What Conflict Is Your Business Prospect Having?

Learn to be different, weird - and your marketing / brand may just take off...

Positioning and promoting your product/service for YOUR market is a highly beneficial strategy. The outcome can and will be significant.

Determining the exact audience of your product that is a match for that target, is a winning model. With your solution and offer, you are answering the (hopefully) hungry desires from your market. And, they will respond to your offers a 100 times faster and better, and with conviction — because you can help them (and care).

See, the old ‘mass marketing’ model born in the industrial revolution is disappearing.

The idea that you are or can be different, serving a changing breed of consumers makes you unique, and therefore valuable. Seth Godin calls this being ‘weird‘. It’s another word for ‘different and unique’. Something remarkable. (somebody would actually make a remark about you/your business, naturally)

I guess in one way, nothing has changed over the many years of history in business and humankind.

How can you make changes to accommodate this ‘new’ way of thinking?

If you are different, you may not be liked (at first), but you’ll be recognized, and stand out from your peers. If you have the guts to do it, it’s possible to not only make a huge change for yourself, your business – but others as well.

Here is a way to look at your business marketing from now forwards.

This idea is not new.

In fact, the classic book, “Breakthrough Advertising” by Gene Schwartz was written many years ago. It has become a bible of marketing, sales and advertising principles for many. It’s one of the deepest, most influential books on sales ever written.

“We make a market by aggregating enough people who have some conflict. We channel that conflict through our product, through our service, through a claim that says that it’s the superior way to solve that conflict. If you’ve made that conflict big enough, strong enough and your claim strong enough, you’ve just created a demand for what it is you offer.”

Consider this as a baseline of discussion.

As Eugene says in his book – the real issue of marketing:

“It is not about building better mousetraps. It is however, about building larger mice and then building terrifying fear of them in your customers. In other words, it is about helping to shape the largest and strongest market possible and then intensifying that markets’ reaction to its basic need or problem and to the exclusive solution that you have to offer…”

If you spend more time thinking about how to improve your products and services versus just buying more advertising and cramming messages down people’s throat, you’ll be better off. Yes, harder. Yes, more time. Yes, more money invested up front.

But, if you are in for the long term (hope so) – you’ll be providing for the next generation and beyond.