Thunder to Lightning: Why Marketing Needs a Purpose
If we want to change minds and articulate actual value, we must have a specific target in mind, a clear focus that binds our messages together and unifies our entire organization.
There were once three statisticians who went hunting in the woods.
Before long, one pointed to a plump bird in a tree, and the three stopped and took aim.
The first fired, missing by a couple of inches to the left.
The second fired but also missed, a couple of inches to the right.
The third put down his gun, exclaiming, "Great shooting, gents, on average, I reckon we got it..."
Most marketers today spend all of their time thinking about how to increase the reach and frequency of their marketing.
How they can “get the word out.”
Reach is important and strategic frequency is essentially a lost art in today’s marketing landscape, but sole focus on these two aspects of our marketing mix has left most campaigns feeling empty and dry.
If we want to change minds and articulate actual value, we must have a specific target in mind, a clear focus that binds our messages together and unifies our entire organization.
In other words, we must discover our different perspectives on the problem we solve and then find compelling ways to say it that condition our target market to think the way we do.
The Current State of Agtech Marketing
Most of us in agtech have over-indexed for reach and frequency while leaving the message for some last-minute quick thinking by the agency...
...or worse, we ask our teams to look over our well-structured, laboriously-built, committee-approved, theoretical “messaging guide” and extract some semi-human way to articulate why we are better than the competition.
Then we take those poor messages and assume the market for our solution - we show up everywhere our competitors are showing up with messaging that mostly mimics theirs while listing some slightly upgraded specs.
These ads inevitably fail, and we immediately blame the platforms, or we question the tactics... ”maybe we should have different images.”
Well...maybe...but maybe you should have started by having something to say.
Maybe you should have focused on advertising the problem you solve.
Stop organizing your marketing to shoot for averages and metrics and shoot to hit the bird. Shoot to change minds.
Start transforming your current mess of thunderstorm marketing into a series of lightning strikes.
The Shift from Thunder to Lightning
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.” - Mark Twain
Because most marketers and business leaders have been effectively indoctrinated into the “reach and frequency” cult with the sacrament of constant reporting, the majority of companies tend to do thunderstorm marketing - it's big, it's impressive, it can even momentarily get your attention, but there's no lasting impact from it.
It's too spread out, it's too broadly targeted, and it doesn't have a message that means something to someone specific.
Research tells us that we see between 40 and 60 thousand marketing messages daily. We've gotten good at ignoring the thunder.
Alternatively, lighting changes things. It finds a specific target, and it strikes that target with full force...and it changes the world for what it hits.
The authors of Play Bigger define “Lightning Strikes” as “an event meant to explode onto the market, grab the attention of customers, investors, analysts, and media, and make any potential competitors crap their drawers. It is the full concentration of the company’s resources on one high-intensity strike.”
Instead of organizing lightning strikes, most of our organizations view marketing as a box to check. We show up to compete in the market without considering how our company plans to change the thinking in our space.
Instead, we assume demand and mimic the other players in the market.
What we say internally: “Look at what that company is selling; let's go steal some of their business with a ‘better’ product.”
What customers hear: “We're the same as your current provider, but we might be a bit better, faster, or cheaper. You were wrong before. Admit it.”
No thanks.
The “Better” Lie
At the same moment, teams internally are saying things like: “why can't they see that we're better? WE TOLD THEM WE WERE BETTER.”
Because you're lying, and you know it. You're not better for everyone; you can't be. Better is subjective.
Best for who? Best for what?
For those of us serving a business like agriculture, where problems are localized and decentralized by nature, is it possible to have “the best” solution for the entire industry?
Instead of asking, “how many new features could we create?” or “how can we get the most people to click on our ad and buy our solution?” We should ask, “what problem are we going to solve for the smallest number of users?”
In an incredible piece of research, Ayelet Fishbach wrote about “goal dilution,” showing that people perceive organizations with one stated goal as better at what they do than those who claim to do multiple things.
Pulling from this research, author and speaker Rory Sutherland used Google as a case study to emphasize the practical application of goal dilution.
“Everybody else at the time of Google, more or less, was trying to be a portal. Yes, there’s a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news. Google understood that if you’re just a search engine, people assume you’re a very, very good search engine.”
Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft at the time were spending all of their resources chasing mass, identifying “more solutions” to “add more value” for their end users.
Google said, “We will do search better than anyone.”
Now they own 92.47% of global search traffic.
Too many of us attempt to emulate categorical winners by chasing the mass market.
The secret is that the road to mass begins with a single point of value experienced by a particular group of people.
The road to change begins with lightning, not thunder. When trying to change people’s minds - you'd better make sure you hit your target.
Don't chase the mass market; chase the market to whom you can matter most.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
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