The thing about experiences
Designing experiences (so you can “sell” experiences). Saying so is like arguing that cultures can be designed. That they can be made “on purpose”. And that’s far away from reality. It would mean that every aspect of an “experience”, from inception to the thing itself, was done with a specific metric, process and outcome, in mind and execution. And that they all would be equal. Standard. The same. For EVERYONE. An experience, just as a culture, can’t be designed because: It depends on the one…
Provocation
In business You price is a provocation. Your insight is a provocation. Your voice is a provocation. They’re not a response to the market. The provocation To push them to consider. Think. Wonder. It’s to shift the conversation from “Could this expert help me?” into “How could this expert help me?” (compare your proposed options) Because, if you can’t provoke them to think different of things, how can they innovate and take better risks?
You’re the only one
You’re the only one who cares about their brand. Everyone else is too busy with life to care about your brand. And that’s ok. Because what you need to care about is your customers and how to make their lives easier. You need to know how to focus on the right things to better serve them. To provoke them to think of a different future. A different present. Because once they’re the focus, they’ll build your brand. Not the other way around.
A marketer’s reflux
Is copying others for the sake of “what’s working for other brands” feels like. Is talking about “purpose marketing” when you don’t actually care about shifting the whole system in your business (or whatever “purpose marketing” means). Is saying “you’re the brand, you’re the product”, as if you’re a thing and not a person. That you can be sold/bought. Is pricing based on the costs, as if your clients should care about your cost structure. Is tactics of pressure, FOMO or “scarcity” that we all…
Solution- and brand-agnosticism
Look, you don’t need to “reach the 10% of this market/segment”. We can all play the numbers game. Basic math ain’t that hard. You know what’s hard? Taking a stand for something and sticking to it. Finding the ones who actually care about that something. And forget about your solutions —and your brand. Because when you can help them, your solution comes second.
Experimentation means risk
Experimentation can take MANY ways to achieve MANY outcomes. It requires ways to try new things, and these new things involve a certain risk. How can you get to de-risk the decisions to follow experimentations? Because to experiment, you’ll have to incur into waste. Odds of making a new thing that works in the first try are quite low. So how do you make the process to feel less risky and —hopefully— not get overinvested in the process itself?
Themes over resolutions
“New Year’s resolutions are a perfectly valid mechanism for helping to drive change in one’s career, business or life, but most of them fail to achieve such change, I believe, because they’re framed as quantifiable, all-or-nothing goals.” Blair Enns This is a great piece about resolutions and how you can redirect the energy into making them successful (or at least give them higher chances of). Here’s the full view of Blair’s post.
Simplicity
“Simplicity has a very specific construction and there’s a reason why it works.” Bryan Beller Simple doesn’t mean easy. Simple doesn’t mean not-hard. Simple doesn’t mean no-impact. Simple simply (pun intended) means de-complexed, so that focus can be the next step onto what to choose.
Not the pitch
“There are no wrong notes” That’s Victor Wooten, bass legend. “I don’t have perfect pitch, but i don’t care. Because you’re not gonna dance to the key. You dance to the groove.All the notes are right, but it’s the context that makes it right, not the pitch.” This is the lesson you can take on ditching product-market fit. Why? Because it’s all about the context. You need to find the right context to make it groove. And for something to be groovy, sometimes it needs to not fit. The context is…
ARD or OUT?
Are you aiming to be standARD or to standOUT? One requires to fit in —to a market, to a need, to a set of expectations from what is already around. The other requires to… well, stand out —from a market, from a need, from set expectations, from what is into what could be. One follows best practices. The other searches for new practices. One goes about efficiency. The other about innovation. One is about blending in —bland. The other, about the edge. Where you choose to go, it’s up to you.
