In this episode of Marketing 24-7 Podcast, we talk about novels and movies and this relates to Unique Selling Propositions. More particularly, how can you can make your business so unique that it will attract people in your market niche to come to you, rather than you have to constantly chase them?
More often you might ask, what can I do to increase the pass on value of my business? USP or Unique Selling Proposition plays a very important role.
Increasing your business’ word of mouth value is to make it so interesting so cut through so different that people will feel the need to pass it on their friends and peers. That’s the essence of a great USP.
In this podcast, I share with you a technique on how to do so. I put a lot of work into this for my business and also the businesses I consult to. I will unveil something that will give you results in direct proportion to the amount of energy that you put in and create something unique and individual.
I encourage you to create and think of a backstory around your service or product.
- What’s so intriguing about it?
- What makes it interesting?
- Why is it beneficial?
Great writers, movie producers and directors have done this in the past. In fact, Ernest Hemingway had a saying. It was called the iceberg deal. He talked about his characters and what he wanted you to realise in his novels that his characters had a lot going on under the surface.
In short stories, he couldn’t insert it all. But in doing so he did unbelievable preparations and he crafted deeper parts of each character. He writes his stories and novels that has truly interesting characters. That is what I encourage you to do with your products and services. I want you to think deeper behind why do you offer your service? What was the “Aha” moment that created the product or whatever the case is? Dig deeper.
Another example that novelist and movie producers use is a thing called a character Bible. They fill in the blank of each character in this character bible. Some do it obsessively. I will sight an example shortly.
Again, this is what I urge you to do with each of your products and services. For that matter, you should do it for your actual business. That’s what I do. I spend a lot of time with the clients that I get so that I can get the personality of their business 100% right away. I have learned this from Quentin Tarantino.
He is Unbelievable! Really obsessive!
When Quentin Tarantino writes his films, he obsesses over it even if that might not even make it to the screen. He fleshes out detailed backstories of not only the key characters, but even tertiary characters. He sometimes drafts whole backgrounds of various people. The classic one is in his film once upon a time in Hollywood. Where he has Rick Dalton, who was played by Leonardo Di Caprio. Tarantino went so far into this that he actually developed an entire back catalogue of his films. He wrote a fairy tale version of basically everything Rick Dalton has done so that when he referred to Rick Dalton in the actual movie once upon a time in Hollywood, he had tons of character traits. He had tons of information that he could feed into the narrative of the story.
So imagine if you had that amount of backstory for your products and services. You can explain it to your potential clients flawlessly or tell them how your business is different from your competitors.
The best place to start your “Product or Service Bible” is the history.
- What moment caused you to pick a particular product?
- What caused you to start a service?
If it is a product. For example, you are at a trade show in Milan. You noticed a booth and got attracted by the smile of the person working at the booth. You went and had a look at the quality of the tile. You heard about the quarry with which this granite tile came from. How many people worked in the factory. How they hone the tiles. I’m sure you get what I mean.
So, the history is particularly important. So what was the moment that got you started? What was the fear about starting it and what are the changes that happened when starting that product or business or service?
What about goals? What was the goal of the product? What was the goal of the service? What’s the goal of your business? How have you handled challenges? What’s holding you back your weaknesses and more importantly, what are your desires for your business?
And then let’s look at some lumpy parts, things like interesting stories and anecdotes. So in my case, one of the stories I use a lot was the fact that I wrote a book called “Exercise Danger”. The book got delivered to my home. Because I was conned by a printer to produce 15,000 copies of the book. The books, 15,000 of them took up an entire second bedroom in a home that only had two bedrooms.
The smell of the ink permeated so badly through my home, I couldn’t live or sleep in there. It stunk. And that’s when I coined the phrase “Product minus sales equals junk” because unless I could move those books, they weren’t worth anything to me, hence my fascination with marketing.
How was I going to sell those 15,000 books that I’d gone out, pig headedly and produced and on and on my narrative goes, that was the reason I got involved in marketing. And then there’s another story as to how the book became successful and so on and so forth. I ask you to do exactly the same thing with your story. What are the lumpy parts? What are the interesting anecdotes of your product and services?
In doing business with you, it’s your job to make the world as interesting as it can possibly be. So I promise you, if you put a lot of work into creating the Service or Product Bible of your business the benefits will flow to you in direct proportion to the amount of work that you put in. Of course, it doesn’t end with one session. If you’ve just got a flimsy story to start with, that’s still better than having no story. And as you get more confident and as you open your mind up and more importantly, as you open up your soul and get honest with yourself and your customers and the marketplace, the better the story you’ll be able to craft. And as I say, the results will come in direct proportion to the amount of energy that you put in.
