Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck...
(What, No Goose?)

By  Rich Harshaw

Standing out from the crowd. Letting prospects know your company is different. Showing the masses that your business is a golden goose hidden in a gaggle of ducks. There's no doubt that differentiating your business has become increasingly difficult, and for a variety of reasons.  In previous articles we've talked about how television spawned the era of the brand builders, how the C & R formula took over, and how using platitudes in marketing became standard protocol. Those factors converged to dupe millions of business owners into unwittingly spewing billions of platitudes on the marketplace for the last half-hundred years.  And now for the bad news--platitude-laced, underleveraged marketing messages are only a part of the challenge to achieve separation in the marketplace. Why? Because the sheer number of "ducks" has increased significantly in the last 20 years... making it hard for a goose to get noticed.

Quick review: The era of the brand builders (1950's to 1980's) was a time of industry consolidation, which resulted in relatively few companies offering products and services. And because there were fewer competitors, companies didn't have to offer a lot of choices to their customers. Remember back in the day when there was only one phone company and you could only buy the phones for your house directly from them? Remember how many different choices of styles and colors there were? Only about 2 styles existed--the wall mount and the desk model, and they came in about 3 colors each... black, white, and green. I think they introduced turquoise in the 70's.  That was pretty much it.

Back then, grocery stores didn't have to be supermarkets because their just weren't that many brands, styles, and varieties being manufactured. It was either Crest or Colgate, end of discussion. If you went to the Yellow Pages in a major city in 1980 to find a moving company, you would have found about 30 or so different companies to choose from. I'm not saying that 30 competitors isn't a lot... but compare that to now... you would find over 300 companies listed! You would think that finding a goose among ducks would be difficult enough--but now add 300 competitors, and your prospects' task is more like trying to find the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack!

We call the days of relative--and I want to emphasize the word relative--low competition the "days of simple selling." In the days of simple selling, things were a lot less sophisticated, and it used to be easier for a company or a sales person to get an opportunity to sell. Compared to now, there was low competition, low information, low media coverage, and low technology. Those factors all limited consumer selection and increased the power that sellers had over buyers. Think about it, back then, if you wanted a different kind of telephone, you couldn't get one. It simply wasn't available. Complaining to the phone company would yield zero results. The basic attitude of business was "You know what we have for sale; take it or leave it. But if you leave it, you're out of luck because nobody else sells it."

Think about it in your personal life. Let's say that in 1975 you wanted to buy a Ford pickup truck. Where did you go to buy it? That's right, the dealership. Which dealership? THE dealership...probably the only one anywhere near where you lived. You couldn't hop on the internet and search 500 different websites. You couldn't go to Barnes & Noble and get 15 magazines that allowed you to compare trucks and know prices. You couldn't drive around to 10 or 15 different dealerships and get the absolute lowest rock-bottom price like you can now. Back then, you basically only had one source of information--the salesperson at the dealership. So you went in there, got hammer-dunked by the sales person, and bought the truck because it was basically your only option if you wanted a FORD truck. See, back then, the SELLER had the power, and the buyer was at his mercy. 

Back then there weren't 5,000 people calling you everyday asking you to switch your long distance carriers, and over 300 different choices in the phone book for a mover? There weren't 31 varieties of pop tarts and 66 kinds of toothpaste. In the case of sales, you could call a prospect on the phone and say "Hey, I've got this great new gizmo that will lower your operating expenses by 33%", and he'd say, "Wow! That sound's interesting. Come on over and show me." And you'd say, "Would tomorrow at 10:00 o'clock or Thursday at 2:00 be better?" Then you'd go over there, use a bunch of tie-downs, trial closes, and hard closes, and walk out with a check. Or you could slap an ad together for the newspaper or the local radio, and you'd generate leads. Menu-board-style, institutional, it wasn't really that big of a deal. Now, I know that I'm over-simplifying, but the essence is true. An aggressive company that just showed up would generally be successful. Not any more.

Now it's definitely different. Now there are tons choices available to the consumer. Now the buyer can go out there without fear of being beaten up by the salesman. Now, in today's internet, instant-information, tons of choices marketplace, the BUYER has the power. Walk into Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal-Mart, and you might find as many as 120 different styles and brands of telephones. And that's good, right? Well, it's good for the buyer! But if you're reading this article, I'm sure you're more concerned about finding ways to sell more, not buy!

In this cluttered environment, there are so many competitors SAYING so many different things, but because they're all almost saying everything with the same meaningless platitudes that actually DON'T communicate any worthwhile information...that the BUYERS--even though they have the power--can't tell who offers the best value--or if any of the competitors offer a superior value. We call this condition NOISE--and it's created a huge GAP in the sales process that allows the buyer to keep the seller as far away as possible.

We call this gap the "Confidence Gap" because it represents the customer's inability to have confidence that ANY of the products or any of the services are any different or any better or any worse than any of the others. Let me repeat that one more time.... The confidence gap is the customer's inability to have confidence that ANY of the products or any of the services are any different or any better or any worse than any of the others. To the buyer, all things appear to be equal. That's why they end up shopping price; they're not deciding based on value. 

So here's the mess we've got now: because of the era of the brand builders, companies have learned to use the C & R formula, which results in a glut of platitudes littered throughout institutional and menu-board style marketing and advertising. Now we throw into the mix the fact that there a quad-billion competing companies out there all using the same indistinguishable drivel, and you can really see why I can say that everything you've ever learned, everything you've ever done, everything you've ever thought about marketing... it's all WRONG. The convergence of these factors over the last 50 years has brought us to a situation where the problem is absolutely pervasive, yet practically unrecognized, meaning the problem is unlikely to be fixed by all but the savviest of business people who realize an opportunity when they see one. Or in other words, "Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck... NO GOOSE."

Show Me 10 Good Ads... If You Can Find Them!

How big is this problem? Let me give you a historical analogy to make the point. Do you remember the story from the Old Testament about Abraham and the two wicked cities named Sodom and Gomorrah? God is sitting there talking to Abraham one day and He says, "You know Sodom and Gomorrah? They're so wicked that I think I'm going to just wipe them both out." Abraham says, "Hey hold on a second. I know people there you can't just wipe them out!" God says, "Well they're just so wicked that I've got to do something." And Abraham says "Well what about the righteous people? Won't you save the cities to spare the righteous people?"

God thinks about it for a moment and says, "Abraham, I'll tell you what: You go out and find some righteous people, prove that they're there, and if you can find them, I'll save the cities."  Abraham says, "How many righteous people are we talking about here?" God replies, "Look, just find fifty, and I'll call off the fireworks." Abraham considers the enormity of the task and retorts, "Perchance I only find forty-five?" And with that, the negotiations were on!  God comes back with, "Fine, find forty-five." Abraham counters with forty. God says fine. Finally, after some serious negotiations, Abraham gets God pinned clear down to ten. He then begins his search, but in the end, he can only come up with one, his nephew Lot. We know the end of the story, right? The fireworks were on! God let's loose his best show since the flood and destroyed the two wicked cities.

Okay, fast forward 4,000 or so years to now. I'm going to grab my local yellow pages directory here in Dallas where I live. I'd invite you to do the same and grab the yellow pages where you live. My book is so big that they had to split it into two books, with a sum total of 2,017 pages. How big is yours? I'm sure if you live in a town of any size at all, it's a minimum of several hundred pages clear up to a few thousand. Okay, now here's what I want you to do with it: Show me fifty good ads--just 50 ads that accomplish marketing's basic functions like we've discussed. If you can do that, if you can point to 50 good ones, then you can be excused from reading the rest of this article series. If you can find 50 good ads, then the problem that I'm describing does not exist, and the MYM program isn't needed. Show me fifty good ads out of over ten thousand ads on more than 2,000 pages. If you can do that, then there's no reason to listen to a word I'm saying. Can't do it? Okay, show me 45. How about 40? 10?

See my point? This problem of crummy marketing and advertising is prevalent and it affects you personally in your business. I understand that you probably don't advertise in the Yellow Pages; hey, maybe you don't "advertise" at all--but its representative of what you do in the business situation that you are in. This is a problem that spans every business in every industry from start-ups to mom and pops to mature businesses to Fortune 500's. For whatever reason, nobody seems to know how to fix this problem, so companies just like yours keep churning out sub-par marketing that only works in direct proportion to the sheer momentum of the marketplace in your industry. Hey, people are going to buy something from somebody, and you can get your fair share with marketing efforts that are substantially no better or no worse than anybody else's. If everyone's terrible, you can subsist off of momentum. Let me put it to you this way: Even a dead fish can float down stream. But this program is called "Monopolize Your Marketplace." It's not about subsisting off of the momentum of an industry. It's about being worth more to the marketplace and as a result getting more response from the marketplace.

Tune in next time where we'll begin our discussion of theSOLUTION to this problem: The Marketing Equation.

© 2006 Rich Harshaw ∙ May Not Be Used Without Permission