The Law of Leadership
You guys know how much I LOVE good non-fiction books. I know a lot of us either don't have the time or patience to finish a book from cover-to-cover, so I've decided to do something new.
In this series of blog posts, I will be breaking down one of my favorite books of all time by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It's called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and needless to say, it has served me well. I hope you enjoy, learn from and ultimately implement these 22 critical laws of marketing into your reselling endeavors.
This first law is what I base a majority of my decisions on. Whether I implement a new idea or not depends on how it will boost our position as a leader in our category.
Not a week goes by where my team and I don't discuss something new that we can bring to the reselling game. Doing what has been done already will only keep us stagnant and forgettable. This is not to say everything you do should be different, it's just to say that you should focus on doing the same things differently. This is how you stay relevant and be remembered.
The major downside of doing something different or doing something differently has 1 major drawback, but it comes with the territory. You can't consistently bring something new to the table without having your fair share of misses. That's just how life works, you WILL make mistakes when you're trying to be different. There's no other ways around it and I'm glad my team and I have come to this realization. These mistakes can be the result of poor timing, poor execution or the idea was just horrible to start off with. But with even with this major drawback, there is a major benefit with being the first to do something.
Getting in the minds of your customers is paramount. It's probably the biggest factor when it comes to marketing because if they don't know who you are, they won't buy from you. Making noise for the sake of making noise is not the idea here. The noise you're making has to resonate with your audience. I do want to warn you that you must first know who your audience are for this to work. This starts with you first understanding the product or service you're attempting to push and knowing where you stand with your audience. Let me explain.
Because we've built a solid reputation with our customer base, every calculated move we make will draw us attention from said customer base (audience). This reputation is important because it adds legitimacy to what we're about to do and people know we're not bluffing. Take for example the 10 iPhone giveaway we did with our Valet Clients. Because we have a history of pulling off a crazy giveaway before (the $1,000 closet buyout we did a few months back) our customers trust that we're not going to back out on our 10 iPhone giveaway. This has less to do with the 10 iPhones and has more to do with our initial push as being a company that's known to do some outlandish giveaways. In other words, the $1,000 closet buyout was our foot in the door with our customers and the 10 iPhones was the icing on top that cements PrettiBone as a leader in giveaways.
So how can you implement this in your business?
First start off by understanding your place in the game. Without this, you'll simply just get lost. Next, ask who are your audience base and their values. Lastly, think of an idea that will pique their attention but make sure you're the first to do it! Don't wait around for someone else to take the spotlight because you'll find yourself sharing that spotlight (if you're lucky) if you're anything but the first to do it.
Here are some other things that we're the first to do to get your minds going:
1. Sure, there are other VA providers, but we're the fist to provided Free Inventory, Vacation Mode payback and exclusive Giveaways for our clients
2. We're the first to provide a 100% money-back guarantee for our services
3. We're the first to push a fully customizable reseller box (although this idea proved to be too successful, you can read about it here).
I hope this first law put some things into perspective for you and I hope you move forward with this idea in mind at all times.
The next Law is coming soon so be on the lookout for it.