Entries

As you may know, you must present “social proof” of the value of your complex solutions. The more complex and/or expensive the product or service you sell, the more important is this proof.

But what kind and why?

I see that most marketing professionals gloss over this subject without having thought through the specifics. What types of social proof make sense for their customers?

Let’s plot social proof on an authenticity spectrum. The spectrum runs from generic and unverifiable on the low-authenticity side to personal and verifiable on the higher-authenticity side of the spectrum.

You might be surprised at what the highest-authenticity proof looks like. More on that later; first let’s talk about the villain in this story.

Generic proof. In consumer goods marketing, this includes statements like “4 out of 5 dentists recommend X toothpaste”. Or quoted words such as, “it really tastes like chicken”, attributed to no one in particular.

It’s not proof at all in the most prevalent sense of the word, but it still works because that’s how we’re wired as a species – we value a thing based on what others in our tribe say about it. These made-up statements trigger that phenomenon, even when our rational mind knows they are BS.

Providers of business services and products, like you and I, also use generic or impersonal proof.

An example is stock photos of models in biz-casual attire at a conference table. Or an image of a trekker, photographed from a rear angle, contemplating the vastness of the Himalayan mountains. We see this all the time. When you overlay words over a photo like this on a website or a deck, you imply a connection that doesn’t exist. Those office workers aren’t you; those mountain climbers aren’t your customer. They didn’t say the things that seem to be attributed to them.

But it is expensive and psychologically taxing to put up a real photo of yourself, on your homepage. Especially when it’s of a group of people. But what are your customers buying? Whether you sell software or services, they are buying solutions and the people behind them, as discussed here. 

Another example – testimonials that real words from a real customer but hide their name, for whatever reason. This actually works if the testimonial is long enough and has some other qualities.

Which is to say, generic social proof isn’t always a bad idea; it can be easier to create and it can still work. But there are better options.

Personal and verifable.

It’s amazing how well numbers work. And how much better they work if they come from a verifiable source, such as a study conducted by a name brand organization, a university, a government agency, or a person associated with one of the above.

A small-print citation at the bottom of a screen is effective marketing copy.

Personal social proof is another effective hack. People confuse personal social proof with authority. A name, photo, and bio, or a real person goes a long way without that person being a known authority. Any real person will do.

And that brings us to the best kind of social proof. You.

The proof we have discussed so far tends to materialize as testimonials or case studies, whatever medium that comes in. It also comes from other people. 

But the most effective social proof I have experienced comes from publishing my own content. It is verifiable (it comes from me, really!) and it’s very personal. 

Interestingly, it’s not actually entirely authentic. When you publish a lot, you realize that you’re speaking on behalf of your professional self. Your professional self and your true aren’t the same; they have different interests and goals.

Now technically speaking, creating content isn’t by itself a form of social proof. But when you publish on the Internet, and people react to it in some way, it becomes social and it becomes proof.

Testimonials and case studies still matter. But we really want to hear from you – we want your take. That’s all the proof I need.

Have a wonderful weekend
Rowan

Genre helps make sense out of a story faster. Western. Victorian. Detective. Half of it is pre-downloaded to your memory banks. Thus with the scene set in your head, the creator can focus you on the original story.

When the plane crashed in the first scene of Lost and the survivors stepped out onto a sandy beach with palm trees, we knew the genre even without realizing it: castaway narrative, just like the Tom Hanks movie that preceded it by a few years.

In positioning your business, your product, your solution, you are almost always picking a pre-existing business genre.

But business genres are harder to pin down than counterparts in books/movies. They can be technology platforms or languages, business philosophies, schools of design, or company formations, product-based, and more.

In the world of niche-market expertise businesses, there are 5 to 10 overlapping uber-genres and 100s of sub-genres.

• SaaS is an uber-business genre; project management SaaS is a child business genre.
• Technology consulting is a genre; Salesforce consulting is a child business genre
• Web Development is an uber-genre; sub-genres are Drupal or Squarespace development
• Digital marketing is uber-genre. PPC advertising and outreach marketing are child genres.

If you identify your business according to an uber-genre, people will be uncertain. We know what a thriller is but it’s more interesting to know whether it’s a legal thriller, a psychological thriller, etc. This means we have to ask the followup question – what kind of

Business genre names evolve rapidly too: in the 80s and 90s, digital transformation was called “automation“; it’s still called that in the profit-rich and change-immune energy sector. 

This is the point: you’re rarely creating a new genre from scratch, like Daniel Defoe did with Robinson Crusoe.

The is the bigger point – genre isn’t enough. The series Lost didn’t retell Robinson Crusoe; it imposed a completely unique story on the genre.

I’m assuming that you know what genre or genres you fit into (probably multiple).

Great, so you don’t have explain that part in your messaging. In fact, please don’t. Everyone has seen it a thousand times already.  

We know the genres.

What you must do is discover  – and capture in the form of published content – how your business and its solutions create something new on top of the business genre you work in. Once you publish on it for a while, writing up the messaging gets easier.

My best
Rowan

P.S This advice goes against law 5 of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (The Law of Singularity”) and the book it inspired: Blue Ocean Strategy. If there’s a blue ocean out there for you, then jump in!

Listen to me read this below:

 

“It is sad and clear that on several counts you’ve discussed you don’t know what you’re talking about”.

This is what a computer programmer said to Steve Jobs at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997, as captured in this video. For context, this came right as Jobs had returned to Apple after a 7-year hiatus, following his 1990 firing. He was back but he was vulnerable.

Then the questioner asked Jobs:

“I would like you to express in clear terms how, say, Java, in any of its incarnations, addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc?”

Now I personally have no idea what OpenDoc is/was and I definitely don’t care.

But my suspicion is that Steve Jobs knew perfectly well what OpenDoc was, and cared, but also understood its contextual relevance. He knew where it sat in the vast universe of technology, programming languages, business concepts, design ideas, and cultural understanding that went into Apple. Armed with that contextual understanding he was able to disarm the hostile crowd member and also clarify his design philosophy that made Apple what it is.

By the way, every Q&A talk Jobs ever gave was a sales talk convincing you to buy Apple products. We want to hear from the creator.

You’re the creator

The questions you get about the details of the solution you provide –  they’re not questions about details. They are a micro-expression of a lack of certainty as to value.

How can the listener be certain of effectiveness without knowing how the details fit into the overall solution?

How can the listener be certain of your solution without knowing you care that they understand?

You created it, so you should be able to explain. Being asked to explain details, however trivial they seem, is a wonderful opportunity.

I get this all time the time. Someone will say, “yeah but what about X?” What about video marketing? Why is the tagline you wrote so long? Why did you edit out the period from the headline?

To be fair, there are bad-faith actors such as the hostile programmer trying to play gotcha with Steve Jobs. But good-faith actors want to ask about the details too.

And they want to be assured that we understand how any detail fits the big picture. They’re not testing our data retention.

The next time you want to test whether someone is an expert yet, ask them about a seemingly trivial detail. If they dismiss the question as trivial, they dismiss you as trivial.

Best,
Rowan

Mass-market companies like Google make profits by trying to eliminate the competition. How do niche-market companies like yours do the same? Should they? (Yes, they should).

Consider other huge organizations besides GOOG – governments, school systems, multinational NGOs, and corporations. We’ve all been part of one in some way. Whether they are designed to make a profit or not, they are all mass-market organizations – they do something for huge masses of people from whom they extract time, money, or attention. Because size helps them do so, their workforces are often in the hundreds of thousands.

Few of these behemoths manufacture goods, but many are run like industrial-age factories, as I wrote recently. They run on management science, complex hierarchy, centralization, soul-sucking office parks, and antiquated, militaresque formality.

Meanwhile, niche market organizations:

• 1. have no need for management science
  2. or “re-orgs”
  3. don’t need hierarchy
  4. find less value in metrics
  5. benefit from threats to the status quo
  6. ideas theories must fit the real world – bills to pay

With the obligatory caveats, of course.

Of course, there are vast drawbacks to a niche business. We lack:

• name brand recognition
• enormous capital supply
• predictable revenue
• economies of scale
• access to large internal talent pools

But does a niche-market business also lack one of the most powerful big-company advantages?

Monopolization

When you monopolize you control supply and, if you want, prices, in order to eliminate competition. In the case of big tech monopolies, you also make the rules about how you communicate, mitigating the influence of the largest rule-making competitor, the US government. And other large governments. 

But a niche-market business can achieve de facto monopolization by creating a solution that no one else offers, presenting it as such with clarity – and repeating the process every year or two using one of its strengths, agility.

This is rapid-cycle positioning.

The question for you never stops being, what’s something you can do that – for a little while at least – you control the supply of?

My best
Rowan

According to whom you ask, or how you feel at a given moment, the world is full of either abundance or scarcity. I know – I’m supposed to see abundance everywhere! And maybe you feel you are too. But it’s hard, isn’t it?

Maybe that’s because anti-abundance – scarcity – is everywhere, every day, all day. It comes in a few forms.

1. Genuine scarcity
2. Artificial scarcity you create
3. Artificial scarcity others create 

I get genuine scarcity. That’s just reality; it’s often sadly preventable but it’s real.

But artificial scarcity – why? So why is it so prevalent?

Because it’s profitable.

Ever since social scientist Cialdini published Influence 36 years, thousands of other researchers have also demonstrated that scarcity motivates people to take action, whereas they otherwise might do nothing. That is to say that it helps sell, as I have written about previously. 

But what is less understood is why – scarcity paralyzes thinking.

*    *    * 

One scarcity study took place in the hottest and Southernmost part of India, Tamil Nadu. The researchers didn’t frame it as a scarcity study, but that’s what it was. They wanted to document the effect of poverty on IQ.

They studied over 400 farmers before and after their annual harvest, which yields them 60% of their annual income, in one fast swoop. These farmers are usually poor, but for that one brief period of time, they are flush with cash. They have options.

The researchers found that the farmers’ IQ increases by 10% after their harvest cash comes in.

Then, as in Flowers for Algernon, their IQ plummets as they descend again into poverty. Actual scarcity in action.

The same researchers found similar results among a similar-sized group of low-to-middle income shoppers at a mall in New Jersey. One sample group faced a hypothetical $1,500 car repair bill. The other faced a $150 car repair bill.

Those faced with the $1,500 car repair bill lost 14 IQ points – instantly. Do you keep your car or pay your rent? Or this or that? The mind races with stress hormones and cognitive capacity shrinks.

Let me interject a quick takeaway – if you sell your thinking for a living as a problem-solving consultant, you must avoid scarcity in all its forms. It directly dilutes your value proposition.

But it matters for those who afflicted with poverty. More than anyone, they need their ability to make good decisions to escape the cycle.

Presidential candidate Andrew Yang used that very study to pitch his concept of UBI, Universal Basic Income. As has Rutger Bregman, who has made the impeccable argument that what the poor need is not social programs, but cash money.

*    *    * 

Every marketer I know including myself has tried using scarcity in her marketing and come to the same conclusion: it works. Really well. Not all of them will tell you that it works by impairing cognitive abilities. Scarcity makes you stupid; amygdala trumps neocortex, etc.

I don’t think it always makes you stupid, though, not if it’s genuine and not if it doesn’t prey on serious deprivations such as poverty.

Instead, genuine scarcity can actually help potential buyers focus their attention on a potential opportunity. Maybe there really is just two hours for you two turn your term paper in; maybe there really are only 7 seats available in that course.

Whether genuine or artificial, scarcity works by almost instantly changing the way that people’s brains work. And people are starting to figure this out. In fact, I’d hurry to understand how to use genuine scarcity in your own marketing – time may be running out.

Best,
Rowan

How do you write a call-to-action? This was a trick question because what matters more than the wording of the call-to-action is the brand messaging that goes around it.

But I often get this question: “what do you think our CTA should be?”.  This is where I get to say, “Meh, who cares”. Bear with me.

Brand messaging for niche-market expertise businesses has three interconnected parts.

Name/logo
Tagline
Headline

Nail those three pieces and you have a brand messaging framework. 

A CTA is not part of that framework.

The name is the hardest or easiest part. A while ago I wrote an advice post on how to name things. Businesses, products, human beings, even dogs. That was inspired both by my experience naming brands and also by what I read here. One takeaway – a good name doesn’t have the solution baked into it – because the solution might change.

But a name by itself isn’t enough. Soon enough, for example, your kids get taglines to go with their names. 

That’s Sasha, he’s the life of the party. 

Or more accurately: That’s Sasha, he makes groups of other kids relax and laugh.

It takes a little time to create a good tagline but it’s the easiest part of brand messaging – if you let it be. Accept that as a niche-market brand, most people won’t know you. Then you can accept that your tagline should be descriptive, informative, and accurate. Even if it’s boring.

The headline is not boring though. It builds on an accurate tagline by doing three specific things:

1. acknowledging who the reader is (and isn’t)
2. talking about a problem they face
3. offering a solution to the problem

It doesn’t waste time summing up what the brand is or does. That’s the tagline’s job.

But it’s still the hardest part. And you might need lots of headlines, pertaining to different faces you show the world, on your website, your deck, your bylines, etcetera. A single website for a niche business might need a dozen headlines.

As you can imagine, when you have done brand messaging properly, it’s because you have an understanding of what’s behind it, the positioning, the unique value proposition, and the business model itself. The business model tells you everything you need to know about who the reader is and isn’t, the pain they face, and why they are happy to pay you to solve it.

When this work is done, it doesn’t matter too much what the call-to-action is. 

My best,
Rowan

 

Here’s the punchline: the essence of niche-market brand messaging is accurate and frank words.

Here’s a question.

Which group experiences more suicidal ideation – vets or vets? That is – war veterans or veterinarians?

I don’t know but I think it’s the latter. Bear with me. We know that there’s a higher suicide rate among veterinarians (and veterinary technicians) than among ER doctors. That’s because they witness even more death.

Actually, they don’t just witness death. And here’s what articles on the subject don’t say plainly – vets kill lots of animals. 

Not just any animals either. They kill pets – cats and dogs. Consider that the latter of the two have acquired neotenous, human-like characteristics, through eons of breeding. Translation: vets kill animals that literally resemble our children.

That’s just part of the job.

Suicide really can be classified as an epidemic in my profession
– Dr. Will McCauley, former Texas veterinarian

*    *    *

Of course, vets don’t murder animals. Just as soldiers don’t murder enemy soldiers (non-soldiers, that’s another story). But vets do – compassionately – put animals to sleep, to reduce their suffering in old age, illness or injury.

We don’t like to use the word kill because, like many short, precise words (which often have an old English, not a Latin origin), it punches you in the gut. Such words don’t punch you in the ribs, hip, or shoulder, where bones shield the organs.

Accuracy.

If we used accurate words rather than euphemisms and scientific terminology, it wouldn’t surprise us much to learn about the high rate of suicide among veterinarians.

Not that euphemisms are inherently bad; sometimes we need a little protection from hard things.

But most of you don’t deal in hard things; you deal in positive business outcomes. So remember the power of accuracy in your messaging. Instead of putting to sleep or neutralizing enemy forces – or their business-world equivalents – use short, accurate, native-English words.

Have a great week ahead,
Rowan

Digital marketing and business is a matter of navigating spectrums of opposite approaches and usually settling on some compromise for a while.

Consider the following sets of opposites in business.

• “Who Not How” vs Gaining Momentum. Do you find the perfect expert to do your thing, or just find anyone who will get you started and capitalize on your emotional momentum?
• Details vs Big Picture. Do you dive too deep into details or refuse to consider them so that you stay focused on the big picture strategy?
• Solitary Research vs Brainstorming. Your own mind’s creative output around a topic is directly informed by how much research you do. But you get new ideas just from talking with people.
• Relaxation/Fun vs The Zone. All kinds of work become tolerable and even blissfully if you achieve a flow state, aka The Zone. But do you stay in it at the expense of relaxation from work?
• Productivity vs Effectiveness. Productivity feels good and gives the impression of maximum potential impact. But you might be more effective at creating impact by ignoring productivity and pulling the levers that move the most weight
• Conversion vs Brand Loyalty. It’s tempting to optimize your marketing to convert new customers but it pays better to acquire a community of people who are loyal to your business over the long haul
• Niching down vs Evolving Positioning. Consulting wisdom tells us to niche down and specialize. But the economy changes so fast now. Entire industries are wiped out or transformed every few years.
• Productizing/systematizing vs custom consulting. To sell a business, it has to be as operationalized as possible. Or to maximum revenue. Or does it? A Consulting service business creates the most value by designing customized and non-repeatable-by-design services
• Purpose-built software vs Template-Software. Purpose-built software like Asana requires so less configuration than Template-Software like Notion or Airtable. So what’s better for your business?

These are just a few of the business spectrums you will have to navigate over and over. I talked about these a little when I charted out optimization vs transformation and revenue vs costs.

*      *      * 

And you find a lot of these spectrums in books about business, of which there are three types:

1. General how-to books on specific areas of business (This Is Marketing)
2. Specific methods or practices that help you with something (The Art of Text Message Selling)
3. Big idea books that give you wisdom in a certain area, if not certainty over it. These may or may not be “business books”, per se (Talking to Strangers)

The problem with the first two is that they might not give you context. They might help you do something without helping you think about the opposite way of doing it. But almost every single piece of business advice has a corollary that is also good advice yet a tradeoff.

Once you conceive of life and business as a set of spectrums, then business advice becomes so much easier to take in. It comes to a mind pre-embedded with a helpful perspective – the alternative path. Business books become containers of perspectives, not formulas.

Now flip this around – what business spectrums do your clients have to have navigate to succeed? In conversation, we speak of trade-offs as if they are the exception. “But there’s a tradeoff“. Of course, there are trade-offs. The value is in knowing in advance of the conversation what the most important ones are and having a good idea of what to trade for what.

Rowan

PS. Speaking of Notion/Airtable templates, what a very cool employee handbook!

Things are changing so fast – millions of armchair epidemiologists have suddenly pivoted to being armchair polling experts. As I noted while on constant page-reload this week.

I was agonizing over a wannabe strongman’s ongoing, hamfisted coup attempt on democracy. This was also an attack on the entire concept of right-vs-wrong. That’s what really took a huge blow this week.

That’s why Trump-divided personal relationships will be so much work to repair – it’s not about reconciling political differences; it’s about reconciling one person’s view of right and wrong with another’s – all while sifting through mountains of disinformation.

*    *     *

Democratic capitalism and small businesses are two different things; they don’t co-exist that easily. But they have something in common – they need a moral framework to thrive.

That’s why the stock market rallied when the vote count began to belie Trump’s premature victory claim. And continued to rise when government officials shrugged off his efforts to stop votes from being counted. Wall St knows how bad Trump is for business.

Wall St does business on a foundation of political stability. And political stability does business on decent, ethical behavior on the part of political personas.

Meanwhile, we still want to do business – and our business models still need a moral framework. That’s at the heart of the mission, vision, and values statement. It describes how your business creates profit in a way that fits your values.

One way to figure that out is through deep content marketing – that means publishing a lot about the things you believe in as a business person. And a person. Less labor-intensive approaches include workshopping, discussion, reflection. However you get there, it’s worth the effort. Knowing where you stand morally as a business person is a core business practice – the act of creating the bottom-most foundation of your business model.

Stay sane everybody (:
Rowan

 

 

I’d never used the word trichotomy until I wrote this. It sounds a lot like thoracotomy, as in, “thoracotomy tray, stat!”, the surgeon-to-nurse command that spiced up many a dramatic scene from the TV show ER. George Clooney probably shouted it a few times.

But trichotomy is like a dichotomy except it’s made of three, not two – a three-part paradigm. More on that below.

*     *     *

One of the lies that SEO agencies commonly tell is that SEO is a “long-term game”. That it takes 6 months or longer to get results.

That’s really not true.

But as a strategic premise, it has essentially become part of the SEO agency business model. It’s lucrative because:

1. Absolves the agencies for non-results for at least 6 months
2. Allows, meanwhile, agencies to sell 6-months of execution work

Services business models are built on such strategic premises, some true, some false. Some once true and now false.

Whatever the case, they direct the allocation of execution work.

According to the prevailing view of the independent entrepreneur’s business model, you create value through two work types:

1. Strategy work
2. Execution work

All work is either one or the other. Take your pick. Or pick some combination thereof.

Here’s how the thinking goes around this:

• Strategy work is more valuable than execution
• Products are made valuable through strategic thinking; likewise, services are more valuable through strategic thinking
• If you’re an “outsider”, you start with execution then work your way into selling strategy work, which creates a greater value exchange
• Conversely, however, once you begin to sell strategy, you then sneak a little execution work to supplement your income
• In fact, if you adopt the agency or consulting firm model, you can make money by selling the (marked up) execution work of others
• If you really love execution work – building, crafting, writing, teaching, designing – then just do it and let satisfaction compensate for lesser financial compensation

A lot of this is true and good advice (except for the very last one).

The False Dichotomy

The points above are based on a false dichotomy, that of strategy vs execution. It’s false because it omits creativity, which doesn’t fit either category. This leaves us with a trichotomy: 

1. strategy
2. execution
3. creative

“Trichotomy tray, stat!”

Think of creative work as somewhere between the high-skill, stylized work of the craftsperson and analytical work of the strategic advisor. It’s similar to execution work but it’s not menial or repetitive. It’s similar to strategic advice but it’s a form of execution; you can’t do it unless you do it – a slogan for a new brand, the direction of a video, the decoration of an interior.

It might be that you create more value for clients by providing strategic advice. And it’s definitely true that any problem-solving venture should start with strategy. Strategy is still the leader. But is it where the most value is created?

Not in my experience.

Value-through-creativity is one of the fattest throughlines of my 20 years in digital marketing & advertising, technology consulting, UX design, and web/app/software development.

Whether it comes from engineers, writers, statistics/data people, or designers, creativity is sometimes where most value comes from.

How to read diagram: size of bubble denotes value created

Case Study

I once worked for a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had gotten his logo from a designer on Fivrr for $5. That entrepreneur’s venture is – you guessed it – toast. There was no creativity in his business model. 

Compare that futile crypto venture to another business I worked for, Tiffany & Co.

They invested over $20 million dollars on web design and development over three years at the agency I worked at. And got a stunning ROI. 

Here was the strategy:

• let the online presence be as international as offline
• leverage a stockpile of extraordinarily high-quality images
• exploit an impeccable brand identity by pursuing a minimalist design
• embed share-with-friend features into the UI (this was rare then; it had to be designed and built from scratch)
• boldly pursue customers who were new to online shopping but lived far from retail locations (which were MUCH more rare back then, before Tifanny diluted its brand into McMall-type storefronts)

This was a great strategy. And again, I am not questioning the value of strategic work at all. But others could have come up with it. The execution work was also superb – but others could have done it. Where was the value created?

Creative work, both in engineering and design but led by a superb, interdisciplinary design director. That’s why the Tiffany.com website was one of the first ecommerce sites to hit 100 million in annual sales. That’s why the website UX has hardly changed in 20 years.

*     *     *

Real quick on the product variant of digital expertise businesses – MySpace is worth $110 million in 2020; Facebook is worth $810 billion. 

So how did Facebook 8000x its former competitor’s valuation? Letting design thinking (a form of creative work) be part of the business model.

BTW, product business models and services business models are more similar than people think. 

*     *     *

Pricing takeaway. Don’t let anyone underprice your creative work by telling you, that’s not strategy, it’s hands-work/implementation/execution. Not only is it neither strategy nor execution, it often creates more value than both put together.

But here’s the bigger takeaway – figure out how creativity is part of your business model.

My best
Rowan