Sherlock Holmes, West Virginia Coal Mining, and the Power of Reframing the Problem

Fellow AgTech Marketer,

Ever hear about when Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping??

The two men pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, Holmes woke Watson up.

Holmes: "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce."

Watson: "I see millions of stars, and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life."

Holmes: "No, Watson, you idiot, somebody's stolen our tent!"

Effective marketers don’t begin by evangelizing a solution - the comparative metrics every one of their competitors is actively using or how they are more clever than the rest of the market. Instead, we reframe our customer's problems to make our solution the obvious one; we establish the terms of the conversation we want to have with our customers, and more often than not, we win.?

What's Their Problem?: Powellton Coal Asks the Right Question?

West Virginia's Kanawha Valley is famous for its coal. For over 200 years, this land has been at the center of the industry. It was here that one of the state's first commercial mines opened in 1817 to supply coal to the saltworks that developed along the Kanawha River in the wake of the War of 1812, where the first commercial coal mining company was incorporated in 1834, and where much of the state's coal was shipped from to help power the Industrial Revolution.

However, at the dawn of the 20th century, one mining operation in the area began a project that deserves at least as much acclaim as any of those earlier accomplishments. The Powellton, West Virginia mines changed how they marketed and sold their coal. The experiment began just after an exceptional young man in his twenties named Robert Collier came to West Virginia as a mining engineer in search of his fortune.

The situation that Collier found was a mess.

The mines in that area had become entirely dependent on coal brokerages who secured contracts with the largest coal buyers for a certain number of carloads at a general quality grade. They would then pit the mines against each other and place their order with the company selling at the lowest price. The result was that every mine was stuck in the same spot - competing for scarce labor when times were good and underbidding each other for the small amount of business available when times were tough. It was a race to the bottom, and everyone was losing.

So Collier got started. He researched his customers and collaborated with his colleagues in Powellton to find ways to set their coal apart. After some testing, they identified that their coal was particularly well-suited for gas production, and they built their new commercial strategy around this idea. Instead of going through generic brokers and using their generalized quality ratings to sell coal by the ton, the team in Powellton re-framed their offering by communicating the total cubic feet of gas their customers would get from a single pound of Powellton coal.

And it worked.

The company got so many direct orders from gas companies for their coal that they could barely keep up with production. Moreover, Collier reports that these customers were retained because even when they chased a bargain, they quickly discovered that the cheaper coal was more expensive or time intensive to use in producing the desired gas.

Most companies sell solutions based on the stories they discuss internally, not on the story their customer is telling themself. All ineffective storytelling in business is the same, it's all about you, and it immediately commoditizes your product; every compelling business storyline is different, centers on the customer you seek to serve, and immediately imparts differentiation.

The reality is that becoming a commodity is not an inevitable outcome of being in a crowded market; becoming a commodity is a choice we make when we run out of ideas and start justifying our actions by saying things like, "that's just the way things are done."

Why Good Products Go Bad

It is hard to run a successful business. It is not easy to convince a group of people to part with their hard-earned money to take a chance on the promises you are making them, but it is absolutely impossible to do so if you fail to make a unique promise at all; if you are stuck chasing the same problem as everyone else - just a little bit cheaper, faster or more technically competent.

Blackberry lost the phone battle because they failed to understand that the definition of a better cellular phone in the customer's mind had moved away from better keyboards and business email functionality. Netflix didn't open more locations than Blockbuster; they put them out of business by making Blockbuster's locations irrelevant relics of the past by solving the entertainment problem through more seamless distribution - first through the mail and then through streaming.

I'll admit that doing something new takes an unusual amount of courage, but failing to distinguish your product from what has come before by presenting it as a new opportunity is a sure way to pronounce your idea dead on arrival and allow your business to run out of steam.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

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