Hidden In Plain Sight – Why Great Products Need Great Categories
On Friday, January 12, 2007, just before 8am, Joshua Bell walked into the L’Enfant Plaza in the Washington D.C. metro and began playing his $14 million-dollar violin.
Bell was dressed informally, sporting jeans, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. He had positioned himself near a trash can and placed his case out for donations.
This was not his usual performance.
Three days before, Bell filled the house at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where a moderately priced ticket went for around $100…
Joshua Bell usually earns about $1,000 for every minute he plays his violin in public.
However, to the busy commuters in D.C. that day, Bell was just a regular guy who played his instrument for 43 minutes.
He delivered beautiful renditions of 6 classical pieces while 1,097 people passed closely by - few of whom even bothered to pause…
It took 3 minutes for anyone to even glance at him.
In the end, Bell collected just over $32 in crumpled bills and loose change from 27 casual listeners who passed by.
Everyone else just kept on walking…
Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post, who partnered with the master violinist on this experiment, posed this question in her piece covering the event:
“If a great musician plays music, but no one hears it…was he really any good?”
Great Categories Make Great Products
No one has a better product in the classical violin market than Joshua Bell.
But what makes him a world-renowned artist worth $1,000 per minute is the context that he is placed within.
The value of his musical talent can best be discovered when it aligns with the worldview of his audience. Left with no context, the art is largely ignored.
Bell’s typical audience members buy a ticket and dress in their best clothes to hear a master bend the strings of a violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari. They tell themselves a story rooted in culture, history, and mastery. They are primed to hear great music.
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On the other hand, the individuals in the D.C. Metro that Friday in January were focused on pushing past the noisy station on their way to work. They were telling themselves a story about inconvenience, unwelcome intrusion, and the need to get where they were going as fast as possible. They were primed to ignore everything.
Establishing Context – Marketing the Problem You Solve
It is estimated that modern Americans are bombarded by between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every day. Agtech is not immune to this phenomenon – think of how many people are reaching out to your customers.?
Before we join in with the chorus of advertisers hoping to steal a moment of attention from their list of prospects, perhaps we should take a unique approach to how we communicate.
We need to develop great marketing messages - marketing that creates a path to earn the trust of our audience members.
One of the most complex parts of creating this type of great marketing is recognizing that it is not about you or your product. It’s about creating an environment for your customer to succeed using your product.
This is especially true in the face of an economic downturn (I’m no economist, but many intelligent people tell me it’s time to plan for a recalibration in the market - it’s an excellent time to get off the “nice to have” list).
It is not inherently evident to our target market that the problem we solve is the one that they need to prioritize solving for their business. If they don’t prioritize your problem, they will pass on your solution to that problem every time.
Our job as marketers is to make sure that every one of our customers knows what a big deal our problem is and how it’s explicitly hurting them today.
We do this by crafting statements that take our target audience from where they are today to where they could be tomorrow…
What will your customer’s life look like in 5 years if they use your product or service today?
Instead of focusing on our product or solution, our messaging needs to market a problem or a fundamental shift in the world that must be dealt with.
For example:
Then get busy evangelizing your category and telling the world the story about why your way is better FOR THEM. Prime them to hear the music you’re creating and recognize it for the value it contains. Build great categories, and do great marketing.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
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