Transcription
Over a million views on the Better Call Saul video. People had questions. Hopefully today you can bring them some answers.
But before we start, I just want to thank each and every single person that's watched this. Whether it came on your feed accidentally or on purpose, thank you very much. It's been a hot minute since we had a million-view bangers. So, heartfelt, genuine thank you. Thank you.
All right, I'm going to read this one comment. And some of them are comments, some of them are questions. And they're, they run the spectrum from "hate you, hate your face" to "love it, brilliant genius." So, we'll, we'll chill on the genius ones. Okay, we'll, we'll go into the ones that have some substance to them.
Gummy Sammy said he's doing what Simon Sinek teaches about "start with why." Jimmy isn't selling what, which is a phone. He is selling the "why." Privacy. This is a valuable thing to unpack, and I think Gummy Sammy really brought the heat on this, and this is really good insight. Whenever we make something, what people buy isn't what they pay for necessarily. So, you buy a pair of shoes, but you pay for belongingness, a feeling of accomplishment, and just some maybe inspiration. And what, what Jimmy had discovered in this moment is why do people buy cell phones? And we can sell features and functions, which is what we talked about in the video, but he started to look for an alternative reason why someone would buy a cell phone. And he found a really unique thing. So, he created a customer. And he, he was like, "Maybe one really novel use of the phone is for privacy because we're concerned that the man is listening." Excellent comment contribution. Thank you, Gummy Sammy.
So, like for our viewers that are designers, videographers, photographers, what is it that you see that they're doing wrong with this? What are they selling, and how can they use this lesson to help sell more of their services?
Okay, let's address the elephant in the room because we got a lot of comments about, "You're just teaching people to be slimy, dishonest, deceitful, and scummy," and they hate everything about this idea, this practice. What they're not really seeing in the forest through the trees here is a fundamental business principle, which I think Peter Drucker talked about, which is the purpose of a business is to be profitable and to create a customer, and that all business are in the business of sales and marketing. Let's try to understand this from a practical business point of view, removing it from the fictional world of television.
There's a concept that many of you may know. It's called the blue ocean strategy. If you move your boat to somewhere else where there's less competition, the fish may have migrated, or there's a new pocket of fish, and you have no competition. And it's a very valid strategy.
In his book, *The Innovator's Dilemma*, the late Dr. Clayton Christensen talks about this. Honda motorcycles wanting to compete in America. America's a big market for Honda, but the problem with their motorcycles is, at that time, Harley-Davidsons are the dominant vehicle. They're loud, they're powerful, and they're heavy and expensive. And Honda has, by all measures, an underpowered, smaller, lighter motorcycle that is not designed to ride on the freeways. Because in Japan, they're limited access to fast-moving roads, so they don't need that power, nor do they need the speed, 'cause you just can't drive that fast.
So, these two people who are spearheading the launch of Honda motorcycles in America are just showing up every single day, and they're not really selling any of these motorcycles, and they feel the stress and the weight of doing this, thinking it's a total failure. And by their sales, it is a total failure. So, one thing they do on the weekends is to blow off some steam. So, they take these motorcycles off-roading. They go onto paths and trails in the hills, and they're riding around. They're having a good time. This is an ideally suited situation or environment for smaller, more agile motorcycles. And some people noticed. They're like, "Hey, what are those?" And soon a new industry was created called dirt bikes, or off-roading with motorcycles. And thus, Honda was able to have a footprint in America. They created a new lane, a new use case. And almost by accident, they found a new use for the motorcycle that no one else had paid attention to. They moved into a lane that had no competition. Blue Ocean Strategy.
How can our viewers apply this lesson from the TV show into their own business?
Okay. So, what business are they in?
They're in video production.
I know a little bit about this, and, and you're in it. So, we can talk about this from firsthand knowledge and experience. Okay. Most people get into video production because they aspire to become cinema directors. They want to work on feature films, shorts. They want to work on the most cinematic, most beautiful thing. This is why we love lenses and bokeh and aperture, all the kind of crazy things, 'cause we aspire to make a Hollywood feature film production. And so, what we settle for is some version that is a proxy for that. Okay? So, you get out into the world, whether you're self-taught or you go to USC, you're going to make videos, and you're going to settle for whatever pays you some money. And you're going to go uphill in this battle of trying to convince a buyer of video services that doesn't want to pay you for it, and you're going to try to oversell them quality, right? And I put "quality" in these air quotes, but let's just assume objectively it's higher quality, but they don't give, they don't give a rat's tail about whether or not this is quality or not. They wanted to do something which is an announcement, or they want to talk about their services, 'cause they're going to do a video sales letter of some sort.
They want their phone to ring. So, what they want is their phone to ring, and they want to pay as little to buy that opportunity as possible, and you want to sell art. That's the problem. So, there's a conflict. So, if we say, "Okay, let's remove ourselves from this world and say, who else might want a video outside of the traditional market of 'I'm going to sell something'?" I don't want the phones to ring. It might require some thinking on this, but luckily, you and I have talked about this before. If you sell videos as a form of way for you to make a living, you have to ask yourself, "Who in this world would pay the most amount of money for videos and I have a steady, constant supply of customers for?" And you could say Hollywood, but there's not a constant, steady supply of customers. And there's way more qualified people to do it than you today, maybe not forever, but today.
So, I start to think there's this new emerging market where there are authors, experts, people who are authorities in their space that want to grow their influence. And we know that video is the dominant format for content because it's easiest to consume. It requires the least, or the lowest amount of mental lift or processing from the end user to get a piece of information. Plus, it activates not only visuals, but sound and music. And so, we're tapping into a lot of different multisensory things. That's why videos are so powerful. So, if we look at entrepreneurs who are established, who are making $3 to $100 million a year, and they're, they're not in it to make more money. They're in it to build authority, what we would call thought leadership, or grow their influence, to rise above their peers, to be the most influential person in their space. Video is something that they want to use.
You take, for example, people like Simon Squib, Alex Hermoszi, and run down the list, Dan Martell, and they're spending tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand dollars or more a month building out their video team. Our, our good buddy Caleb, he consults people on how to build their video content team because he's seen that demand, and that dude is booked solid. He's figured out, "I don't need to make the videos. What I want to do is build systems for people who don't know how to run a media company," and I can do that. I believe his offer is public. I believe it's $100,000 to work with him, and he has too many clients. He has too many opportunities. So, that's a pretty good clue as how you apply this blue ocean strategy, where you go where someone else is not going, and you find a new customer for the very thing that you're doing.
When you write a sales page or sales letter, use the PAS system: Problem, Agitate, Solution. If you can identify your ideal client and talk about the problems and agitate it, they're going to be more interested or keen in finding out what the solution is. But the problem with the PAS is, you must first identify a new type of customer, not the same type of customer that everyone else is going after. So, if you say, "Tired of your phones not ringing off the hook?" or "Does your video sales letter suck butt?" Well, I'm the guy who just saw that is going after the same demographic. This requires radical thinking. This is why it's not so easy to create a new customer. But if you can create a new customer, one who didn't realize they needed the solution, which no one else has thought about before, that's where you make a lot of money. That's where you own and define categories.
Here's another example in case you're struggling with this. And I just want to express this, that creating paradigm shifts, inventing new categories is not for the weak at heart. This is not something you just roll out of bed like, "Oh, I got a brilliant idea." You really have to set the intentionality in order to be able to do this. And it requires a lot of brain work. But whenever we see it, and we reverse engineer it, it becomes very obvious to us.
The next example I'm going to share with you is a company called Method Soap. There are some advertising marketing guys who are sitting around thinking, one is a chemist, by the way, uh, sitting there thinking, "What category in the household can we reinvent? One that is low-hanging fruit for us." And they looked around, and after many different ideas and brainstorming, they found a very common problem, which is all the people who have hand soap are embarrassed to have it on the counter. When you have guests come by, you want to put it away because the market is dominated by a company called Dial, and the bottle is ugly, the label's ugly, everything about it is ugly. And so, you feel shameful to have it out in your aesthetic apartment, kitchen, or wherever it is that you have. So, they said, "You know what? Can we do something to make it so that people are happy to leave it out without hiding it?"
Now, the story is, they don't have a lot of money, and they know of a very famous industrial designer, his name is Karim Rashid, an Egyptian-American designer. And they ask Kareem, "Kareem, can you do something for us?" And he goes, "You know what? You have just enough money for me to design one idea for you." And as the story goes, he designs the teardrop shape, which becomes this super iconic thing. Now, there are other attributes to it, but what we want to do is focus on the main driving factor, which is aesthetic. Now, they are using more natural ingredients, less harmful things, and all those things are fine, but if they put in the exact same packaging and the same aesthetic, I guarantee you it will fail. Because this is why Dial can't do this. So, Method creates a new category, basically selling soap to a different market: people who want to wash their hands but care about the environment and the interior design of their space. And so, then they go on to be wildly successful and start to crush the marketplace. That's another example.
Third example, Dude Wipes. They took baby wipes, which you use if you have a child to kind of clean up the bum, and it's got some quality, some lotion and things like that, but, you know, it makes a messy thing a little bit less gross. Then they realized that a lot of people don't have bidets but feel a little gross after going to the toilet. And they create this thing called Dude Wipes. Literally the same product, the same ingredients, but package it in black and change the design so it appeals to men and then call it something that they can relate to: Dude Wipes. What they did was to demonstrate in this example, create a different market for the exact same product. This is how you create a disruption and a category innovation. We didn't know we needed this until you told us we need this, and you've solved that problem. The same exact thing.
So, don't dismiss valid marketing product innovation ideas because you don't like the literal example. Look below the surface, and you'll discover something really wonderful that can actually turbocharge your business, and you could very well be the next Dude Wipes or Method Soap or Honda motorcycles.
Is there an exercise or something that you'd recommend for creatives that they can maybe try to figure out these different verticals that have not been tapped into yet?
Here's what I would recommend for you to do. First of all, forget about your category because you're too close to it. What you want to do is pick any common product and look for a problem, and lots of problems, and say, "How might we solve this and invent a new category of a different buyer?" Here's the really good news. The world is ripe for disruption because products that we use and love today were designed from a whole different decade or a different era, and things have changed dramatically. And the other thing I can tell you is look for niche markets that are passionate but underserved.
I'll give you another example. The founder of Liquid Death didn't create water. Didn't create anything new, per se, but found that there are people who are moving away from alcohol. They don't want to drink, but they're like, maybe a little punk rock, or they're younger, or they're maybe they're straight edge. And he wanted to figure out how to serve them best. And all the soft drink companies know this because the sales of Coca-Cola in North America have steadily declined year after year. They know this is a problem. And we can see that people are much more health-conscious and they're moving away from alcohol and they want to live a healthier, cleaner life. So, what they did was the novelty. Let's be ironic about it and call it Liquid Death, and then come up with a clever tagline: "Murder Your Thirst." In keeping with Liquid Death, and the PS deistance is to hire the illustrator that created the melting liquid skull. The three put together: Liquid Death, a name, being ironic about it, "Murder Your Thirst," capturing this kind of sentiment, being tongue-in-cheek about it, and creating this really cool skull liquid melting thing in an aluminum can allowed them to price their product in a tall boy so it looked like alcohol. So, you have all the taboo of alcohol and none of the hangover. That's the innovation. They created a new market, a new customer for the same exact product. That's genius.
To shift things real quick, you got a lot of negative comments talking about like, "Yeah, Chris, this is great, but this is just TV. This is not real life."
Yeah.
Other comments were, "This is pretty much everything I hate about the marketing industry and why nobody trusts advertising and marketing. Create false demand, creating fake scarcity, leveraging people's insecurities, misrepresenting your product and services."
Yeah.
What do you say about that?
Well, I have to say, you live in a fantasy world. And there are predatory practices of marketing, advertising. We want to set that aside, and we'll get to that in a second. But what you understand is humans are meaning-making machines. If I buy this, who am I? Who do I become in the pursuit of this thing that I have? Right? So, the shoes that you wear, the house that you live in, the neighborhood, the party you vote for, you're all complicit in the lie because it's part of your identity. And to deny that is not to really look at reality.
So, how do we challenge this thought a little bit? So, what is something that you've purchased that you didn't need, but then discovered that you need? Well, let's put it in this way. If you're a man, you have been sold this idea that if you use these products, you become much more attractive to the people of the opposite sex. Presumably, if you drink this drink, if you drive this car, and you're happy to be a part of it, do you like Porsches? Well, Porsches are marketed to you to say, basically, "You drive a Porsche, you get a girl." It kind of comes with a car. At least that's the thing that they tell you. Even a diamond ring, which was a gigantic marketing ploy created by De Beers, that "a diamond is forever," "a diamond's a girl's best friend." And now that we have a whole society built on a man's worth in relation to the size of the diamond, the clarity of the cut that he can provide to the woman of his dreams. This is all part of the lie, and you buy into it. So, why are you drawing the line?
Now, if you want to rebuke all of this, you can even get into religion. Religion is a giant marketing propaganda campaign designed to save your soul, and every religion believes it's the one true religion, and that every other one is false. So, again, these are all marketing things, and it's tribalism. If I believe this, if I say these words, if I wear these things, if I drive this vehicle, I belong to a certain tribe of people. And if you were to audit yourself, unless you wear plain white t-shirts and you live in a white room with nothing branded and you participate in none of this, then you can say, "I am free of sin." But otherwise, we feel great about all these things, and we're complicit in the lie. You can read a whole book on it called *All Marketers Are Liars* written by Seth Godin, and it might break your mind.
Why do you think this pushed so many buttons for people? Like, this is probably the major theme of what we saw in the comments of like, "You're a snake salesman. Like, you're just teaching people how to con." Why do you think that hit such a nerve?
Well, I think because Saul is a con man, and he is kind of like the anti-hero in the story. He does despicable things. He has questionable morality and ethical guidelines, but down at the core, he's a really good guy. He's trying to do right, but he's willing to take shortcuts. And we see the devolvement of his ethical boundaries as the series progresses. And we kind of see where maybe it touches on lines which we would not cross, but it's entertaining to watch.
What I'm trying to do is extract, free of the morality part, the marketing sales principles that are driving the conversation. Vince Gilligan, to me, must have had a background in marketing, advertising, or writing, but he understands this so well because not only in *Breaking Bad* but also in *Better Call Saul*, he is able to write amazing scenes where people are negotiating, objection handling, and pricing, and creating a new market that I think if he's not, he has some natural talent for doing this because those principles are the principles I understand have deployed myself. But we all do it to our own moral and ethical code. I'm not manipulating anybody. I don't believe in lying to anyone. If you create false scarcity, that's a problem for me. Real scarcity is a thing.
For example, Daniel Priestley talks about this in his book *Oversubscribed*, I think, if not in that book, at least in conversation. He says, "We all have finite amounts of clients that we can take on." So, for you, how many clients can you work with in a month?
In a month, two or three.
Drigo, at any point in time, can only work with two to three clients. Yet, he does not communicate that to his audience to say, "I can only take on three clients a month." That creates scarcity already. We do not have unlimited capacity. You cannot infinitely scale creative businesses. But what we don't do is to communicate that to the outside world. Therefore, when someone gets to work with you, they're like, "Wow, I'm glad I got my money in before the next batch of clients come to you, 'cause I really do want to work with you." That's real scarcity. And that's a real concept that you can use because we want what we can't have. And also, we are very aware that if we don't get in on this round, we might have to wait two, three, four, six months, and our problem can't wait that long. But if you are always available 24/7, seven days a week, basically available at any point in time, there's no urgency for them to make a decision because there's no penalty for them to wait. So, if there's no penalty, they just wait.
So, if I'm a creative and I want to communicate to people that I have a finite amount of resources, what would that post or how would you communicate this in your marketing?
Very simple. Okay.
The way you would market is, "At any one time, I can only process six or seven clients. I actually have an opening in June. If you're interested in working with me, get on the waitlist now. Reach out. Let me know."
So, is this something you put on your website and making a...
Put everywhere, every single place you could you can write and tell people this because they need to know, right? Restaurants do this all the time. Concerts do this all the time. They announce when the tickets are going to go on sale. They have a history of selling out, and they tell you in advance when you can book or when you can buy tickets. And probably for their loyal customers, they might give you a little lead time. But maybe you're a sneakerhead, and they do this exact same thing. They have limited drops. I wouldn't consider a drop, it would just be a release where only the people in the know, loyal customers, or people who are in the VIP club have access to this, and they know they will sell out. People wait in line for them, and then they could immediately turn around and flip the shoes. It's a kind of wink-wink relationship they have with their diehard fans, basically will give you early access to a finite quantity of shoes. They can mass-produce them and then allow you to flip them for your loyalty. This is a fantastic way for me as the end consumer. I hate it, and I hear you if you hate this practice because the shoe I want is never retail anymore. It's 2-3x, but I'm not willing to wait in line and I don't want to participate in that. So, I have to choose. I can choose not to buy it, not to care, or I can wait in line. I can join the lottery, or I can buy it at 2-3x, or I can wait for it to go back down to earth and buy it then. Those are all my options. But this is a very real thing.
A lot of the other comments are about being a con artist and you're just teaching people how to lie.
You know what the word "con artist" stands for? When, when there's a con man, do you know what that is?
No. Tell me.
The root of that is you're a confidence man. You make me believe this is real. And so, part of the confidence game is to create this idea that you can believe in this person. Now, you're being conned all the time, and you're conning other people. The only difference between you and a criminal is they're doing it with lies. You should do it for real, 'cause the same principles are at play. And I would strongly recommend people read Dr. Cialdini's book on this called *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion*. And it is an excellent book on principles that we as society have evolved to develop. I'll give you the top three things I recall from Dr. Cialdini's book: contrast, reciprocity, and consistency. These are psychological triggers that people deploy all the time. You do it as well, and, and or scarcity is one of them. Uh, that something's not available, or reciprocity, which means I've done something for you, and then therefore you want to do something back for me. These all work in a modern society.
So, if you have a good product, you shouldn't have to need to pull this crap to sell it. I think that's a myth that people who don't really understand how things are done. And I understand the sensitivity around this because I believe in creative communities and circles, we're taught to focus on our craft, to be the best that we can be. And if you're really good, you never have to sell. And I think that may or may not have worked a long time ago through reputation, through referrals that you might get more and more clients this way. But we live in a modern era where being good is expected. You have to be better than good. And what does that mean? That means you have to learn how to do marketing and sales.
How many of you watching this video think you know of somebody, or are that person, who's really good but doesn't get any work? Well, in a just world, that wouldn't happen. And how many people have witnessed this, or are the beneficiaries of this, where you're, you know, you're not as good, or they're not as good, but they seem to get the lion's share of the opportunities? How many people would raise their hand? Just type "me" in the comments. Okay. So, we have to acknowledge the reality of the world versus the ideal world in which we live in. We want to say everything's based on meritocracy, based on merit that you get the opportunities. This is not how it works. People hire who they know, like, and trust. This is not a new idea. So, if you are not well-known, the chances of you getting work is going to decrease tremendously because they don't know that you exist, let alone to call you. If you have a weird website name, and you don't do SEO, and you do no social media, or any media at all, we'll just call it media. If you don't do any media, PR, promotions, direct marketing, you don't do any of that stuff, how is someone going to get to know you? You rely on the few people who have had personal interaction with you to do your marketing for you. That's called word-of-mouth advertising. And that works. And for many of you, that's 99% of how you get work. But it's a very passive form of getting leads. And that's why you have fewer opportunities than the capacity to do the work.
So, what we want to say is, would you like to be the master of your own destiny, to write your own chapters in your book? If you do, you have to be proactive, not reactive. So, you can choose whatever method it works for you so that you become a little bit better known than your competitors. However you choose to do that, it's up to you.
I think that's a great way for us to end the segment. Chris,
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