An Interesting Marketing Exercise

What Makes Marketing Very Interesting?

Marketing is about understanding your customer’s story or perspective.

• What are their priorities?
• What matters to them most and why?

Answers to these questions will help you understand why customers buy from what brand.

Share this interesting marketing exercise to your friends who you think would benefit from it.

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Transcript

What’s up everybody?

Going live again. I’ve actually only got a few minutes before jumping on a mastermind call, group call with one of my mentors.

I’m actually thinking about doing a video about mentors and what they mean, but, that’s not what this video is about. This video is about marketing so if you’re just joining, let me know where you’re joining us from, joining me from, and tag someone who would benefit from a discussion on marketing.

Welcome Ryan, welcome to Joe, thank you for joining in. I’m going to discuss marketing and, and Miami… Miguel – my favorite city on the face of the planet, Miami baby. Dude, Joe, I miss you too, I missed you at Baby Bathwater this past weekend, man. I know it’s a hike for you, but, I hear there’s some good things happening on the other side of the pond regarding Baby Bathwater and maybe I’m gonna have to come to you.

But, yeah. So, Ireland, nice, nice, Ryan. Actually Catherine, my business partner is from Ireland. It’s pretty interesting. That she’s from there. I actually have family from Ireland. And get this – the person who wed my wife and I, is actually a cousin who’s from Ireland, and, Catherine was at my wedding. Him, Catherine and the priest, who’s my cousin, know somebody who’s, and they know somebody from Ireland so they have like this trifecta going, but apparently everybody from Ireland knows everybody, so, you gotta at least know one person. At least that’s what I hear.

Anyway. Let’s start talking about marketing.

There’s this interesting thing that happens in marketing and how it affects your customer. What products you’re selling, how it makes them feel, and, what experience they have when interacting with your product.

Now interacting can be interacting with your brand, how they see your brand, whether it’s online, how they see your brand in the store.

What’s up Cap? Thank you for the likes.

Or, how they interact with your brand once they receive it. Right, once they receive the product. And everything in between.

Now. This could be said for anything on the face of the planet. When Catherine and I first started our businesses, we were selling products from China and we elevated the brand to make it a premium product.

Now, was it a premium product? I think it was good enough to call it a premium product, but anybody could’ve sold it for much less and still made a profit. We decided to be at the higher level of where the market was for those products. So let me give you an example.

So here are three pairs of sunglasses.

So. There’s nothing really different about the shape or structure of ’em. They all, they do the same thing, they protect your eyes. Some do it better, by, you know, wrapping the frame around your face tighter, but pretty much they’re manufactured the same way.

Plastic with a plastic or glass lenses, right?

(laughing)

Cody, I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Getting feelings of nausea and disgust.

So Mike, one on the left is way more expensive. Okay. Can anyone guess how much, let’s say Glasses A, Glasses B, Glasses C are? I’ll give you guys a second to jump in. Josh, thanks for joining. We’re just saying how much Glasses A, Glasses B and Glasses C cost the end user.

Anybody?

So we have someone who says that Glasses A is the most expensive.

So let me give you.. great guesses, great guesses.

Miguel says 200 A. You’re too kind, Mike. Talking about Cody’s nausea.

C 20. Oh wait, C’s 20. B’s 150. No idea what shades cost, 250?

Good question, good question.

So. Let me. So we have everything from $20 over here to the most expensive over

here, 150 in the middle, so let me just tell you exactly what these are.

Glasses A. We still have comments coming in. 150 over here.

Glasses A, 40 bucks. $39.

Glasses B, $100.

Glasses C, $300.

Now.

Let me tell you what the difference is.

The difference is really the messaging and your target market.

So someone who’s purchasing Glasses A is not going to be purchasing Glasses C. They may jump up and purchase. Yes, they are Maui Jims.

They may jump up. To the middle one. But. They may. There’s a limited chance that they’re gonna go from Glasses A to Glasses B or C. It’s just, it’s just not the same target market, it’s not the same demographic.

Now I purchased Glasses C. Maui Jims, for $300, and the reason being is because I have spent a lot of time outdoors, on the water, I’ve lifeguarded, and I’m on a boat in the summertime. And this is what I like to protect my eyes with. I stare at the water all day long and it just, it reduces headaches and I find the value in them, and there’s also another reason. I always protect whatever I purchase. So I’m not the type of person who loses sunglasses or breaks them. I will actually put these back in the case every time that I put them away, or when I’m traveling with them, I carry the case with me. There’s just something different about these than these.

Now these are called Nectar sunglasses. And I’ve actually heard about Nectar way back when I was in college. And I had the opportunity to meet the founder over the weekend and he gave me a pair.

Now I am not a Nectar sunglass purchaser. I wouldn’t buy that for $40. The only reason is because I would purchase these. But he told me the story about Nectar. His story is that his customers won’t…purchase a $300 pair of sunglasses and most times they won’t purchase a $100 pair of sunglasses. They’re the type of person who just wants to not worry about putting their glasses in a case, not worry about breaking them, not worry about you know, losing them or them falling off your head, or if you’re at a party or whatever, doing some action sports. They’re just to be bought for style, for function, and it’s not really meant to be a lifelong thing. You’re supposed to just live your life the way it is.

And I said, that’s really, really interesting. I really like that perspective. And that’s what I love about marketing. You could have this same product targeted to different people with different messaging and every person gets a different feeling from them.

The person who buys this says, you know what, I’m just gonna live my life, not worry about the sunglasses. The person who buys this says, hey, I love my sunglasses, they’re a part of who I am, I will protect them and they’ll protect me, right? And the person who buys this is in the middle. They don’t really, can’t justify $300 but they also know they want something a little bit different, so maybe they’re in the middle, right?

Now, another funny thing is, each one of these come with a backend warranty. You can have a warranty for these glasses if they break. Yeah, go ahead Mike, ask away. So, while you’re at, while you’re typing your question, I will tell you about the warranties.

The warranties for this one, is, there is no warranty. You know what? They’re cheap enough where, if you break ’em, if you lose ’em, if something happens to ’em, you just go and buy another pair. That’s it, but, that’s really all it is.

The warranty for this one, the $100 pair. You send ’em in if they break. You have to pay the return shipping, and we’ll send you the next pair.

Okay.

Now the warranty for these, if they break. I also have to send in $40 plus return shipping plus everything, so now I’m actually paying $40 to get a broken pair of sunglasses back, when everyone else underneath… When everyone else underneath will…Offer it for free. Very, very different. And a very, very different way to market your product.

So, when you’re thinking about marketing a product, whether it’s sunglasses, whether it’s salt and pepper shakers, a commodity. Whether it’s a skincare product. Maybe it’s a journal. Maybe it’s something along those lines that you need to differentiate yourself with. Try to figure out who your exact target market is.

What makes them special,

what makes them unique?

What type of lifestyle do they have?

The lifestyle from someone who’s purchasing a $40 pair of sunglasses has a completely different lifestyle than someone who’s, someone who’s purchasing a $300 pair of sunglasses.

The messaging is going to be different. You need to hit the key reasons of why they’re going to make that purchase, the benefit to them, right?

So that’s why I love marketing.

Because you can have such a diverse product line. As far as what you’re offering. And offer it in a different and unique way to different people. So, I’ll give you some examples about my personal business.

BestSelf offers the self journal.

We initially geared it towards entrepreneurs. Most people who purchase a self journal are entrepreneurs. What we found, after building a community and after building, building our audience up and everything like that, we found that there’s other little sub segments that we can go after. That we could change our messaging, offer the same product to a different audience using a different messaging, and using different benefits to get them to use our product.

So we realized that, there’s people using it for health and fitness. There’s people using it for business, obviously, entrepreneurs. There’s people using it who I never even thought about this market, but there’s people who actually don’t have jobs and are using the journal to find their next position, their next job. And their goal in the next three months is to have a full time job.

So it’s really interesting when you start talking to your customers about the products that you’re selling, who else, why did they come in, what’s happening in their life that made them purchase, and is there more markets for you to go after, another market that we’re going to go after is book writers.

We’ve had several authors come in, start with just an idea and over the course of two, three, four journals, have done an outline, a pitch to publishers, wrote the rough draft and then finally syndicated the full feature out. So it’s been really, really interesting to see, see that from a marketing perspective.

So, that’s what I have about marketing and positioning and I hope you liked the example of the three different sunglasses. It was interesting after I met the founder of Nectar, very cool guy, and, yeah, that’s it.

So thank you for stickin’ around and watching and, if you are watching this video afterwards, drop a comment and I’ll be sure to stick around for a little bit and respond to everybody.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.

This article was originally published on allenbrouwer.com