Make a Big, Loud Difference

by Bob Serling

How would you like to have 75% of all your potential customers hate your product or service?

Before you jump to any rash conclusions, let's take a minute to examine the other side of the coin. What if at the same time that 75% of your potential customers hated your product or service, the remaining 25% absolutely loved it?

The truth is, most companies would kill to control 25% of their market. In most industries, a 5% to 10% market share is often the dominant position, and a very profitable position at that.

So what's the best way to command a market share as high as 25%? It may be to find a way to make 75% of your potential customers hate you.

The ugliest cars in the world

Do you remember Renault, the manufacturer of those squat, tin-can looking cars that are no longer sold in the USA? Well you might be surprised to know that they have the best-selling model in all of Europe. And they're making Ford and VW cringe at their loss of market share.

How did Renault accomplish this? With designs that are so strikingly different, and often jarring, that people either love or hate them. When Renault introduced the Twingo — a boxy, bulb of a car with bug-eye headlights, a full 50% of consumers who participated in Renault's focus group said they hated it. Another 25% were unmoved either way. But 25% loved it and wanted to know where they could buy one right away. When it was released to the market, the Twingo became an instant market leader.

Think big, loud thoughts

Here's another one of my favorite examples. Many of my clients may have heard me mention it before, but it bears repeating.

Pamela Yellen, CEO of the Prospecting and Marketing Institute, is one of my favorite clients. Besides the fact that she's a brilliant marketer and CEO, her willingness to think big — really big — always impresses me. A number of years ago, Pamela brought me in to help her company devise a way to substantially increase the revenue on one of their key product lines, a sales and marketing training program for insurance agents.

Despite the fact that the program was completely sold out three times per year, because the fee was just $699, it wasn't a great money maker. The program included three days of intensive training, a bundle of materials, and personal support for an entire year. The cost of providing the support alone offset nearly the entire fee for the program.

Pamela wanted to increase the fee for this program. But not just a hundred dollars or so. Not even a few hundred. She wanted to increase the fee to what she felt was its true value — $5,000.

Now in anybody's book, you'd have to agree that this is thinking big and loud.

When I worked with Pamela and her team, one of the critical points we discovered was that attendees valued the year of personal support more than the initial training. We used that to restructure and reposition the program. It became a year-long program kicked off by a live 3-day immersion training, with the emphasis on the year-long program of personal support allowing the attendee to master the implementation of the material.

While we made minor changes to the product itself, for the most part it remained the same. What changed was the positioning of the product, the copy used to promote it, emphasizing the benefits of a year long program, and the name of the program, because it would be difficult to sell the program under the same name with a price increase of this magnitude.

How did the new program do? Pamela's company continued to sell out all three offerings. But now, with the increase in price, yet almost no increase in cost to deliver the program, her company's revenue grew for this product by a sizable 714%.

And the high ticket price actually created a buzz among insurance agents who couldn't wait to tell their associates how this expensive program was directly improving their bottom line profits.

Wrap up

A key point that I want to emphasize is that neither of these examples required outspending the competition. Because car designs change on a regular basis, Renault doesn't have to spend a penny more to come up with a big, loud design than they would to produce a mediocre design. And the Sales and Marketing Institute hardly changed the cost of delivering their program at all. Both of these companies simply chose to think bigger and louder than their competition.

So the question is: How big and loud are you willing to think?