by MJ DeMarco
On the internet, mocking convention works fabulously when combined with political incorrectness and humor. The Dollar Shave Club launched their company with a hilarious YouTube video and several years later, PooPourri did the same thing. The viral videos where shared millions of times, creating a swath of media attention and more importantly, customers.
Another mocker of convention is the Geico Insurance Company, which took typical situations and shattered them with the surprise punch line: “I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance.” Another Geico spot mocked convention when they aired a promo for a new reality TV series called “Tiny House.” The promo featured a newlywed couple in a midget-sized apartment who endure cramped quarters and rising marital tensions. The couple is shown hitting their heads on low ceilings and struggling for a good night’s sleep in a tiny bed. But wait, this expected convention of reality is only a ruse that bursts into unconvention when the announcer voices: “The drama will be real, but it won’t save you any money on car insurance.”
If you get someone’s attention, half the battle is won. The other half is letting selfishness take over your audience and tailor your messages to self-interest. In other words, the good old “What’s in it for me?” How about saving 15% or more on your car insurance?
What’s in It for Me?
It’s ironic: To succeed a Fastlane we must forsake selfishness yet satisfy the selfishness of others. Did I say this would be a cozy stroll down the beach?
The first human behavior you can count on is selfishness. People want what they want. People don’t care about you, your business, your product or your dreams; they want to help themselves and their family. It’s human nature. Therefore, our marketing messages must focus on benefits, not features.
People need to be told exactly what’s in it for them.
How will your product or service help them?
What’s the benefit?
In marketing speak, it’s called the “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM) principle.
My customers were small-business owners and yet I served millions of consumers, too. This intermediary relationship allowed me to study the behavior of both consumers and producers in a powerful, accelerated fashion. I learned things in weeks that would take educators months to learn. I noticed that small-business owners fall into their own selfish trap and love singing the praises of their company. They sell features, not realizing that people rent convenience and events, not limousines.
As consumers, we buy things to solve needs. We participate in transactions to fill voids.
You don’t buy a drill; you buy a hole.
You don’t buy a dress; you buy an image.
You don’t buy a Toyota; you buy reliability.
You don’t buy a vacation; you buy an experience.
We must become problem solvers and align our business as a savior to someone. Features must be translated into benefits. Does the fact you are the largest limousine company in Colorado solve my problem? It doesn’t until you translate that feature into a benefit.
Translating Features into Benefits
If you want to sell anything, translate features to benefits. A four-step process accomplishes this.
(1)Switch places.
(2)Identify features.
(3)Identify advantages.
(4)Translate advantages into benefits.
First, trade places with your typical buyer. Be them. Who are they? What is their modus operandi? Are they affluent CEO types? Or price-sensitive WalMart shoppers? Cash-strapped students? Or single moms? If you can’t identify your typical buyer, your results will be flawed and your benefit hidden. Once you identify your buyer, ask: What do they want? What do they fear? What problem do they need solved? Or do they just want to “feel” something?
For example, two brands of the same product could have two different buyers. A person who buys a Corvette has different psychological motives than someone who buys a Volvo. Both are cars, yet the Vette buyer isn’t buying basic transportation. He’s most likely a risk-taker, self-employed, independent, outspoken, and assertive. The Volvo buyer is probably more concerned with family and safety, likely conservative and analytical. Two totally different buyer profiles means each marketing message must be specifically targeted to the desires of each group.
After you switch places with your customer and grasp what they want, your next step is to isolate the product features. For my web service, I let my customers schedule their vehicles and target leads for each, by both date and service type. While these features were great, it was my responsibility to translate them to benefits. What makes them so great? What advantages do they offer my client?
After you isolate the features, translate those features into benefits, or a specific result. Extrapolate forward the benefit of that certain feature. This is where you drive home why someone should buy from you, versus the other guy.
For my web service, the seemingly simplistic feature of “upload pictures” translated to: “Quit wasting time with client meetings at garages. Upload photos of your fleet and show your clients your product!” The “target” feature translated to: “Target the clients you want—right down to the day, service, and vehicle type.” Schedule vehicles translated to: “Maximize your fleet’s road time and receive leads based on your vehicle availability!” Each feature transcribed to a specific benefit that would compel my buyer to join. I didn’t let them fill in the blanks; I filled in the blanks for them.
Using Price as a Branding Weapon
Price is like a paint job for your product or service.
My first taste of “paint” and its implications came young. I wasn’t much older than six or seven. Mom staged a two-day garage sale, and she permitted me to sell some toys and keep the money. One item I offered for sale was a “football clock,” a timekeeping monstrosity. I vividly remember its sale price—$2.55. A steal, I reasoned.
On the first day of the sale, my football clock gathered many looks, but no sale. My young mind plotted. How can I get $2.55 for my clock? I didn’t want to budge on my price, surely because $2.55 was the cost of some gadget I wanted to buy at the corner store. Then I had an idea.
I grabbed the masking tape Mom used for labeling prices. I tore four small pieces of tape and stuck them above the current price. Then on the first piece of tape, I boldly wrote $5.55 and crossed it out. The next piece of tape I wrote $4.50 and crossed it out. Then, $3.95, and the next $2.95. Each piece of tape successively had a lower price, clearly crossed out so buyers could see the “price reduction,” leaving the same old price of $2.55.
Now my clock was priced exactly the same, except it was presented differently. The taped higher prices, visibly slashed, conveyed two things: 1) A higher value and 2) A smoking deal.
And guess what? The second person to look at the clock bought it. I succeeded at reframing price in the mind of my buyer. Of course, at seven years old, I had no clue what “marketing” was, and I certainly didn’t know that my pricing scheme was indeed, a scheme. Yet this was my first marketing exposure and price’s implication to value.
Price Conveys More than Just Cost
Price is a brand-builder because price implies value. The more expensive your price, the higher its perceived value. The cheaper your price, well, the cheaper it will be perceived. Price isn’t just a number that tells someone cost. It conveys value and worth.
There’s an old story about how price equates to value. Cleaning his basement, a man found an old dresser and decided to give it away. He moved the dresser to the street corner and placed a sign atop it: FREE. Shockingly, the dresser stood there all day, and for several days thereafter. This confused the man because the dresser, albeit old, was in decent shape and just needed a quick wood stain for perfection. The man decided a new strategy was warranted. He went to the street corner and replaced the “FREE” sign with “$50.” Not an hour later, the dresser was stolen.
Same objective, different pricing strategy.
Unless price is your
brand (WalMart, Southwest Airlines), don’t let price steal your brand when it should be defining it. Price is more than just a competitive metric that slides up and down to sell goods faster. It also indirectly conveys the value of your product or service.
I had multiple competitors who undercut me by 10%, sometimes even 20%. Yet I continued to prosper. I wasn’t the cheapest, so why did I do well? My service had better value, and I kept my price correlated to that value. My leads were better targeted. I had better joint venture partners. I had great support. I was running a brand while my competitors were running businesses.
My artist friend, who painted the most exquisite, beautiful paintings, priced her work through her own limited price filter. She was a single mom living paycheck to paycheck. For her, $500 was an extraordinary amount, and because of that, she priced her works far below their true value. Her own corrupted vision of price distorted her earning power and degraded the perceived value of her work. I suggested a price increase. Take that $90 painting, make it $300, and see what happens. Sure enough, she sold just as much art at the higher price, because price implies value and defines brands.
Even in the Slowlane, pricing can play a role, in the form of a salary you’re willing to take. For example, this was posted at the Fastlane Forum:
A company placed two ads for only one web programmer position in the paper. One listed the salary as $120K a year. The other ad listed it for $32K a year. The first, higher paying ad received only about four responses. The second ad for MUCH less pay got over 100 responses. Most people have a lack of confidence in themselves and their ability and are willing to settle for so much less.
Are you settling for less in business? Is your warped frame of value corrupting your unrealized potential? The right pricing strategy is crucial to brand building and marketing. The wrong price conveys the wrong meaning. For industries with heavy commoditization, price is crucial. A public relations consultant can charge 30% higher than their competitors, but a gas station can’t.
While I’m not feminine or metrosexual, I have a fascination with designer purses because I admire their pricing strategy. How does a handbag sell for $4,000 when it probably costs them less than $100 to produce? Branding and marketing. Price is apart of the brand build.
Premium pricing is one of the many ways to get into the consumer’s head. But only if you can convince them of value beyond the cost of its practicality. What makes you different from the rest? Why should someone pay you more? As a marketer you have to drill into your buyer’s mind and get your brand differentiated. Own the consumer’s mind and you own the consumer.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
➡Marketing and branding (the queen) is the most powerful Fastlane tool.
➡Businesses survive. Brands thrive.
➡Businesses have identity crises, brands don’t. Identity crises force business owners into price commoditization.
➡Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) is a brand key and differentiates your company from the rest.
➡People have a natural desire to be unique and different.
➡Marketing success requires messages to break above the noise, or advertising clutter.
➡Polarization is a great above-the-noise tool if your product targets a polarized audience—usually politics, minority opinions, and even sports teams.
➡Sex sells and always draws eyeballs. (But can tarnish your brand image.)
➡Consumers make buying decisions based on emotions before practicality.
➡If you can arouse audience emotions, convincing customers to buy is easier.
➡People like talking about themselves. If you can incorporate interaction or “try before you buy” into your campaigns, you will have better success.
➡To be unconventional means to first isolate and identify what is conventional, then doing the opposite, or interrupting that convention.
➡Consumers are selfishly motivated. Always target your messages toward the predisposition of “What’s in it for me?”
➡Features are translated to benefits when you switch positions from producer to consumer, identify the feature’s advantages, and extrapolate those advantages into a specific result.
➡Price implicitly conveys value and worth.
➡Don’t allow your own perception of price lead your brand to mediocrity.
[44] - Choose Monogamy Over Polygamy
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
Cheating Spouses Aren’t Good Partners
As we near the end of our conversation; I must address the Fastlane’s need for faithfulness . . . monogamy.
In college, my friend Mark Tekel was quite the ambitious entrepreneur. And Mark, if you’re reading this, I apologize for the call out. But what the hell were you thinking?
Mark would get involved in a different business every week. One week it was some moronic MLM program, the next it was some turnkey ad scheme found in the back of an entrepreneur magazine, and the next it was some classified ad program. Different week, different opportunity. My friends eventually coined this opportunity-hopping neurosis the “Tekel Syndrome.”
The Tekel Syndrome is a compulsion to scatter your focus across different projects and opportunities. It’s also a symptom of money chasing versus need filling. When you invest your time into five different businesses, you become a polygamist-opportunist. The idea is to toss as much shit on the wall as possible because something’s gotta stick. Something’s gotta make me some money!
A scattered focus leads to scattered results.
Instead of one business that thrives, the polygamist-opportunist has 20 businesses that suck. Ten businesses earning $10,000 cumulatively are not better than one business that does it single-handedly.
When you segregate your effort among assets, you build weak assets.
Weak assets don’t do heavy lifting, and they don’t build strong pyramids.
Weak assets do not generate speed.
Weak assets do not scale to multimillion-dollar valuations.
Weak assets do not accelerate wealth; they build income to pay the month’s bills only to start again next month.
I dabbled into polygamy when I started another web business that mimicked my current company. Once launched, the new web business siphoned time from my core breadwinning company. In effect, I cheated on my spouse and it showed. Time once allocated to my thriving company now went to my infant company.
The results were not good, and I had four options: 1) Continue cheating on my existing business, 2) Hire someone to manage the existing business, 3) Hire someone to manage the new business, 4) Discontinue the new business.
Ultimately, I discontinued the new company, because I reasoned that hiring additional employees would inject management time into my life.
Monogamy Leads to Crazy Fun Polygamy!
I don’t know any highly successful polygamist-opportunists unless they were monogamous first.
Seriously, think about it.
The richest people in the world got rich by focusing on one core purpose, not by diverting focus. Lebron James wouldn’t be any good at basketball if he spread his interests around. He focused on one thing and one thing only: basketball. He ate, slept, and shit hoops. Now, with his legendary status and millions in net worth, he can afford to be polygamous with his interests.
To hit the top of your game, business or otherwise, you have to eat, live, and shit your thing. If you’re dabbling in 10 different things, your results will be dabbling and unimpressive. Focus on one thing and do it in the most excellent way.
Some of the greatest tech entrepreneurs built impressive companies by 100% committed focus, not diverted attentions into other ventures. After successful entrepreneurs hit the mother lode of wealth, then, and only then, do th
ey divert into other ventures that deviate from their core business. In other words, their monogamy led to polygamy.
What’s usually the first thing an entrepreneur does after they sell their company for $100 million? They go out and invest in multiple companies, get involved in philanthropy, and spread out their passions.
Why is polygamy now possible?
Money.
Money buys systems, like human resource systems, and money systems that buy time.
Fastlane success comes from monogamy; not split attentions among wives and mistresses. It’s marriage. Yes, good old-fashioned monogamy. Focus on one Fastlane business and kick ass at it.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
➡Tekel Syndrome sufferers are polygamist-opportunists who opportunity-hop.
➡A weak business commitment commits you to weak assets. Weak assets do not accelerate wealth.
➡The most successful entrepreneurs lived and breathed their business with 100% committed.
➡Successful business monogamy can lead to successful business polygamy, a diversification into many passionate interests and investments.
➡Save the “I have ten businesses” until after you sell one company for millions.
[45] - Put It Together: Supercharge Your Wealth Plan
Your choices are made in a moment, but their consequences will transcend a lifetime.
~ MJ DeMarco
Give Wealth a Supercharger
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. I’ve spun a lot of information your way and it’s time to put it together and take your first step. It’s time to unfold your process with concerted action. You now have the necessary psychological and mathematical framework that will give you better probabilities for wealth. To start your Fastlane financial road trip bolt on the F-A-S-T-L-A-N-E S-U-P-E-R-C-H-A-R-G-E-R, which is an acronym for the Fastlane process.
