Joe's Play Bigger Takeaways
by Joe · 17 things on Twos
- Once people can see the problem, they can't unsee it
- The most exciting companies sell us different, not better
- Winning companies market the problem, not just the solution
- Your number one job is to change the way people think.
- The story simply and clearly defines the problem and creates a “thing” that people will feel they must have
- Keep it simple. Use human words, not business or technology words. Keep sentences and phrases short. Be provocative. Think movie trailer!
- In a limited number of powerful words, the POV should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes
- At the end of the POV, simply describe your company’s particular solution in a broad, visionary way. At no point should a POV get into product features
- A company's value is based on its category potential
- Decades of brain research have demonstrated that stories have a more lasting impact than facts
- A great new category is one that solves a problem people didn’t know they had, or solves an obvious problem no one thought could be solved
- It can happen very publicly for consumer companies, as the gravity-inducing requests and criticisms pour out into social media. These forces are the beginning of gravity dragging the product and company away from true north. Pull the product a little off course now and it will continue to veer wildly away from true north over time
- Listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories
- The things the customers ask for rarely line up with the true north originally set by the CEO.
- Content must evangelize the category problem first and your product second
- Take them on a journey from what they know now, to how things can be if they adopt your solution
- Smart companies don't waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy