the reasons not to change (less work, less to manage). Compare the two and decide which looks more appealing, which has the stronger sell. Chances are with something like improving your health or weight loss, the self-sell will help motivate you. This, by the way, is a Ben Franklin close.

Look at how you self-sell already. The testimonial close that salesmen use to persuade you (see all of our other satisfied customers?) is one of the most powerful self-sells now in social media. You’re executing a self-sell testimonial close every time you hit a review site on a product or service, or read a blog post about someone else’s experience that you want.

You self-sell with an opportunity cost close every time you upgrade a piece of gear in World of Warcraft, justifying that the stats on an improved item, no matter how small the improvement actually is, is worth the opportunity cost of slogging through another Violet Hold in quest blue gear.

You self-sell all the time with a minor points close every time you fire up Twitter and say you’re really only going to just check really quick to see if anything interesting is happening, but only just for a minute.

We know these sales techniques work. They’re proven, they’re designed to manipulate minds and take advantage of blind spots in our human brains, in our emotional and rational makeups. Sales companies have been forcing crap into our homes and bodies since the day we were old enough to understand language…

… so why not take what we know works about manipulating other people and use the techniques to manipulate ourselves towards the outcomes in life we really want?

If you learn these sales techniques, you’ll find that you can sell yourself damn near anything. If you’re one of those folks who knows you have to make a change but you just can’t seem to ever get the momentum you need, learn the techniques and sell it to yourself. Sell it to yourself powerfully, and sell it to yourself often. It might be losing weight, going back to school to finish a degree, starting the martial arts, whatever.

Make up your mind and sell to yourself, because if you don’t, someone else will. When you’re done, you too will be saying, how did I ever live without this?

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How hard can a brand hit?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 25, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Video | 9 comments

One of the enduring misconceptions in marketing is that it takes a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of resources to truly empower a brand, to make it stick in your head, and to eventually be a part of your mental calculus when you go to buy something later on.

That misconception is still wrong. Brand, empowered by story and emotion, can smack you in the face with a 2×4 and instantly become powerful and memorable, if you do it right.

Here’s an example of doing it right. Watch this short video for just two minutes.

Do you remember it? Do you know what Love 146 is about? Can you remember the story and the emotion behind it, the emotions it evoked in you?

This was one of the most powerful stories I’d heard at the Optimization Summit. Love 146 was created by Rob Morris and this particularly excellent story example was created by Geno Church as part of Brains on Fire’s work to help Love 146 tell its mesmerizing story.

Ze Frank once quipped that a brand is an emotional aftertaste from a set of experiences, and that’s never been more true. What does your brand evoke emotionally? Does it evoke anything emotionally at all? What aftertaste do you leave in the brains of your customers and prospects?

If your customers and prospects feel nothing when they interact with you, then you’re a utility. You’re a commodity. You’re instantly replaceable because there’s no compelling emotional reason that keeps others – your friends, your employer, your customers – engaged.

How hard can your story, your brand, and you hit?

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What World of Warcraft's Healing in Ulduar Can Teach You About Your Marketing Team

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 23, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, World of Warcraft | 13 comments

Over the weekend, my Warcraft guild managed to down 4 bosses (really big bad guys) in Ulduar. Two of the bosses posed two separate challenges for healers. One boss, a giant robot named XT-002, hands out lots of damage over a relatively long time to your entire team. Your healers must continuously refill the team’s health throughout the fight in a fairly aggressive manner.

The second boss, Kologarn, hits only a couple of members of your team, but he hits them very, very hard and very fast. Your healers must protect those team members and shield them from as much harm as possible while healing them.

In the first fight, there’s a class of healer known as a druid who can dispense lots of healing to lots of people over time. Druid healers really are ideal for addressing XT-002′s damage method. In the second fight, there’s a class of healer known as a discipline priest who can put up shields on a few people – but not the entire team and still stay focused on key members – and protect them from harm. Discipline priests are ideal for mitigating Kologarn’s intense damage.

As you can probably imagine, discipline priests who excel and shielding and protecting a few targets have a difficult time healing an entire team on XT-002. Druid healers who excel at healing over a period of time get overwhelmed very quickly when Kologarn dispenses near-instant smackdown, and fall behind quickly.

So what does this have to do with marketing? It comes down to knowing which members of your team have which abilities, and knowing how to properly allocate those abilities for the “fights” you face in marketing.

To make a comparison, if you need to generate lead flow over a period of time, you want to look to your inbound marketing team for search engine optimization, for brand and awareness building, for affiliate and referral marketing programs – things that keep the leads flowing.

Likewise, if you need to apply intense, high lead volume over a very short period of time, you want to look to your outbound marketing team for techniques like press releases, blogger outreach, high volume email marketing – things that are not sustainable for long periods of time but can throw some big numbers up very briefly for a specific campaign.

Asking the inbound team to generate outbound results is exactly the wrong thing to do. They can’t put those numbers up any more than a druid healer can heal through Kologarn’s spike damage. Asking the outbound team to generate inbound results will end equally badly – they’ll burn up all their resources, generate intense fatigue in their channels, and likely piss off a lot of otherwise loyal customers and prospective customers if they have to maintain pace over an inbound team’s normal operating period, just as a discipline priest will not be able to sustain focus and effectiveness over an entire team versus focusing on mitigating damage on just a few players.

Inbound and outbound marketing are complementary and equally effective if you’re competent at the methods and you know what you should be using when, just as druid healers and discipline priests are both excellent healing classes, as long as you know what they are and are not capable of. The wise raid leader brings the right class to each fight to maximize success, and the wise marketing and business leader brings the right teams to each marketing challenge.

May your raids and marketing equally never hear a Tympanic Tantrum!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.