Tag Archives: strategy

Feb 1 2009

Piggybacking trust

Telling somebody how great you are isn’t convincing.  In order for them to believe your assertion, you either have to prove it repeatedly with your actions (which can take months or even years), or you can piggyback on trust.  Here’s how to do the latter:

  1. Pick your target. This is someone who you want to have trust you as quickly as possible.  Your target can be anyone — a customer, a prospective employer, the most attractive girl at the bar, etc.
  2. Find out who your target already trusts. Track down their influencers.  Who has already done all the hard work for you and earned your target’s trust?  Is it an online message board?  A secretary?  The attractive girl’s group of friends?
  3. Establish your credibility with the influencers. You don’t have to earn their trust right away — you just need to prove you are legit.  Add value to the message board discussions by providing content/responses that other members will love.  Call up the secretary and be genuinely interested in what her work routine is like.  Make the attractive girl’s friends laugh.
  4. Give them a reason to talk to the target about you. Be remarkable and go over the top so that they’ll be really enthusiastic when you come up in their conversations.  Write a hilarious rant on the message board about all of the most popular members.  Mail the secretary a handwritten note the next day, thanking her for her time, and enclose an interesting article about that movie she referenced while you were talking with her.  Get extremely into Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” on karaoke night, complete with a face-melting air guitar solo on top of the bar.

After doing those kind of things, the influencers will actually want to talk to the target about you and they’ll have nothing but good things to say.  When they talk about how great you are, the target will actually believe it and will be about 100 times more receptive to whatever message you want them to hear.  That’s how you successfully piggyback trust, and you can work on building a deeper relationship from there.

Some of you might think piggybacking trust is kind of devious because it’s consciously using people as a means to an end.  But the nature of these interactions really depends on the person who is executing the strategy.  You can be a sleazeball if you want, or you can be ethical and caring.  It’s really up to you, but approaching it from a moral standpoint will yield far greater results in the long run (for your bottom-line, happiness, etc.).

Piggybacking trust is just a smarter way to promote yourself.  It’s a circuitous strategy that enables you to build a relationship very quickly.  Most of us take an unexamined, one-dimensional approach to earning someone’s trust, which is why most of our approaches will fall short of expectations.  For instance:

A company wants everyone to love them and buy their products after seeing their clever Super Bowl ad…

A college grad wants an employer to see how smart she is by emailing them a boring, bullet-pointed, Times New Roman, cookie-cutter resume…

A desperate guy wants an attractive girl to realize how awesome he is, even though they’re in a crowded and noisy bar with way too many distractions…

The company, the grad, and the desperate guy all have one thing in common: they don’t deserve what they want because they haven’t earned their target’s trust. This ultimately stems from them being selfish and egocentric.  They need to put themselves in their target’s shoes and find out who influences them.

The company wants to provide value to their customers, so they should join a select message board and interact with the community.  It will help them understand their customers better and ultimately improve their business.  They’re not trying to make a quick buck — they’re in it for the long haul.

The grad wants to get a job at Company X, so she needs to distinguish herself from every other applicant.  She can’t expect them to notice her because she’ll be in a stack of hundreds of other faceless resumes.  If she spends 15 minutes on the phone making the secretary feel special and appreciated, then the secretary will be sure to put in a good word for her to the person who makes the hiring decisions.

And every guy wants to have the most attractive girl in the bar interested in them.  So why do so many of them try to sell themselves with their self-aggrandizing prattle?  She doesn’t care how great you say you are — you just met her and therefore you have no credibility.  We’re social animals and our opinions are swayed by what the people we trust think.  So make her friends laugh and ensure that they’re having a good time while they’re around you.  Once they give you their approval and actually enjoy your company, you’ve won.

And even if they don’t like you, at least you rocked the house with your sweet karaoke performance.  You win either way.

Jan 29 2009

Adaptation

I was talking with a guy the other day who has been running a successful video editing business for many years now.  His company specializes in corporate shoots, which can be anything from commercials to internal office videos used for training.

He was telling me about their methods and why they’d been able to do so well, when he said something that really surprised me:

“We’re stuck in our ways.  The video editing business has taken a pretty hard hit this year, and we’re not doing very well.  But our methods are tried and true, and we stick to them year-after-year.”

Those weren’t his exact words, but they’re pretty close.  The thing that surprised me was that his voice swelled with pride when he said that.

Why on earth would someone be proud that they’re stuck in their methods? A company that doesn’t test, experiment, or take any risks is a company that will never be the industry leader.  He might think that the recession is the cause of his business’ downturn, but there are still opportunities out there that he’s missing.  So why not try something new?  Why not venture more into online video?  Or better yet: he could market his business as the best online video company in the state.

Why don’t more companies have an evolutionary mindset?  Force a mutation into your business’ DNA to differentiate your company from all the others, instead of just playing it safe.  Because if there’s one thing that’s become very clear to me over the past few years, it’s this: playing it safe will always yield mediocre results.

If you don’t adapt to the changing environment, your business will die.

Jan 9 2009

The art of polarization

I just finished “Positioning” by Al Ries & Jack Trout (the authors of one of my favorite marketing books, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing“).  A bit outdated but still an extremely important book.

Originally, I planned on covering the important concepts like I did in the post on “Grapevine,” but I decided to share one of the more memorable examples from the book instead:

Sometimes you can want too much.  You can want to own a position that’s too broad… This, of course, is the everybody trap, and one example is a famous campaign for a beer called Rheingold.  This brewery wanted to preempt New York City’s working class… So they produced some marvelous commercials featuring Italians drinking Rheingold, Blacks drinking Rheingold, Irish drinking Rheingold, Jews drinking Rheingold, and so on.

Well, rather than appeal to everybody, they ended up appealing to nobody.  The reason was simple.  Prejudice being a basic human commodity, the fact that one ethnic group drank Rheingold sure didn’t impress another ethnic group.  In fact, all the campaign did was alienate every ethnic group in New York.

Trying to be everything to everyone is a recipe for failure.  You have to decide who you will not market to.  In fact, it can be extremely beneficial (and profitable) to actively exclude other groups.  You will polarize the crowd — most will dislike you, but the rest will become your diehard fans.  In a world where most businesses have castrated themselves with “safe” and “politically correct,” you will stand above the mediocre.

If no one is discontent and the response to your product is tepid, you screwed up.

May 25 2008

Microsoft has been done for awhile

From Tim O’Reilly’s Radar:

Microsoft was once motivated by its own Big Hairy Audacious Goal: “a computer on every desk and in every home.” They achieved that goal, and ever since, they’ve drifted. Now their only goal seems to be to stay on top of the heap. They need to stop focusing on eating other people’s lunch and start thinking deeply about what kind of goals might stretch the company once again.

Microsoft is probably one of the best examples of this “big company” mentality. This seems to happen all the time. A company comes on the scene with a vision and a great product/service, and as soon as they become dominant in their category, they forget to realign their strategies. They milk their product for all it’s worth (which is the right thing to do), but they also try to play catch up with their competitors. This is a waste of resources, typically. It’s especially true when a company puts their name on a new product that doesn’t really fit with them. (Donald Trump is the absolute worst at this, and while he’s a smart businessman for the most part, he’s notorious for idiotic line extensions. Trump vodka? Trump steak? Come on, put your ego aside and think about what you’re doing.)

The Microsoft Zune? No one is going to take down the iPod in the portable digital music player industry unless its Apple replacing it with something better. Microsoft Live? No one is going to take down Google anytime soon, and the company that will sure as hell won’t be Microsoft. The problem with this company is that they’re trying to be everything their competitors already are. They’ll imitate any company that poses any sort of threat to them. They make no attempt to be the leader of the pack anymore. There’s no strategy because they never were the innovators; they were just the smart business people.

Microsoft is every big company who doesn’t understand the importance of vision. Microsoft’s vision was to have a computer in every home. They essentially accomplished that goal long ago. They’re desperately looking for new sources of revenue because their competitors are so much better than they are. Instead of redefining their vision, they follow others. They’re toast, and have been that way for awhile.

If you are a big company, DON’T follow what your competitors are doing. Stick to your guns. Guns = what’s your really good at and what your customers know you’re good at. Microsoft isn’t Google, Nintendo, or Apple. Stop pretending and define yourself.