These 3 Customer Strategies Will Keep You Relevant

Do you ever stop and think about how fast the world moves?

Something always changes. And it seems like every week, there’s some new trend affecting your customers that you need to be aware of. New is the new normal.

But some things always remain true.

This week’s newsletter focuses on three strategies to help you stay relevant no matter what else changes.

This Week:

• Marketing: How LinkedIn Misses The Point, Again

• Branding: Is Scott Galloway Right? Is Branding Dead?

• Advertising: The Ultimate Customer Motivation Cheat Sheet

• Three Other Things: Tomatoes, Mystery, and Benchmarks

Marketing: How LinkedIn Misses The Point, Again

Last week, LinkedIn earned my marketing fail of the week.

They announced three games you can play on the platform. Their VP and Editor-in-Chief Daniel Roth excitedly claimed:

They're obviously trying to jump on the popularity of online word games like Wordle.

LinkedIn editor Ruiqi Chen announced:

Yes, word games are popular.

But LinkedIn misses one thing crucial to customer behavior:

Context.

People come to LinkedIn for work. To find a job, network, or get new business. Not to play around.

Harley riders don't act like bikers when they're at work as a doctor, seeing patients. They do that at HOG rallies.

Walmart has more of Tiffany's demographic than Tiffany's does. But they're not creating a high-end jewelry line.

Customers behave differently under different circumstances.

LinkedIn missed a key idea:
​Your product should never be for the whole customer. It should be for a specific part of their life.

Solve a problem. Not every problem.

You need to:

• Figure out why they come to you.

• Create products that help them in a specific way.

• Ignore everything else.

Focus on what your customers want from you.

Not what they want from everything in their lives.

Branding: Is Scott Galloway Right? Is Branding Dead?

Scott Galloway has made a successful living from controversial opinions.

Over the last week, marketers have been throwing hissy fits over Galloway's comments about the death of branding on Josh Evans's Uncensored CMO podcast.

Galloway talks about the death of branding for 6 minutes, but here's the heart of his argument:

Marketers are in a fit over the idea that the most successful companies are no longer investing in branding.

My take: Galloway and the hissy-fit-throwing marketers have both gotten in wrong.

Branding is about creating a preference for a product. And there are many ways to do that. One of the weakest is solely through advertising.

But that way worked well for a long time.

The biggest brands had a lot of money to spend constantly reminding the public of who they are and what they offer. They had so much money that the barrier to entry for new brands was incredibly high.

But the potential for a new brand to enter the market and dominate was always there. It was just unlikely.

In 1940s Victor Schwab wrote about this situation:

This big-idea advertising that Galloway talks about is a type of reminder advertising. It reinforces an idea over and over again. It makes a company top-of-mind when a customer considers a purchase.

Product could always win. It was just unlikely because the barrier to entry was so high, so it rarely did.

You have to solve customer problems. And nothing can do that better than a product. So, if you have a superior product and you get it into people's hands, a well-advertised inferior product can't beat it.

A superior product will always have a higher preference. And since branding is everything you do to increase preference, product preference can't be divorced from branding.

Product only seems like it's suddenly the "new black again"—as Galloway puts it—for two reasons.

First, the internet has made the barrier to entry for creating, distributing, and marketing a product much lower. It's easier to get a product into the market and into people's hands. So, more products have the potential to break through and become category leaders. This is just purely odds.

Second, the VC investments driving a lot of big product launches are purely odds games for products. The investors throw handfuls of darts, hoping one or two stick. That's how they make money. They know the failure rate is high. And the creators of those products rarely know much about branding. They often don't even know the real benefits of their products until years down the line. And they use brute force methods to get products in people's hands, hoping they'll stick.

Together, this creates a glut of products hitting the market, with some incredibly well-funded.

Some break through.

But ultimately this creates an environment where many great products fail. There's just so much out there. And they never get the chance to succeed.

In this environment, branding becomes even more critical, not less.

A great product will beat a lousy product with a great brand. But when you have a lot of great products competing with each other, branding can help your product stick.

Having a great brand alone is no longer enough to succeed.

But without branding strategies and tactics to increase preference, it will be harder and harder to stand out.

Branding gives you that extra edge to win.

Branding isn't dead. It's now forced to do what it always should have done: enhance a great product.

• Click here to watch or listen to the episode "Scott Galloway on the end of the brand era, monetising rage and how to create wealth" on Uncensored CMO. The piece on branding begins around 33:57 and lasts for about 6 minutes.

Advertising: The Ultimate Customer Motivation Cheat Sheet

Advertising should make customers believe you will make their lives better.

Using your products changes their lives in some way. It doesn't have to be a significant change. But something has to change.

The common wisdom is that you should improve their lives in one of three categories: health, wealth, or relationships.

And that's true. But there are so many ways you can improve their lives.

Last week, I came across a list of 40 ways you can offer to improve customers' lives. It's the most comprehensive list I've found.

I found it hidden in Victor Schwab's How To Write A Good Advertisement from 1942.

The list is just as relevant today.

Schwab breaks the 40 customer motivations into four categories:

People Want to GAIN…

• Health

• Time

• Money

• Popularity

• Improved appearance

• Security in old age

• Praise from others

• Comfort

• Leisure

• Pride of accomplishment

• Advancement: business, social

• Increased enjoyment

• Self-confidence

• Personal prestige

People Want to BE…

• Good parents

• Sociable, hospitable

• Up-to-Date

• Creative

• Proud of their possessions

• Influential over others

• Gregarious

• Efficient

• "First" in things

• Recognized as authorities

People Want to DO…

• Express their personalities

• Resist domination by others

• Satisfy their curiosity

• Emulate the admirable

• Appreciate beauty

• Acquire or collect things

• Win others' affection

• Improve themselves generally

People Want to SAVE…

• Time

• Money

• Work

• Discomfort

• Worry

• Doubts

• Risks

• Personal embarrassment

It's a powerful list to keep in mind while creating ads. So, I turned it into an infographic.

​Click here to download a high-resolution copy of the Customer Motivation infographic.

Three Other Things: Tomatoes, Mystery, and Benchmarks

• Tomatoes: Summer’s coming. In Philly, that means tomato season hits, and there will be BLTs everywhere. But only for a few short months. And that got me thinking: in marketing, we often don’t think about the seasonality of messages beyond major holidays. But the customer isn’t the same customer all year long. Just like tomatoes, they’re affected by the time of the year.

• Mystery: Do you ever let your customers discover something on their own? In marketing, we often get too obsessed with telling customers everything about ourselves. But when customers put in some work and discover something on their own, they deepen their preference for a brand. Don’t hide anything from them, but help them discover something rather than just telling them.

• Benchmarks: Twenty years ago, I took my first acting class. We had to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was the first play I had ever seen. I thought it was great. The rest of the class thought it was horrible. They were right. They knew more about theater than I did. Their bar for quality was much higher. This experience drove home the point that you need to have appropriate benchmarks to judge the quality of your work. The best talk on the importance of benchmarks I’ve seen comes from chef Jeremiah Tower. Tower was responsible for igniting the farm-to-table movement in the US. As Tower says, “Quality is only barely subjective.” Below is a photo of the prep instructions Tower gave new employees for lettuce.