Value is subjective, and people are willing to pay only for the part of your value that they can see. The bad news is, they probably can’t see much. The good news is, you are their most reliable source of information about your own craft.
The 99-cent double cheeseburger… to make it, you have to feed, raise and slaughter cows, grind their meat then freeze it and ship it to its destination, but also grow some wheat and process it until it’s whiter than queen Elizabeth the 1st. Also, learn to milk cows and then Read more…
“May your every wish be granted.”_Ancient Chinese curse Wishing is a dangerous business, especially when our context is so different from the one clients we want to reach actually experience.** It’s human nature to not really understand what we actually wish for, and all of the ramifications of such a wish Read more…
“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring Because of its location In relation to Earth’s north celestial pole Polaris, aka The Northern star, is famous for holding still in our sky while the entire Read more…
In a certain corner of the marketing industry, there is a famous cliche: “Don’t be afraid to be pigeonholed, pigeonholes are stuffed with money”. Like most cliches, it’s tediously overused and seems too simple to be true. But let’s play a little devil advocate here, and try to defend it Read more…
A kettle is meant to be used for boiling water so making it out of chocolate is of course… less than ideal. None of us provides services with zero value of course, but some markets can get polluted by hype, noise, [[Price dumping]], or technology shortcuts. When the price of what we do sinks so Read more…
Viewing your competition as “others in my industry” or “people who do what I do” leads to a special kind of myopia. Namely, mixing up your “industry” with your “market” shows you a skewed picture of your competition while skipping many viable alternatives. For example, both BMW and KIA make cars and Read more…
The default buying behavior of humans is comparing alternatives. That means whatever you offer, it’s going to be compared to competitors. But what if you really believe that there are no competitors you could be fairly compared with? Does that mean that you actually have no competitors, that you are effectively Read more…
Throughout history, selling expertise of any kind was usually local. That also meant that competition was fairly easy to identify and keep an eye on. The post system and the Yellow Pages expanded the range somewhat but still kept it somewhat manageable. From the neolithic times until the third industrial Read more…
Historically, service value communication had a very limited range but was a fairly simple affair. If you sell ice cream or draw henna tattoos on a local beach, you still live in that world, but most industries moved on. Fairly recently, people decided to contact you after pricking you out from an Read more…
One day, a hair salon owner decided that they don’t get enough customers as a male salon, so he recalibrated the messaging. From now on, they will specialize and become the only hair salon in town exclusively providing robust, clear-cut one-type-fits-all unisex haircuts. Yessir, all customers are guaranteed to look exactly alike when they come Read more…