Want to Create Change? Challenge the Premise

Taking the market conditions we see today for granted is one of the biggest mistakes made by modern marketers...

"I don't know; I guess I've always done it this way," her mother said. "That's how your grandma did it."

Maria nodded to herself, unsatisfied with the answer...

For the last 15 minutes, she had been helping her mother prepare several fish for their family dinner later that evening. She loved to help, but she couldn't make sense of the first direction she received - why did they have to cut the heads and tails off the fish before they went into the pan?

Her mother just shrugged and said, "why don't you ask your grandmother when she comes for dinner tonight?"

Luckily, grandma always arrived early for family dinners, and Maria met her at the door with a smile. After a hug and a short hello, Maria asked the question that had bothered her all day.

"Grandma," she asked. "Why did you teach mom to cut the head and tail off a fish before baking it?"

Grandma thought for a while and replied, "I don't know. My mother always did it that way."

She continued, "you can ask great grandma when she comes tonight. She should be here soon."

When Maria's great-grandmother finally arrived, the whole house began to buzz with excitement for the evening meal. After warm greetings, everyone took their seats, and Maria promptly posed her question to the older woman: why had she taught her children to prepare fish without the head or the tail?

Great grandma thought for a while and smiled, "Because my baking pan was too small to fit the whole fish."

Taking the market conditions we see today for granted is one of the biggest mistakes made by modern marketers.

Most of us approach business believing in an unchallenged way that the market has always operated this way and will continue to do so in perpetuity. We believe this is how things are done, and our job is to, at best, "disrupt them."

And when we say disrupt, we mean "we have no unique point of view on how to improve things here, so we are going to introduce this incremental change - perhaps by digitizing it or making it faster - but the business will mostly remain as is."

We unquestioningly pull yesterday's thinking and apply it to tomorrow's challenges - frequently a set of challenges that our old way of thinking was never meant to address (sort of like needlessly cutting fish to fit a pan that is no longer in use). 

Furthermore, without a unique point of view on the problem we seek to solve, our companies are left running comparative analyses against every other player in the market. This makes the business consultants rich, but it's not likely to resonate with your target audience. 

Research tells us that somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of all sales activity ends in no decision.

Still, most of our companies spend most of their time and money comparing themselves to other products on the market…

...we assume demand instead of creating it...

Here's the thing: your customers don't care about how you're incrementally better than the competition.

The questions they pose about how you're different than 'company x' or 'company y' are not requests for a head-to-head comparison slide or a giant spec sheet. Instead, these questions demand that you stop wasting everyone's time by presenting the same value proposition as every other organization in your space.

They want you to tell them a differentiated story about how you can help them identify and overcome their shared set of problems.

The company that creates the agreed-upon definition of the problem and solution is in the best position to lead and dominate the category. 

In the future, the companies that win big will be those who:

1. Design their story around an apparent customer problem to create a new category.

2. Internalize solving that problem as the reason they exist - crafting a unique point of view.

3. And equip those in the industry to share that story amongst themselves using the correct language - activating the power of synchronized word of mouth to spread their ideas.

Stop challenging the existing competition in your market; start challenging the market to think about their problem differently.

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