What can Porsche teach us about marketing
“Why do you need huge gestures when the signs are clear?“
The above is just one of the many headlines by whose simplicity and eloquence I was taken back while browsing a product brochure about the new Porsche 911 Turbo. What first came to mind shortly after I first read the above headline was a passage from a remarkable book I recently read. It was titled Different, Escaping the Competitive Herd, by Youngme Moon, a Professor at the Harvard Business School (she teaches the Consumer Marketing elective in the MBA program). Here is a little taste of that passage:
“Where a connoisseur can discern subtle shades of distinction based on nuanced asymmetries, a novice lacks the necessary filters to canvas, to organize, to sift an assortment in a meaningful way. Where a connoisseur can navigate a category with effortless intuition, a novice will struggle to find beginning, middle, or end.”
Suggestion #1: Know your target audience. Communicate with those who volunteer their attention. Much of our life becomes unnecessarily cluttered with meaningless noise every time someone out of the blue tries to fight for our attention. Why do they do it? The harder they try the less we pay attention. As Kris Kristofferson sang in his To Beat the Devil:
“If you waste your time a-talkin’ to the people who don’t listen,
“To the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear?”
Suggestion #2: Have a niche. Why? Without a niche, you spend all your time pursuing clients, while there’s little or nothing that brings them to you.
My parting question: Does having a niche limit you or does it focus you?