“You can make people feel guilty enough to do something,” advertising legend Howard Gossage once wrote, “but you can’t make them enjoy it. As a matter of fact, you can make them positively unenjoy it.” Many business owners positively unenjoy doing their own marketing.
"There’s only one thing you can count on...On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up."
There’s a dangerous pressure in business. The pressure to have more and more products, so we can capture more of the market. To further and further expand our target market, so we can appeal to everyone. Or to provide more and more services, so we can do more work with our current customers.
Building a sustainably profitable business is a bit easier, and a lot more likely, when you couple that drive with a strong strategy.
Successful strategy requires being different. When you focus on what everyone else is doing, when you try to fit too well into your industry, you become more and more like everyone else—with less and less for a customer to base a choice on other than price.
Unless we have an external accountability, if there’s something we should do but don’t want to do, chances are we won’t do it. At least not for long.
With the New Year now upon us and ambitious goals set, or resolutions made, we’re entering a dangerous period of disillusionment. The first shock may come when we realize we don’t suddenly have more energy or motivation this year than we did last year.
It can be tempting to respond directly when you feel attacked. Perhaps by a competitor trying to “steal” your customers by drastically undercutting your prices. But to respond in kind is to rush headfirst into battle against someone who wants you to fight on their terms.
If you don’t have the resources, capabilities, or equipment necessary to make something that looks like it had an enormous budget, or which matches the prevailing trendy aesthetic, try something else.
The task was to sell a German-made car in America, less than 15 years after the end of World War II. Oh, and it looked and drove nothing like the most popular cars of the day. So how do you introduce a new car in a hostile market dominated by giants?
If there are red flags during the sales process, if the project seems doomed from the start, those issues won’t suddenly go away once there’s money, expectations, committees, and deadlines involved.
Frankly, entrepreneurs and creative types tend to bully themselves. Not because they don’t know what to do, but because they feel like they know exactly what they should be doing, but aren’t. Or can’t.
