The web makes starting things easy. It also makes us a bit lazy and smugly entitled.
We throw up a blog. Set up a store and sell something. Imagine a market or merchant need, and thread connections in a new way with an eye towards relayering peoples wants and needs.
It’s easy and inexpensive to get started on the web. Technology is our ally here.
Human nature, however, is not, and the web is littered with lightly programmed skeletal ideas hanging by threads. Not ready for prime time, not sure where to go next and no real idea how to get there.
Somehow people think that it just happens.
And somehow businesses think that just being there is marketing itself, as if the web is a favored address with qualified street traffic walking in the door.
Of course, neither is true.
There’s a softness that comes from these expectations that is out of whack with reality. There’s a misunderstanding that even though your customer may be in control, they certainly aren’t always right. That opted in discovery is what lead gen should be but you need to push hard before the market starts to pull.
This customer first perception as right as it is, is wrong when it drives marketing as survey, marketing as asking a customer what they like and what they want. It is about setting a new context and selling the value of the experience. Then you see if it touches a nerve
Actually, Henry Ford captured this perfectly:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
At its core, permission-based marketing has nothing to do with asking the customers or the community what they want. They are giving you the permission to sell them, not determining what they want.
I believe that core value needs to be sold. Sold smartly and sold hard. It’s really that simple, although the craft of selling and the orchestration of setting the proper environment are anything but trivial.
Neither the market nor people know what they want until you sell it to them. I’m not referring to a transaction, but to shared perceptions of a different tomorrow. Letting something be tried on with anticipation and good will, and seeing something in a new way.
New doesn’t just happen, it needs to carve it’s own spot in the market. New doesn’t exist to be bought, it needs to be sold within a conversation. Within an experience. Within a new context.
Some ideas have logical inklings of pent-up market demand (a singular online POS system for all consumers), and some things have merchant demand (customer acquisition tools that work for the SMB) but a generalized need and product that suits it are completely different.
There are exceptions of course, but there are no overnight successes. The idea of “Build it and they will come” is no idea at all.
We all dream of that magic moment when you stop pushing the market and it starts to inch toward you and pulls, as if with new found gravity. When your dashboard of metrics on campaigns and activities has no logical relation to the positive growth of traffic, transactions, referrals or market attention.
Most every successful company and product has that market aha moment.
It doesn’t happen because you built something and the market just moseyed on over. It happens because you pushed and sold, with passion and persistence. Because you found bridges between circles of adopters that, in total, defined a new community of customers.
Ideas in product form are the fuel that drives, but that the market defines. In between is where we work, iterate, execute and create our own luck.
Selling value is tough. Marketing is tough. Building something new is always devoid of oxygen at first. There is never momentum until we create it.
The cool thing of course, is that it can happen and does, every single day, and changes the market and potentially our fortunes along with it. .
My last post, “Marketing Matters…” was a primer, and a reminder that marketing, as a mindset, is the other side of the market coin. That marketing is part of what you build and how you sell, and the interpreter between what you so believe to be true and what the market comes to adopt.
This post is a further nudge to all of us.
That value is there to be sold, not simply discovered. That just putting it out there is a non-starter.
That you need to create a common ground where selling what you believe on your customer’s terms is key, and that listening to their response, not asking for their approval, is how you create a new market reality with yourself firmly entrenched as part of it.
