What keeps execs awake at night?
The smart ones worry about how to stay relevant. How to get noticed when everyone else is screaming for attention. So, how can you raise your game and create a buzz?
Author/entrepreneur Seth Godin has some suggestions…
Ignore the masses. There are no average Americans anymore. We’re a population of special interests. One-size no longer fits all. So, unless you have the heft of Walmart, don’t aim for the middle.
The riskiest thing you can do to is to play it safe. Success lies at the edges. So the secret is to narrow your focus and thin-slice the marketplace, whether it’s flugelhorns or kale toothpaste.
Be remarkable. For decades, marketers used the shotgun approach, pitching average products geared for average people. Think Applebee’s and J.C. Penney; once mainstream brands, now in bankruptcy.
Target people who are already obsessed. In its early days, Apple’s Mac computers had a 2% market share. But those buyers were passionate fans who became brand ambassadors. Apple laser-targeted creative folks. They offered a product that designers went crazy for, despite its high price. And Apple continues to dominate that market segment.
Here’s my take. Reaching mainstream America used to be easy. Just buy an ad on Seinfeld. Now that our attention has splintered into thousands of niches, creating a phenomenon called idea diffusion.
Better known as: it’s brutally hard to be heard above the clutter. So, the gold lies in mining the niches, knowing your customers and super-serving them.
This blog is called REVERB because reverberation is the goal. Like a pebble breaking the surface of a pond, the best products ripple and spread organically.
