The Brain Audit
Page 12
If you go to the website at The Benjamin, you can’t actually find their sleep guarantee (well, I searched, and I couldn’t find it). And while the hotel is covered regularly in the press for their uniqueness, there’s almost no mention of it on the website (where I’d look first, if I wanted to book a hotel).
It’s not enough to simply have a uniqueness. You need to tell the world about it.
To be fair, the website has been updated to reflect the fact that The Benjamin does sponsor the ‘Great American Sleep Challenge’ and the ‘National Sleep Awarness Week’. But enamoured as I am with this hotel, I don’t see the connection. I don’t see the uniqueness, unless I actually was aware of the uniqueness in advance.
And this brings us to a very pertinent point.
It’s not enough to have a uniqueness. It’s critical to propagate the uniqueness everywhere. On your website, in your brochures, in your speeches, in your presentations and wherever you’re sending out messages to your customers.
But how do we know if our customers are indeed receiving the message?
That’s quite an easy answer actually. Ask a customer what Volvo stands for, and pop comes the answer. If your customer can’t tell you the uniqueness of a brand in a millisecond, then either you don’t have a uniqueness, or you’ve failed to make the uniqueness well known.
Sigh!
Deep sigh!
So many of us are afraid to stand out.
So many businesses lose customers and suffer the ignominy of ridiculous pricing, simply because they won’t sit down and work out their uniqueness. And then having worked it out, they do nothing with it. Or worse, in an attempt to get a message across, they bring out several factors, and completely water down the message.
You see, The Benjamin may have the most delicious vegetarian meals in Manhattan. They may have a one-of-a-kind sparkling wine from Italy. They may have movie stars staying at their hotel. They may be really pet-friendly. They may have this and they may have that. And if they were to succumb to the temptation of trying to say it all, they’d simply water down the uniqueness.
It simply wouldn’t be one thing.
The logo test instantly tells you if your product is unique—or not.
But pray, how do you know that the one thing you’ve chosen works as well as it should? Well, we already know that you can ask your customer and gauge their response. But before you do get to the customer, you have to test it out yourself so that you don’t end up with egg on your face. Because your uniqueness may not be so unique after all.
So here’s a little trick to find out if your uniqueness works.
Take the logo of your product or service. And slap your uniqueness under that logo. Now swap your logo with another company’s logo. Does the uniqueness still work? It does, doesn’t it?
You’ll find it hard to admit, and you’ll argue that your uniqueness is indeed unique. Then along comes the customer. And you ask them for the uniqueness, and guess what happens next? Yup, the customer stumbles, fumbles and you’ve got your proof.
The proof is that your uniqueness is unknown to the customer.
No one knows it, or understands it. But they do understand the uniqueness of Volvo and The Benjamin. And Volvo and The Benjamin must have had to do the same soul-searching to begin with. They too would have had the most frustrating, screaming board meetings. They too would have had their doubts.
It’s when you bite the bullet and stand for one thing that you really create a uniqueness factor. And that uniqueness factor creates the basis for everything you do and say. Which when you think about it, is a big relief. Because no matter if you’re an atom-sized business or a big business, there’s a uniqueness waiting for you. There’s always an angle that you haven’t discovered.
And yes, you’ve understood that you need to work on your company’s uniqueness, but you still resist. You find all the reasons to avoid going through this uniqueness exercise.
Somehow this uniqueness factor seems like too much hard work.
And it is. But that’s precisely why you should do the hard work. For one, it creates a sense of clarity of who you are. Your customers understand why they choose you instead of the competition. And because it’s so much hard work, your competition will keep procrastinating, and give you a massive headstart, and even get some of your competitor’s customers over to your side of the fence.
And there’s one more big reason why you need to define your uniqueness sooner than later.
Imagine you took the six bags off the conveyor belt.
Would you have done enough of the grunt-work? Technically yes. But if you don’t remove the seventh bag—the bag called ‘Uniqueness’—all you’ve really done is set up the customer to go to the competition.
You’ve given your customer lots of information, but without a factor of uniqueness, your product/service appears to be exactly like the next person’s product/service.
You may not agree. You may say you’re absolutely unique. That you’re different in a lot of ways. But the customer isn’t in your ‘store’ to listen to your rants. They want to know why they should buy from you. It’s your job to make that uniqueness simple and dramatic enough.
So how do you go about creating a uniqueness factor for your company? You do it in steps.
Steps to The Uniqueness
Tah-dah, here are the steps you need to take to make your business unique.
Step 1: Make a big list of what makes your business unique
Step 2: Weighted ranking will help you decide on the most important reason
Step 3: Flesh out the uniqueness to create more clarity.
Step 1: Make a big list of what makes your business unique.
Sit down and brainstorm with others in your company. And if you’re a tiny business, sit down and brainstorm with a friend, or some people who know you well. You may find a spouse or partner to be very helpful as well.
What’s important when you’re doing this brainstorming, is to write down everything—no matter how ridiculous it may sound. Just write down the list. Don’t analyse.
Step 2: Use weighted ranking to decide.
Weighted ranking will help you decide what you consider to be the most important factor of uniqueness for your company. Using weighted ranking is effective, because it clearly shows a preference.
Step 3: Flesh out the uniqueness to create more clarity.
Now that you’re clear what you’d like to be unique at, you need to bring more colour and detail to that uniqueness. It’s not enough for you to understand what the unique factor is all about. It’s important for the customer to know as well.
So let’s find out how The Benjamin could have gone about this exercise [13]
What is weighted ranking?
Weighted ranking is used for more accurate decision-making. Usually when we’re asked to make a decision, we’re often asked to numerically rank a list in the order of importance. e.g. 10 is the least important, and 1 is the most important. This method is flawed, because it forces you to choose one over the other. So if you were given a choice between coffee, tea and hot chocolate, you may prefer hot chocolate on some days and tea on other days. And not drink coffee at all. But when forced to rank, then you may vote a tea over a hot chocolate. So your ranking may end up looking like this:
1- Tea
2- Hot chocolate
3- Coffee.
This is inaccurate, because you love hot chocolate as much as tea. And you don’t like coffee at all. And hence the ranking above would be mostly inaccurate. However, if you use weighted ranking, you’re responding to a question based on your preference. So if I were to give you ten votes, and tell you to allocate those votes between tea, coffee and hot chocolate, then the result may look like this:
Tea - 5 votes
Hot Chocolate - 5 votes
Coffee - 0 votes.
Suddenly there’s a marked change in our understanding. This weighted ranking tells us that both tea and hot chocolate are equally desir
able. And coffee is eeeyuck!
Of course we could just as easily end up with a result like this:
Tea - 7 Votes
Hot Chocolate - 3 Votes
Coffee - 0 Votes.
This shows our clear preference, and hence is more accurate than ranking a list numerically.
Weighted ranking really gets your brain churning. It forces you to choose based on your preference, instead of simply ranking what’s important and what’s not.
Step 1: Make a big list of what makes your business unique?
1) Super fast broadband access
2) Food at ungodly hours
3) Great bathrooms
4) Good night’s sleep.
Step 2: Weighted ranking that could have ended up like this:
1) Super fast broadband access - 0 votes
2) Food at ungodly hours - 2 votes
3) Great bathrooms - 3 votes
4) Outstanding beds - 5 votes.
Now we have a clear winner.
Step 3: Flesh out the uniqueness to create more clarity.
This is where the concept is fleshed out. What does ‘a good night’s sleep’ mean? As you can see, The Benjamin went into considerable detail. They considered pillows, and guest rooms that started five stories above street level, and soundproof windows; luxury sheets; aromatherapy; massages; satin sleep masks; tips for “executive” naps; a menu of 11 special pillows, including the “Snore-No-More”; and special sleep-inducing foods, like banana bread with peanut butter.
And the list is only part of the ‘fleshing out’ of the ‘a good night’s sleep’. The Benjamin is focusing their entire energy on ‘a good night’s sleep’. So much so, that if they do a good job of propagating the uniqueness, their customers will know exactly why they choose The Benjamin, when there are scores of other hotels in New York.
But there’s a downside to this uniqueness exercise.
You can clearly see how a company can stand out from its competition. But then when you sit down to do your own uniqueness, you end up being vague.
So how do we know if we’re being vague?
I worked with a bread company. And their bread was extremely fresh
But everyone says: Our bread is fresh.
So how do you qualify freshness?
They actually never let their bread stay for more than two days on the supermarket shelves. But the customers never did know it (they still don’t).
And so the bread brand fights against cheaper bread brands.
What’s more interesting is that their bread would get mouldy in about 4-5 days if left in moist conditions. So people would think their bread was not good, because the other bread wouldn’t get mouldy. But the fact was that good bread does get mouldy, because good bread has no preservatives. Crappy bread can be left out forever, and it stays just fine. Because it’s loaded with preservatives.
Terms like ‘fresh’ or ‘quality’ or ‘service’ are useless. How ‘fresh is fresh?’ Two minute old? Two days old? Two weeks old? Ooh, what’s that fishy smell?
But what if you want to preserve bread to oven-freshness?
Put it in the freezer as fast as possible. Then simply heat it, and it puffs back to normal freshness.
Now I could go on and on, about bread.
And you’d continue to be interested.
But this bread company didn’t think a customer would be interested.
They thought the facts were boring.
You don’t think they’re boring, do you?
They could own the market with the word ‘fresh’, but they don’t.
And they won’t. Unless they educate their customers about what freshness means.
What does freshness mean?
What does quickest mean?
What does quality mean?
What does fun mean?
What does structure mean?
As a customer I want specifics.
The Benjamin fleshes out the detail, but most companies simply stick to something vague like ‘we have the best quality. Or we have the best service’.
Ugh!
Don’t be silly. Qualify your uniqueness. Flesh it out. Make it alive not just for your own business, but make it alive for your customers as well. And that’s how you get a factor of uniqueness. [14]
And yes, we’ve taken all those seven bags off the conveyor belt. It’s now time to summarise, give you some check lists and help you create your own audit.
So a check-listing we go. But first let’s detour back to our two recurring examples and put the finishing touch.
Website strategy workshop
Target Profile: Howard R.
Problem: How do I grow my internet business, without compromising on my ethics?
Solution: Here’s how to create a website strategy that’s ethical, yet extremely profitable.
Objections:
- Not sure if I have time to implement more information
- Travel always takes time and energy
- I’ve just got myself a project manager which leaves me with fewer discretionary dollars
- Not sure if there’s an overlap of information from other courses
- I don’t need more tactics. What I need is a strategy.
Testimonial:
“I figured the website workshop would be a rehashing of older material.”
Before the website workshop, I had my doubts about what I could learn. I have been on 5000bc for more than a year, read The Brain Audit - I’m even in the Protégé program. So I was a little skeptical about hearing anything new; I figured it’d be a rehashing of older material.
I also didn’t know how I would swing the time away - I’ve been so busy implementing the Protégé teachings, and I was concerned that this might take me off-target.
And here’s what I found:
I don’t think I can really put into words how comprehensive and integrative the class was. We learned amazing material. We learned how to apply it to our businesses. We discussed and shared with others, so it wasn’t just direct learning, it was tangential - we were “cross-pollinated” by everyone else’s epiphanies, so the learning was exponential. It was pretty darn amazing!
Risk Reversal:
1) Money-Back Guarantee
2) Ask-Anyone Guarantee.
Uniqueness: No information dump. It’s not a blah, blah information dump. You get all the information weeks in advance, so you can assimilate the information. Then at the workshop, we work through specific concepts making it a reality.
An allergy clinic
Target Profile: Tricia M.
Problem: How do I get rid of my allergic reaction to wine?
Solution: Here’s how you can get rid of the allergic reaction in less than 24 hours (and without any pills or medication whatsoever).
Objections:
- I’ve tried these anti-allergy clinics before and it didn’t work for me
- The treatment seems to be quite expensive
- Will I have to go for several treatments on a recurring basis?
- What if the treatment doesn’t work for me?
Testimonial:
“I thought the treatment would be quite expensive. And I was right!”
The treatment was quite expensive. But was it worth the expense? Let’s see. I’ve had this allergy for well over twelve years. And no matter what I did to get rid of the allergy, nothing seemed to work.
In fact, when I really think about it, I may have spent far more money popping some kind of anti-allergy pills that only brought me temporary relief.
And here’s what I found:
The allergy clinic treatment on the other hand, worked like magic. It’s been six months since I’ve sneezed. And I can tell you I’ve been enjoying my red wine. I no longer have to rush home early with my face all puffy and red-eyed. I can stay and enjoy the company of my friends. And of course, when my husband and I spend a romantic dinner, I can enjoy a glass or two of fine wine, and the evening doesn’t end up with me having to d
rink tomato juice instead!
Risk Reversal:
1) Testimonials of clients with similar issues
2) No pills or invasive techniques guarantee.
Uniqueness: Fixes the problem permanently within 24 hours of treatment.
Summary: The Uniqueness
There’s a fundamental flaw in uniqueness. We’re asked to slap a uniqueness onto our business. And because we simply attach a uniqueness to our business, the uniqueness appears cheesy. And forced.
Finding a uniqueness is a pretty tough job. Clients aren’t much help. Family or friends aren’t much help either. And the reason why finding a uniqueness is such a tough job, is because you’re trying to ‘find’ uniqueness.
Instead of finding your uniqueness, it’s easier (and more efficient) to create your uniqueness. To create your uniqueness, all you have to do is make a wish for your customers. If there is one thing you’d wish to improve in the life of your customers, what would that one thing be?
One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. One thing. I’ve had to say ‘One thing’ ten times, just to remind you that it’s easy to be tempted to choose two things. Or more. e.g. Dominos Pizza chose speed of delivery. The Benjamin chose an ‘excellent night’s sleep.’ One thing!
The three reasons to create uniqueness are:
a) You can make your company’s offering simple and understandable.