Do You Know Where Your Customers Will Be Tomorrow?

Welcome to the first issue of The Make Business Matter Newsletter. I want to express my sincere thanks for subscribing.

The format of this newsletter will likely evolve in the coming months. But right now, I'm breaking it down into showcasing one thing that caught my attention in marketing, branding, and advertising. Then, I'll provide a five-bullet book summary that highlights insights from a book I recently read. Finally, I'll close with a few other things that had my attention in the past week.

I hope you find the newsletter valuable. And if you do, I would appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

I hope you enjoy this first issue.

This Week:

• Marketing: Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become?

• Branding: Brand With The Culture, Not Against It

• Advertising: Speak To Your Customers, Not Yourself

• Five-Bullet Book Summary: Almost Alchemy by Dan Kennedy

• Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Writing, Branding, And Goal-Setting

Marketing: Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become?

Who do you want your customers to become?

It’s the best question you can ask to keep yourself relevant to your customers.

The question comes from Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. It forces you to think about the future. It makes you go beyond thinking about what value you provide to your customers. And it makes you ask how the customer who uses your product or service is changed by using it.

Every product or service has the potential to change a customer’s behavior.

Innovations don’t only change the business; they change the customers.

One example Schrage offers is Google: Google created impatient customers. Using Google’s search engine created customers who wanted easy access to information and wanted it fast.

It turned them into a different type of customer.

But it also did something else: it made them better customers of Google. Google was better equipped to serve impatient customers than its cluttered competitors like Yahoo and AltaVista.

This is the real power of the question: answering it can transform your customers into better customers for your business because nobody else can satisfy the customers they became as well as you.

So, ask, “Who do we want our customers to become?”

• You can check out Michael Schrage’s short original article by clicking here.

• Or you can purchase his booklet by clicking here. (It’s only 102 pages and a must-read for any marketer.)

Branding: Brand With The Culture, Not Against It

Brands only exist in the context of the culture.

They can work in line with the culture. Or they can actively work against it. Both can be successful. But you have to know what culture you’re playing in. You need to know the rules you’re playing with or breaking.

If you don’t, you’ll be out of touch. You won’t seem relevant

Losing relevance is what happened to Apple during its “Get A Mac” campaign in the late 2000s. The were the ads that featured Justin Long as the cool-kid Mac and John Hodgman as the nerdy and reserved PC.

When Apple tried the ads in China, they fell flat because the nerdy programmer type was an aspirational figure there.

The dynamic that worked so well in the US didn’t work in China. It didn’t translate to the culture.

Ignoring the cultural context of your brand is a path to inevitable failure. It may not happen today or tomorrow. But you’ll eventually be out of sync if you keep ignoring it. And your message will no longer be relevant.

It makes you an easy target.

A few weeks ago, I came across a framework from strategist Jasmine Bina that’s a great way to begin thinking about how your brand relates to the overarching culture.

Bina descrbes four stages of culture. The majority of brands in a category exist in the same stage.

• Entrenchment: everyone invests in keeping the status quo.

• Tension: new needs arise in society that conflict with the status quo, making people feel uneasy.

• Exploration: people actively search for ways to resolve the tension with the status quo.

• Transformation: new ways get adopted, eventually becoming ubiquitous across the culture.

The stage of transformation inevitably loops back to entrenchment once the changes become the status quo.

These four stages are useful for understanding how your category operates in the larger cultural context. You can work within the context or against it. In fact, some of the greatest brands push the change for the whole category from one stage to the next.

But to start, you need to know where you already stand.

Figure out what stage your category operates in. Then, figure out your role in it or against it.

• For a refresher on the “Get A Mac” ads, click here for a compilation. The ad starting at 1:29 Is a particular favorite as it emphasizes a big pain point in a memorable way.

• To read Jasmine Bina’s original article “The 4 Phases of Culture Brands,” click here. She goes into more detail on each stage and provides examples of industries operating in each stage.

Advertising: Speak To Your Customer, Not Yourself

Making sure that customers can get your message is a fundamental principle of advertising.

But companies often mess it up. Most of the mistakes occur because the advertiser fails to consider how customers interact with the ad's medium. The media I see the most mistakes in are billboards and posters.

Walking down the streets of Philadelphia, I saw a textbook example of an ad that fails to deliver its message. Here's the ad:

This ad from SEPTA is a digital ad that appears for about 10 seconds before switching to an unrelated ad.

So, in those 10 seconds, the potential customer has to notice the ad, read it, see that it's relevant to them, figure out what action the ad wants them to take, and eventually take action on the ad.

Let's see how that fails step by step:

• Notice the ad: Since this ad probably has a pretty small segment that could take action, it's a crapshoot if anyone relevant will notice it because it's only showing for 10 seconds at a time.

• Read the ad: It's a lot of text to read. Unless someone catches the ad right as it appears, they're probably not making it to SEPTA's call to action.

• ​See the ad is relevant to them: The image on the ad appears to signal that it's relevant to SEPTA riders. But as soon as you start reading it, you realize it's either geared towards someone in talent acquisition or employee benefits. And it's unclear which of those is the intended target. Ads that don't clearly signal who they're for almost always perform poorly.

• Figure out what action the ad wants them to take: The call to action is to go to septa.org/PartnerPrograms. So, in the few seconds the potential customer may have left by the time they get to that point, they either have to remember that address (unlikely) or write it down for later use.

• Take action: Do you really think anyone will likely take action after wading through all that in 10 seconds?

The message must match the medium.

So, look at every ad you make and ask: Can the customer get the message? Will they be able to take the action I want?

Five-Bullet Book Summary: Almost Alchemy by Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is an expert in direct marketing. His books have been particularly influential in the success of small business entrepreneurs.

I’ve read several of his books over the last few years. This week, I’m highlighting one of his best books, which I’ve rarely seen mentioned.

Here’s a five-bullet summary of Almost Alchemy: How to Use Dynamic Financial Efficiencies & Strategies to Make Any Business of Any Size Produce More from Fewer and Less:

What it teaches you:

​How to get the greatest value from every dollar you invest in your business so that you can profitably outspend your competitors on customer acquisition and retention.

The big idea:

​Don’t fight an uphill battle against the market’s momentum. Figure out where the money in the market is moving. Then, invest your resources there. Go where the money is already flowing or where it will flow next.

Two key ideas:​

1. To grow your business, don’t only focus on acquiring customers. Get your existing customers to spend more with you. Figure out how you can serve your existing customers in other or more comprehensive ways.

2. Every dollar you spend advertising in one medium is a dollar you can’t spend elsewhere. So, don’t spend ad dollars places just because that’s where everyone else in your category spends their money. Instead, figure out places your potential customers are that your competitors are ignoring. If you spend your money there, you can focus less on being louder to stand out and more on delivering relevant messages.

A quote that stuck with me:

​“A girl scout in San Diego sold a staggering 300 boxes of cookies in under 5 hours, by placing herself and her sales table outside a marijuana dispensary. In this, there is a major lesson. If you have a good salesperson or sales team, you want to place them where they can be busy selling. You don’t want them 'prospecting'--that’s like asking a racehorse to also pull the hay-baler in the field to make his own feed.”

Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Writing, Branding, And Goal Setting

• Writing: The Daily Pressfield: A Teaching a Day from the Author of "The War of Art." Every morning this year, I've started my day with a chapter from The Daily Pressfield. Pressfield is best known for The Legend of Bagger Vance, but his books on writing are a goldmine of information. The Daily Pressfield is a great way to start your day if you're involved in any creative field. Click here to buy the book.​

• Branding: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland. Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK. I saw this one pop up several times on lists last year, so I'm finally getting to it. I'll include a five-bullet summary of it in the next couple of weeks. Click here to buy the book.

• Goal Setting: "Noah Kagan—How to Launch a Million Dollar Business This Weekend" on The Tim Ferriss Show. Kagan was an early employee at Facebook and is the founder of Appsumo. This podcast episode is a long one—it comes in slightly over four hours—but it has a lot of practical gems. One section that stood out was a segment on practical goal setting and tracking for organizations. It starts at the 47:12 mark and runs for about 19 minutes. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, or Tim's site. Or if video is your thing, you can find it on YouTube. (Note: The segment's start time on YouTube is slightly different. It's at 42:35).