Important question to deeply understand "Unscripted"

[Levi Ackerman]

Dear MJ and all forum users,

My name is Alessio and I came from Italy.

I read also TMF and understood that marketing is the queen on a fastlane strategy.

But, I just finished today to read "Unscripted " and I have a little doubt in my head. That's about MJ POV about marketing in this book.


When he talks about the productocracy he said that "pull" the product with marketing and advertising it means that the product is not so useful or requested by the market.

But when you read about "finding fastlane ideas", number 10 is about marketing arbitrage and how to re-define a product with marketing.

So, these conflicting ideas, if I can say, makes me overthinking about Unscripted principles.

Can you help me?

thanks a lot to all!

 

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[Olimac21]

Hi Alessio

My understanding around marketing from both books is you do need marketing/branding to differentiate your product however marketing will not make a miracle in terms of turning an average product into a good one or trying to fool the customer. Instead marketing is a good tool to reach a wider audience once you are sure your product is worth people's attention.

For instance nowadays everything is mouth to mouth and you can check reviews online before doing almost anything in this world, for a movie, booking a hotel, restaurant, you name it. If the product you have has at the moment 2 stars rating would more marketing be the solution?

 

[Levi Ackerman]

Thanks for your reply Camilo.

I agreed with you that marketing cannot make miracles for an average product.
But If you are starting out with no money and only an idea, you must test the market. And to test the market you must build great marketing campaigns with the target of understand if your product is a market need or not.

These campaigns must have the target to overboost the perceived value of the product in order to understand if there are a potential crew that may like it.

My overthinking about Unscripted is the example on Fastlane Idea #10 where MJ describe the value increasing of an old 1998 website that is re-think and update to be attractive for the customers.
After all, in this way, you only increase a perceived value of an outdated "product" that - otherwise - would not be considered by anyone. It is a doped perception of an outdated product that won't be really useful for the people.

It is because of this reason that the web is full of experts of anything that charge you for false PDFs with "dated" and "useless" tips.
And some of them - at least here in Italy - also earn several hundred thousand euros.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

you only increase a perceived value of an outdated "product" that

I didn't say the product was outdated. You assumed that. The marketing / presentation is outdated. Big difference.

 

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[The-J]

When he talks about the productocracy he said that "pull" the product with marketing and advertising it means that the product is not so useful or requested by the market.

But when you read about "finding fastlane ideas", number 10 is about marketing arbitrage and how to re-define a product with marketing.

Marketing can sell a shit product. This is undisputed fact. However...

The best products (productocracy) don't need marketing to sell.

What they DO need is access. Reach. Eyeballs. Whatever you wanna call it. At least at first.

If you've got something great, people need to know about it. And, if you can't explain why it's great and convince them to take action, the productocracy can't start.

Marketing for a productocracy gets the ball rolling. It's like, if I did Adwords for a contractor and they constantly did excellent work, the Adwords would be the push and his work would be the pull. Each new client is worth more than the last because of the new clients each acquired client brings (if that makes sense).

So market a great product/service and look for unexpected action, such as people ordering more than one or people taking it upon themselves to review it and tell others. When you see that, you know you've got the stage set for a productocracy.

As far as marketing old products... sometimes it might take some modification to make the old product great. All part of the game.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Marketing can sell a shit product. This is undisputed fact. However...

The best products (productocracy) don't need marketing to sell.

What they DO need is access. Reach. Eyeballs. Whatever you wanna call it. At least at first.

If you've got something great, people need to know about it. And, if you can't explain why it's great and convince them to take action, the productocracy can't start.

Marketing for a productocracy gets the ball rolling. It's like, if I did Adwords for a contractor and they constantly did excellent work, the Adwords would be the push and his work would be the pull. Each new client is worth more than the last because of the new clients each acquired client brings (if that makes sense).

So market a great product/service and look for unexpected action, such as people ordering more than one or people taking it upon themselves to review it and tell others. When you see that, you know you've got the stage set for a productocracy.

As far as marketing old products... sometimes it might take some modification to make the old product great. All part of the game.

X100. Rep, +Featured.

 

[Levi Ackerman]

I didn't say the product was outdated. You assumed that. The marketing / presentation is outdated. Big difference.

Thanks for your reply MJ.
I surely misunderstand what you mean in the book. I gotta read this part again...

By the way, if I can ask: what's your advice about market tests made by marketing campaigns? I mean, even if you identify a market need, you should create a prototype of the product the same and test the market's average reply to understand whether investing to produce the final product is worthwile or not.

many thanks for your kind reply

 

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[maverick]

Hotmail is an excellent example here. They were the first cloud-based email provider. This in itself made it a valuable offering however they needed a way to get the message out to the masses. How did they do this?

Simple:
They added the following line as a signature on all of their emails:
“Get your free email at Hotmail”

This enabled their explosive growth.

Taken from an interview with Sabeer Bhatia:
So for Hotmail, this viral approach was extremely cost-effective and successful. While one of Hotmail’s competitor spent $20 million to attract less than half of Hotmail’s subscribers, it spent only $500,000 over a 2 year period to gain 12 million subscribers.


Check out the early growth story of Paypal for another great example.

 

[AndrewNC]

By the way, if I can ask: what's your advice about market tests made by marketing campaigns? I mean, even if you identify a market need, you should create a prototype of the product the same and test the market's average reply to understand whether investing to produce the final product is worthwile or not.

I'm working alongside someone who is building his first business right now.

The product he wanted to create involved professional photographs for online dating profiles so men can get more matches with women.

When I first got into paid marketing, I heard a lot about running campaigns based on the numbers, conversion rates, and demographics. A friend of mine sold a product that converted best for 40+ year old females who were married, and lived on the West Coast. In these instance, the people aspect was removed from the process and it was just numbers on a screen.

Instead of jumping straight to paid traffic which would tell him one thing (do people convert, or not), we had him go a different route; personal connections. They call this focus groups and beta testers.

He joined three different groups that help young men improve their relationships and dating.

His intent? To find guys who are posting in the groups and struggling with their dating and delivering them the online dating profile advice. I had him message three guys per day every day for a week, then 5 guys per day every day for the second week. This gave him enough time not to simply send over his PDF, but also to genuinely get to know what these guys are struggling with.

Turns out none of them were interested in online profile pictures.

The common problem they said they were dealing with is being nervous around girls (approach anxiety).

How would he have known this if he simply setup a website and a landing page? He took the time to personally offer his help to 50 guys in his target market who needed help with their dating, and help them one on one based on his experience of transforming his (and his friends') dating lives in the past.

Now, because of really getting to know his target market personally, and taking the time to get to know the people behind the computer screens and the people who will be using his final product, he can now work with them on molding his product around their needs.

What I learned over the years is that within larger markets, there are common themes of their pain points, desires, struggles, and you name it...and when he reached out to 50 of them, a good 2/3's of the people he spoke with suffered from this same problem. So once he perfects his product with this focus group....

When he delivers the final result through his marketing campaigns, he know his product will most certainly deliver.

The lesson here: Remember the people aspect of this beyond the demographics.