Transcription
In 2007, the Washington Post ran the following experiment. They asked Joshua Bell, one of the greatest classical violinists alive, to play his $3.5 million Stradivarius in a Washington, D.C. metro station during morning rush hour. 1,070 people walked past him, and just seven stopped to listen. He earned $32.17 in tips playing the same pieces he performs at Carnegie Hall, where tickets cost $300 a seat.
That's because in a concert hall, people's brains are primed to think world-class artist before he plays a note. So, they are drawn into his performance. But in the subway, people think just another street performer. So, nothing he plays really matters.
This is the big lesson from Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, the go-to book on getting people to understand and care about your product. You can have a great product that people walk past, just like Joshua Bell in the D.C. subway. It's on you to set the context and make them care the moment they encounter it. You do that by thinking like a movie director.
Every great director crafts an opening scene that tells the audience what kind of movie they're in for and pulls them into what's coming next. Take Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. He opens with a bank heist. Six men in clown masks rob a Gotham bank, and as each step of the job finishes, one masked man kills the next. By the time the last one walks out, every accomplice is dead, and the entire take is his alone. He pulls off his mask. It's the Joker. You now know this isn't your typical comic book movie. In one short scene, Nolan has piqued your interest and encouraged you to watch the rest of the film. Great directors like Nolan use the opening scene to set the context for everything that follows. Your product must do the same, or sales will suffer.
April learned this the hard way. Early in her career, she ran marketing for a startup that had a great database product. Prospects would take one look at it and assume it was just another weak competitor to Oracle. Then she'd spend an hour trying to convince them her product was different, but they'd already made up their minds. So, she started introducing the product as a data warehouse, a place to store your data so you can analyze it and improve your business, not run it. Overnight, she stopped competing with Oracle and created an entirely new category. In the following months, sales took off.
To craft an opening scene that puts your product in a successful context, you must choose one of three positioning strategies. Each one will greatly help your customer understand what you are and why you matter.
One, be superior in one way customers really care about. Pick a product people know well and focus on one thing you are undeniably better at that really matters to your market. T-Mobile didn't try to beat AT&T and Verizon on coverage. Instead, they focused on the most hated part of the wireless industry, restrictive contracts with surprise fees, and positioned themselves as the un-carrier.
Two, be the big fish in a small pond. Own a sub-segment. Instead of another podcast for entrepreneurs, be the podcast for people who want a 4-hour a week side hustle that earns passive income. The smaller pond is easier to dominate and the right buyers self-select instantly.
Three, create an entirely new category. Define a new category that you alone occupy. It's the riskiest of the three, but the rewards are enormous. The pattern is almost always the same. Combine two things working in separate markets in a way no one has tried. For example, 5-hour Energy fused traditional energy drinks with the format of a pharmacy shot, creating the 2-oz energy drink market and owning approximately 90% of it for years. Cirque du Soleil combined circus acrobatics with the staging, scoring, and storytelling of theater, creating theatrical circus.
So, which strategy is right for you? To find out, run your product through Dunford's positioning question stack. Five questions that build on each other.
Question one, what's the alternative? If your product didn't exist, what would most people do to get by? Open a free Google Sheet? Use a well-known competitor's product? Or stick to a time-consuming workaround? Specify an answer to identify your real competition.
Question two, what can you do that those alternatives can't? These are your distinct capabilities. The specific things that, if removed from your product, the prospect couldn't get anywhere else.
Question three, why does that matter to a real customer? This is where most companies stall. They list capabilities and assume customers will see the value. They don't. So, you must translate. AI-powered document processing is a capability, but finish your taxes in one day instead of 10 is value. Capabilities are features. Value is the customer benefit. You must build the bridge between the two.
Question four, who feels that value most acutely? Out of every customer who could buy your product, which ones feel the value the deepest? Position around them and ignore the rest. A small Canadian software company called Jana Systems struggled to stand out in the crowded CRM market. Then one day, they discovered a big investment banker who got excited about a feature that let him model his relationships in ways no other CRM could. He was the only customer who had really noticed or cared about that feature. So, Jana Systems repositioned from enterprise CRM to CRM for investment banks, and leaned into the one thing their software did better than anyone else for investment bankers. By becoming essential to one specific buyer, they became increasingly valuable. 18 months later, revenue went from $2 million to $70 million. The product didn't change. They just found their best customer fit.
Question five. What category should you sit in? The category triggers a cascade of assumptions in the customer's head about what your top value is and who your competitors are. Tesla didn't position the Roadster as an electric car because that category triggered images of golf carts and the Toyota Prius. Slow, ugly, and cheap. They positioned it as a high-performance sports car that happens to be electric. Suddenly, the comparison was Porsche, not Prius. And customers knew Tesla cared deeply about elegant design. What do you care about most? What do you want customers to assume your differentiating value is? For example, if you want people to know you care about eliminating overwhelm, stop calling your product a to-do list app and start calling it a minimalist productivity app. Same product, different assumptions.
Now, after working through the five questions, choose one of the following positioning strategies to immediately stand out in your customer's minds.
One. Focus on one thing customers really care about and do it noticeably better than your competition.
Two. Be the big fish in a small pond by serving a subsegment of your market better than anyone.
Three. Create a new category you own.
Once you choose a strategy, build the first seconds of your sales pitch, slide deck, or sales page to showcase your strategy and reveal why your product is exceptional. Get it right, and your product stops getting walked past like Joshua Bell in the DC subway, and starts getting the attention it deserves.
That was the core message that I gathered from Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. This book greatly simplifies effective marketing and is a must-read if you sell a product or service. I highly recommend it.
If you would like a one-page PDF summary of the insights I gathered from this book, just click the link in the description below and I'll email it to you. If you're already signed up for the free Productivity Game newsletter, this PDF is in your inbox.