The Lesson of the Dead Mouse

Unless you are a wing-walker on a bi-plane or a world-famous rock star, people don’t much care about how you do what you do in your business.

The Heath brothers, authors of Made to Stick and Switch, made that point unforgettably in one of their recent columns. Their example is the old saying, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”. That may be true as far as it goes, but the deeper truth is that people don’t care about how the mousetrap is better, they just want a dead mouse.

It is that focus on the beneficial end result to the buyer that is often left out of marketing campaigns, which all to often stop one step short and go on and on, preening about their product or process instead of talking about your benefit. They fall in love with their part of the process or thing, and they want you to love all that stuff, too, when all you really care about is the “dead mouse”.

Let me show you what I mean.

Do you remember the iconic photo of a man hunched down in a chair being blown away by the power of the music coming from a set of JBL speakers?

JBL could have featured the NEWNESS of the speakers, or the SPECIFICATIONS of the speakers, or the GOOD LOOKS of the speakers, all of which would have been talking about the speakers (the mousetrap), and not about what you want the speakers do for you (blow you away!). The photo says it perfectly, and this one ad catapulted JBL into the front rank of speaker manufacturers because it focused on the experience their products would give you, not on the mechanics or design of the product itself.

That’s the right way to sell lots of stuff.

So go spend some time right now looking at everything you put out there to your potential buyers. Your brochures, videos, the website, your logo and signs. Is it full of details about what you do and how you do it (“we” this, “we” that), or is it totally focused upon buyer experience and benefit?

I just did a day full of strategic planning for an IT company that, until then, thought they were selling “IT services”. That changed about mid-day when they realized that what they really sell is freedom from worry about their computers and they are now orienting their marketing campaign around that.

Your potential customers don’t care how your business does what it does. They do care a lot if your product or service can really make their lives better.

Remember that, market to that, and your sales will go through the roof.

Doug Hickok, CEO, Institute for Provocative Leadership , doug@IPLsmallbusiness.com