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CHAPTER SIX

Beyond Commodities

Problem first

Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution, with the thing that makes them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.

There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen. Not a tactical change. Not a quarter-inch hole, or even a quarter-inch drill bit. No, we can change someone on an emotional level.

Our calling is to make a difference. A chance to make things better for those we seek to serve.

Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way that they need (or want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that, not for your own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.

Does it work?

In 1906, the precursor of the FDA was formed to combat products that were fundamentally dangerous. Anger about products like Berry’s Freckle Ointment, a cosmetic that was quite likely to make you sick, or LashLure, which caused more than a dozen forms of blindness, moved the government to act.

As much as fifty years later, product quality was still a crapshoot. Who knew when your car was going to break down?

Today we take it all for granted. FedEx actually does deliver more than 99 percent of its packages on time. Cars don’t spontaneously break. Makeup doesn’t often cause blindness. Your web browser rarely crashes, the electricity almost never goes out, and air travel has never been safer.

And yet we still talk about being very good at our craft as if it’s some sort of bizarre exception.

Plenty of people are good at what you do. Very good at it. Perhaps as good at it as you are.

Full credit for the work you’ve done and the skill you possess. But it’s not enough.

Quality, the quality of meeting specifications, is required but no longer sufficient.

If you can’t deliver quality yet, this book isn’t much help to you. If you can, great, congratulations. Now, let’s set that aside for a minute and remember that nearly everyone else can too.

The commodity suckout

If you make something that others make, if it’s something we can find on Upwork, on Amazon, or Alibaba, you’ve got pain.

It’s the pain of knowing that if you raise your price enough to earn a decent return on the effort you’re putting into your work, we’ll just go somewhere else and buy it cheaper.

When the price of everything is a click away, we’re not afraid to click.

Selling ice cream on the beach in the summer is easy. Raising people’s expectations, engaging in their hopes and dreams, helping them see further—that’s the difficult work we signed up for.

From now on, your customers know more than you do about your competitors. And so your commodity work, no matter how much effort you put into it, is not enough.

“You can choose anyone, and we’re anyone”

Imagine a shoeshine stand downtown.

One approach is to find the best location you can afford and offer to shine the shoes of anyone who needs a shoeshine.

There are problems with this.

First, if anyone can shine shoes the way you shine shoes, then a competitor down the street will take half of your business—more, if they cut their price.

Second, and more important, no one needs their shoes shined. It’s a want, not a need.

And why should anyone bother?

Perhaps that customer wants to look good, look like his dad looked, or like Michael Jackson looked; it makes him feel good. More confident. More likely to contribute and feel empowered.

Perhaps it’s for someone who likes the status of having someone wait on him. Once a week, he gets to sit in a throne, with a well-dressed, respectful craftsperson putting effort into his appearance.

Perhaps it’s a signifier. That he wouldn’t bother with this except it’s what people like him are supposed to do. And not any shoeshine. This shoeshine, in this public spot, from this respected craftsperson.

Any of these edges and stories and transformations are available to the craftsperson as soon as he decides to make a difference.

Knowing that this is the story your customer tells himself is insufficient. You still have to act on it, open the door to the possibility, and organize the entire experience around that story.

This is the work that helps people understand that you are special, and this is the work that makes things better.

When you know what you stand for, you don’t need to compete Bernadette Jiwa has written half a dozen extraordinary books that humanize the too-often industrialized craft of marketing.

In Story Driven, she makes it clear that if we merely try to fill a hole in the market, we’re doomed to a cycle of rearview-mirror behavior. We’re nothing but a commodity in the making, always wary of our competition. We have no choice but to be driven by scarcity, focused on maintaining or perhaps slightly increasing our market share.

The alternative is to find and build and earn your story, the arc of the change you seek to produce. This is a generative posture, one based on possibility, not scarcity.

Now that you’ve chosen your audience, where do you want to take them?

Bernadette shares ten things that good stories do; if the story you’re telling yourself (and others) doesn’t do these things for you, you might need to dig deeper and find a better story, one that’s more true and more effective. Good stories: Connect us to our purpose and vision for our career or business.

Allow us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here.

Deepen our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace.

Reinforce our core values.

Help us to act in alignment and make value-based decisions.

Encourage us to respond to customers instead of react to the marketplace.

Attract customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values.

Build brand loyalty and give customers a story to tell.

Attract the kind of like-minded employees we want.

Help us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of.

But your story is a hook

And you’re on it.

Once you claim a story, once you commit to wanting to help people change, to take them on a journey from here to there—then you’re on the hook.

On the hook to deliver.

On the hook for what happens next.

Is it any wonder we’d prefer to make average stuff for average people? If all you do is offer an alternative, that’s a low-risk path. Take it or leave it.

On the other hand, great marketing is the generous and audacious work of saying, “I see a better alternative; come with me.” Case Study: Stack Overflow is better

If you’re a programmer, you’ve visited Stack Overflow. It’s a profitable company with more than 250 employees, dealing with millions of visits a week. If you have a question, it’s probably already been answered on one of their forums.

Stack Overflow saves programmers time and effort, and it’s also a passion project for thousands of the volunteers who contribute content.

How did its founder Joel Spolsky make better happen?

In the early years of the 2000s, there was a programming forum called Experts Exchange. Their model was simple and obvious: They hosted answers to common programming questions, and you had to pay to read them. A subscription cost three hundred dollars per year.

In order to build the business, they came at it from a place of scarcity. The questions were free to read, but the answers cost money.

To get traffic, they tricked the primitive Google robots that search the web by showing them the answers (which got them good search engine traffic), but when people showed up they scrambled the information, hiding the answers until people subscribed.

Experts Exchange created profit via frustration.

Joel worked with his cofounder, programmer Jeff Atwood, to come up with a different approach: make the questions visible, make the answers visible, and pay for the whole thing with job advertising. After all, what better place to find great programmers than a website where great programmers come to ask questions and give answers?

Along the way, Joel discovered that creating a better product meant treating different people differently, telling stories to each constituency that matched its worldview and needs.

For programmers in a hurry, he made it easy to find a question and the best answer for it. The answers are ranked by quality, so programmers don’t waste time.

He realized that for every person who answered a question, a thousand people wanted an answer. Instead of trying to frustrate questioners, he got out of their way and gave them what they needed.

But answerers were different. For them, he built a community, a ranking system, a series of levels that would enable them to build a reputation and be rewarded with power over the community.

And job board posters were different as well. They wanted a fast, efficient, self-service method to find the best people. No hard sell, no distractions.

Joel didn’t want to put his personal stamp on a personal site. He set out to be of service, to make things more efficient, to tell people a story that they wanted and needed to hear.

He built something better, and he let the core audience not only spread the word but do the thing that an outsider might have thought of as work.

Better is up to the users, not up to you

Google is better.

It was better than Bing and better than Yahoo!

Better in what way?

The search results weren’t obviously better.

The search itself wasn’t dramatically faster.

What was better was that the search box didn’t make you feel stupid.

Yahoo! had 183 links on their home page. Google had two.

It projected confidence and clarity. You couldn’t break it.

So it was better—for some people.

Now, DuckDuckGo is better. Because it isn’t part of a big company. Because it doesn’t track you. Because it’s different.

So it’s better—for some people.

“And we serve coffee”

Until a fire temporarily shut them down (actually, it was the sprinklers, not the coffeemaker, that did the damage), Trident Booksellers and Café in Boston was one of the most vibrant and successful bookstores in the country.

No matter how cheap and big Amazon got, Trident managed to do pretty well. Because they do something Amazon can’t. They serve coffee.

If you run a retail store that competes with anyone online, “. . . and we serve coffee” is not a bad tagline.

That’s because coffee is better together.

Coffee creates a third place: a spot to meet, to connect, to dream.

And so Trident is actually a coffee shop that sells books.

The books we just bought are a souvenir of the personal connections we made today.

The authentic, vulnerable hero

You know this archetype: the woman who shows up with her full self, her inner truth, ready to withstand the slings and arrows of a world that doesn’t get her, until it does, and then they celebrate.

This is a myth.

It’s a dangerous myth.

There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, but in general, what’s true is that we need people willing to be of service.

Service to the change they seek to make.

Willing to tell a story that resonates with a group that they care enough to serve.

There could be an overlap. It’s possible that it’s the way you feel right this minute, but it might not be. The version of you on offer might run many layers deep, but it can’t possibly be all of you, all the time.

A professional plays a role, doing the best possible work, regardless of the day or the patient or the client.

When James Brown fell on his knees on stage, exhausted, needing to be resuscitated by his attendants, it was brilliant stagecraft, not an authentic performance. After all, it happened every night.

When a therapist changes lives all day long by listening patiently, he actually might be patient, but it’s more likely he’s simply doing his job.

When the barista at Starbucks smiles at you and wishes you a great day, he’s presenting, not revealing.

That’s fine, because revealing isn’t what better looks like. Revealing is reserved for your family and your closest friends, not the marketplace.

Protect yourself. You’ll be needed tomorrow.

Service

Marketing acts (interesting choice of word, acts) are the generous actions of people who care. James Brown and the therapist understand that authenticity in the marketplace is a myth, that what people want is to be understood and to be served, not merely to witness whatever you feel like doing in a given moment.

And when we do the best version of our best work, our responsibility isn’t to make it for ourselves . . . it’s to bring it to the person we seek to serve. We reserve our best version of the work for them, not for us. Just as a three-star chef doesn’t cook herself a twelve-course meal for dinner, you are not expected (or welcome) to bring us every one of your insecurities, innermost fears, and urgent demands.

You’re here to serve.

Authenticity versus emotional labor

Emotional labor is the work of doing what we don’t feel like doing. It’s about showing up with a smile when we’re wincing inside, or resisting the urge to chew someone out because you know that engaging with him will make a bigger difference.

It takes a small amount of energy and guts to be authentic. You need to feel confident enough to let your true feelings be exposed, knowing that if you’re rejected, it’s personal.

But there’s a lot of hiding involved as well—hiding from the important work of making change happen. If all you do is follow your (make-believe) muse, you may discover that the muse is a chicken, and it’s steering you away from the important work. And if the authentic you is a selfish jerk, please leave him at home.

If you need to be authentic to do your best work, you’re not a professional, you’re a fortunate amateur. Fortunate, because you have a gig where being the person you feel like being in the moment actually helps you move forward.

For the rest of us, there’s the opportunity to be a professional, to exert emotional labor in search of empathy—the empathy to imagine what someone else would want, what they might believe, what story would resonate with them.

We don’t do this work because we feel like it in the moment. We do this work, this draining emotional labor, because we’re professionals, and because we want to make change happen.

Emotional labor is the work we do to provide service.

Who’s talking?

When you get an email from a faceless corporation, speaking in the second person, someone is hiding. It’s slick, but it’s not real. We don’t feel a connection, merely the shadow of a bureaucrat.

On the other hand, when a human being extends emotional labor to take responsibility—“Here, I made this”—then the door is open to connection and growth.

The most effective organizations don’t always have a famous leader or a signature on every email. But they act like they do.

“Here, I made this.”

The goal isn’t to personalize the work. It’s to make it personal.