In a remarkable podcast with Krista Tippett and Seth Godin, Krista read from one of Seth’s blog posts about the questions to ask before you start a new venture. There are some magical marketing lessons in these questions that they discussed.
Four questions worth answering
- Who is your next customer? What are her dreams, her outlook, and view of life?
- What is the story she told about herself before she met you?
- How can you encounter her in a way she trusts the story you want to tell her about what you have to offer?
- What changes are you trying to make in her life and the story she tells herself?
Seth’s advice is to begin a venture by understanding the mindset of a person before they learn about your business and put a story into the world that changes how they experience the world. The advice is to start here before thinking about strategy, tactics, scalability.
A New Kind of Bike Experience
I help clients market their products and services by thinking about stories that their customers are telling today and how through encountering a new product or service, it will change the story they tell themselves. An example will help illustrate how this works.
Sam and his wife Lisa approached me to help them market an innovative product in the bicycle industry. Their product was intelligent and had many unexpected features. They thought everyone would want to buy this product.
When we met, I advised them to use the storytelling filter of thinking about how their customers can tell a new story about themselves after experiencing their product.
- Don’t focus on features in the story you tell
- Start small and learn along the way how the new bike would alter the story their customers said about themselves
- Watch to see if our first 25 customers told anybody about the bike and helped us spread the word
I started helping them late in their launch when they had already begun to market it. The bike launch hit a roadblock as they tried to market it to a mass market instead of a niche. They wanted everyone to buy their bike and didn’t give much consideration to the change they wanted to bring about with the new bike offering.
What Failure Taught Sam & Lisa
When the initial launch failed, we realized that the bike solved some cool problems, just not the ones that matter most to their customers. Only a handful of customers thought the product was remarkable enough, to remark about it.
Only a few customer’s stories changed because this new invention wasn’t disruptive enough to the beliefs of most of the people who bought the bike. This was an important clue to recognize whose story Sam & Lisa could change by bringing their bike into a specific world.
We learned that we were too general in who we tried to sell to and weren’t serving a specific community. This bike wasn’t for everyone. It was for a someone, and their marketing had to be refocused to reach a specific person, not the masses.
What Sam and Lisa did get from this early hiccup in their path, was the chance to listen and learn more about the stories these consumers did have in their mind, and to understand the pain points of challenges they do encounter. They realized that the story they wanted to tell mattered to a certain people who fit in the narrower group, not a bigger mass market.
It was from these insights that we retooled the audience we wanted to reach and spent more time understanding their language, the challenges and the opportunity to bring them help. They took my advice and spent time with the handful of people whose experience did change and they listened to how they articulated the before and after the experience.
If you are marketing something new, how will your next customer change the story she tells herself when she encounters your products and services?
Listen to Krista Tippett and Seth Godin’s interview here for more wisdom.
Photo by Mpho Mojapelo on Unsplash
Note: I often have to disguise some of the details of my client’s projects due to confidentiality and patent constraints. My stories are meant to be educational and instructive, but I do have to alter some details such as names and industries. The lessons are still relevant.
Need help telling your story? You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free and we can explore if working together makes sense. Try my new chat feature on my site if you have a quick question.
