Are you marketing a camel?

(This is a long post, so please feel free to skip it.)

“More details please…,” was one of the comments I received about my post The one thing you absolutely cannot do without. Explaining why a product or service doesn’t get any (or very little) traction in the market place in a straightforward fashion is not easy. Why? Because this is an art, not a science.

Having said that, here are four suggestion my pen pal Seth Godin offers on the topic in his book All Marketers Tell Stories:
a. No one noticed it.
b. People noticed it but decided they didn’t want to try it.
c. People tried it but decided not to keep using it.
d. People liked it but didn’t tell their friends.

A good, compelling offer is rarely a commodity. A good, compelling offer is something people want. The landscape architect Eldon Beck understands this concept. This is why (as Seth notes in the above book), when Eldon was, a few years ago, commissioned to build a new ski resort for Intrawest (the same people who apparently own ski resorts like Whistlerhe did not build just another brand new ski resort. Instead, he built a one-hundred-year old French village in the Alps.

Here’s one more example—earlier today I came across something that has a potential to become a compelling and easy to understand offer: unconventional wedding photo shoot for newlyweds. Click here to see photos of this couple who just did that. The unconventional wedding photo shoot of course is not going to work for everyone, but that is exactly the point. But I bet you that there are people out there who are looking to tell a different story with their wedding pictures, those who are for some reason dissatisfied with the traditional wedding shots.

Okay, let’s wrap this up: once you create a compelling offer, you need to share it with the world. Please remember that your offer should be easy to understand. It should be brief. Typically no longer than one sentence. Can you sum up a compelling offer in one sentence? Yep. It’s not easy. But it can be done. Consider this: Michael Pollan summed up his whole book titled In Defence of Food in one sentence: “Eat foodnot too muchmostly plants.” Brilliant, isn’t it? Here’s one more—an attempt to sum-up Seth’s book All Marketers Tell Stories in one sentence: Delivering a remarkable story isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

My 2¢: Every chance you get, make a compelling offer. Bad thing happens when you don’t make compelling offers…

P.S. Did you know that camels in Australia are the only feral herds of their kind in the world, and that they are estimated to number more than 1,000,000?