Each industry and every company have a different approach to marketing. Here are a few key questions I ask to help my clients to focus on their “new” marketing strategy:
What customer problem do you uniquely solve?
Who is your customer?
Where are those customers?
What makes you relevant to those customers?
How do you communicate your relevance?
How will you continuously measure and adjust?
Tim Cook (CEO, Apple Inc.) understood that the majority of people don’t buy Apple products because they are better, they buy them because it raises their status. People wait in line because owning an Apple product increases their status and they feel good when other people see what’s in their hands. Apple uses the technology ratchet to turn the handle on status and luxury. Tim Cook understood this metrics and all he had to do was to watch and understand what was going on in the Apple stores. This turned Apple into the biggest and most profitable luxury brand in history.
I have spent many hours doing “mystery shopping” - watching what happens when people visit stores. Martin Lindstrom was hired by some of the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick. As consumers do not tell you how they see the world, on the other hand they give it all away by the stories they tell. I would recommend that you read Martin Lindstrom’s book “Small Data” as it has many small clues that may help you uncover the next trend.
Our stories are being carried forward by our customers and I think user-generated content is currently social media’s greatest gift to marketing. I also think the customer is the most effective marketer, so how do we earn the right to enter their narrative?
How do we spend less effort on our stories and more effort on their stories?
How do we get invited to our customer’s conversations?
““People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.” - Seth Godin
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The most common mistake I have seen marketeers make is when each of us walks around with a world view that we are 100% sure is true. Our beliefs about money, our beliefs about strangers, our beliefs about places, etc., etc. We really believe that this is true! In my experience people do not always see the world the same way as we do, they don’t believe what we believe and don’t fear what we fear. I’m sorry! As a marketeer you have to be comfortable with this, and if you are not then you cannot market to them.
To put things in perspective, please oblige me in a thought exercise - Think of every product you’ve purchased over the past two weeks. This might include food, clothing, a car wash, house plants, insurance, medicine, office supplies, toys, books … anything at all. Now, consider this list and determine: How many of these purchases were directly or indirectly influenced by a piece of company content? If you are like me, the answer is zero.
Branded content has no impact on 99.999% of consumer purchasing decisions. We don’t see this company content, and if we see it, we probably don’t believe it - let alone subscribe to any of it.
The next group are the early majority, they are the key to getting a stable foothold on the market. This group are very loyal customers if you win them over and essential in securing growth and profitability. The next group are the late majority and are characterized by demanding easy to use, value-for-money products before anything else. Finally, the laggards, this group are the last to adopt an innovation. As clients they can be very tough to win and are therefore often ignored by many marketing efforts, yet can provide important feedback regarding the areas where your product could be further improved e.g. made even simpler, cheaper and more convenient to use.
The chasm is the point where the vastly different motivations for using the new product are emphasised. Visionaries seek out dramatic shifts in productivity which can enable them to quickly move forward, even despite resistance from within their own companies, the pragmatists want gradual, steady improvements, making sure no drastic changes occur too fast.
When trying to explain the Diffusion of Innovations theory to students, I always felt breaking it down to a simple analogy made it more palatable.
The first group are the innovators for whom owning the latest everything is a passion and an end in itself. The innovators proactively seek out new products to try them out, requiring almost no marketing efforts from your part. The next group are early adopters in search of competitive advantages provided by new products and services. The early adopters view technology as a means of achieving breakthroughs and aggressively gaining market edge.
The first two groups (the Innovators and Early Adopters) are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors. They are the people who buy brand-new technology, before it’s been perfected or proved or before the price has come down. They usually have small companies and are willing to take enormous personal risks.
A wise old man once told me that two things define us:
1. Your patience when you have nothing, and
2. Your attitude when you have everything.
My period of self-isolation ended last night and I am “officially” free to go outdoors. Now more than ever, I think it’s so important to tune in, look inward and listen to you intuition. It’s so easy to forget how to listen to that inner voice. This morning I took a moment to enjoy the silence and confirmed to myself how grateful I am to have come through B.1.351 (the South African variant) without any major symptoms.
Now we finally have an opportunity to focus on what matters most to us, make changes - and what better time to change your life than when it’s already changing?
Honest storytelling is compelling and it appeals to our emotions. When I hear a good story I feel myself becoming part of the story. I think that it’s really difficult to tell a good story when you are trying to please everyone. It’s a risk to tell a story that is going to offend some people, it’s not just the facts that you remember, it’s the stories.
Watch the video about Jill Bolte Taylor’s massive stroke, she share an amazing story. Jill is a brain scientist, and watched as her brain functions (motion, speech and self-awareness) shut down one by one and used her experience as a research opportunity.
There is a voice in your head and it is always telling you what you are good and bad at. The voice tends to focus on your weaknesses and you are subsequently thinking hard about how to let people know all about your strengths. And this tends to lead to “me, me” storytelling, where you mistake the question: “How are you?” as an actual enquiry as to how you really are. What they are really asking is, “How am I?” and that is what they want the answer to.
Have some guts and tell a story! Are you fed up of telling a cleaned up version of someone else’s story? Everyone is walking around telling themselves a story based on their pain points and emotions of what is happening around them. Can you write a story in first person about exactly what the client feels? Written in a language that your client speaks and within this story, explain exactly what they can do better. Detailing exactly what your client get out of the interacting with your brand. Contact me via e-mail if you would like to learn how to tell your own story.
My interest in psychology stems from the fact that I’ve always been a lover of people. I have always wanted to know the reason behind certain behaviours and why people do certain things. Sales is about helping your clients and from a psychological perspective you become a real trusted advisor when your clients become comfortable disclosing certain things. From the psychology stand point, it’s allowed me to be more understanding, empathic and better listener. Most people who know me will say that I have a natural air of confidence and I am very easy to talk to.
Selling is an art that requires the ability to form good relationships with others as well as a science that requires the development of successful, repeatable strategies. The Covid-19 pandemic has made it easier to be yourself, challenge the status quo and transform the ways in which you work. Contact me via e-mail if you would like to learn how to move away from your own needs and focus on the customer perspectives?
Work hard
Be positive
Be generous
Stay curious
Trust yourself
Stay teachable
Show gratitude
Be kind
c/o MTV
Are you a result-driven person with solid experience in marketing and a passion for brand building and luxury brands? Are you curious, positive and willing to run that extra mile to get the job done? If so, send me your CV and I will scan it for key words before I can see whether you are suitable the position.
Simon Sinek said, “Value is not determined by the people who set the price, it is determined by those who choose to pay the price." The same statistic can be presented in very different ways to create very different reactions. And our choices reflect and determine who we are and I think individual awards come as a result of the teams success.
I believe the easiest path to transformation is by embracing everyday life with openness and gratitude. You can start on the path wherever you are. Everyone is in the position to say that this situation is difficult but I am grateful for having a higher self that can find a solution. By simply acknowledging this path, you can transform any experience from darkness to light. Just think of it like having a torch in a dark forest, where the only thing that matters is the next step that you see ahead of you.
How should you live life when you are on this path?
It’s easy to feel grateful when life is going well, yet not everyday is like that! Most days are a mixture of negative and positive situations, emotions and feedback at home and work. I think that we only need two tools on the path: knowledge and experience. Knowledge gives you the vision of the bigger picture that you can trust, and experience validates that the experience is true. When we achieve even more knowledge and experience, complaints are transformed into light and wonder, and gloom changes to joy. This acknowledgement that you are being guided by the light inside of you is the beginning of the journey. I think that to be in the light, you must open yourself to it and this is fundamentally different from constantly struggling against the darkness.
““The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.” - James Allen”
Copenhagen (2200 N)
According to the World Health Organisation
Most common symptoms are:
- fever
- dry cough
- tiredness
Less common symptoms are:
- aches and pains
- sore throat
- diarrhoea
- conjunctivitis
- headache
- loss of taste or smell
- a rash on skin, or discolouration of fingers or toes
Serious symptoms are:
- difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
- chest pain or pressure
- loss of speech or movement
And even though I have none of the above symptoms, this morning I received notification from the Danish Health Authorities that my PCR test from yesterday morning is “positive”.
Therefore, I am in self-isolation until 5th February 2021. Stay safe 😷.
““Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” - Michael Jordan”
c/o Getty Images
The majority of you who are reading my blog on a regular basis know that I’m a big football (soccer) fan. There are many parallels between a football team and an organisation. A football team consists of a goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and attackers. All of them are doing their jobs in different ways but at the end of the game, they all want the same outcome - to outscore their opponents and win the match. You can do things differently, you can have different skills but you are moving in the same direction and this is the way we should want to behave when we are part of a team.
Simon Sinek said, ”Leadership is irrespective of what level we are at.”
You don't have to be in a position of authority to be a good leader and we can show that through our communication. When you just share and tell people something, it's not really powerful. Leaders need to be spending time trying to understand where your people are coming from, what they need and not just feeding them information/data and telling them what to do, as people do not respond very well to that.
It takes strong mental strength for a leader to step back and say what is the best thing that I can do that is going to move the needle forward as a group and build trust. Throughout my career, I have seen many islands of activity! Playing the blame game and pointing the finger at who’s doing it wrong in sales, marketing, production, R&D, etc. What I want to do is enable people, and allow them to support, empathise and learn about each other. Would your organisation like to learn how to communicate as a team and not as individual silos? Contact me via e-mail for coaching, mentoring or workshops.
We should always focus on the buyers’ needs and how we can solve them. Guiding the buyers through the decisions and tasks from an authentic perspective will make it more likely to get the deal done. The role of the sales person is to guide the buyer through this process. In the minds of the buyers, sales is not necessary.
Training is not about persuading buyers to buy your products as in general as most people have a persuasion resistance. Nobody want to be sold to! The real role of sales persons is to influence buyers through the buying process. In reality, the buyers are in charge of the selling as they have to sell to internal stakeholders. I think that influence is far more important than persuasion, we only have to tell one story - the customers story. Tell the story of what the future may be like with you in it based on a vision and values.
As a father it has always been important to me to emphasise to my children that I don’t care if they win or lose, all I insisted on was that they do their best. This sounds really “woke” but I think that there is a huge distinction between decisions and outcomes. Pause and take a moment to silently think about any decision that you have taken over the past few months.
Q. Did that decision have a good outcome?
A. My guess is yes! As everyone always picks one that has a good outcome, because that’s how we decide that it’s a good outcome.
I believe that if you made a good decision and it didn’t work out, then it’s still a good decision. On the other hand, if you made a bad decision and got lucky, you haven’t learned anything about good decision making. And yet we criticise people based on the outcome as opposed to criticising them based on what’s in their control, and that’s the decision. The practice is about focussing on the decisions because the outcomes are out of our control. The practice is about what’s in our control and not what the outcomes are.
When this happened what are you going to do about it, is completely different than this happened and screaming oh no, over and over again. I think that things that happen, happen, but they are out of our control except for our response towards them.
Food for thought - Do you value truth over objective reality? Are you willing to be effective or would you prefer to be right? I think if you want to be effective you will be open to feedback that teaches you how the world really works. If you need to be right, then you will isolate yourself from that and in your heart of hearts, you know you’ll never be effective.
Nowadays, we are living in a moment in history where compromise is a dirty word, and everything seems to be about conflict and blame. The old phase, “my way or the highway” appears more prevalent than ever and I for one would like to get more people to face up to their own hypocrisy. Day after day I am trying to live up to the basic human responses - honesty, empathy, courtesy, patience and goodwill.
I know that the best strategies mean nothing if you don’t have the resources to execute them, fortunately, when it comes to myself - I am more than capable. I am analytical and “even” Stephen because of my balance. Some would say that I am skeptical of convention and pretence, others would say that I am wise, funny and gracious.
What are my priorities today? And, how will I be of service today? These are far more valid daily questions than worrying about what people think of you.
