Too many of us are overcomplicating marketing.

Too many of us are overcomplicating marketing. Last week I made a video of the Honest Company a nine-figure business pulling out of the D-TC world. This is a follow-up video on how you avoid that and actually dominate your industry in D-TC. There is a book called Zag written by Martin Newmeyer in 2006 and he introduced one idea that has changed my life completely when it comes to marketing and running my own businesses. It's called the good different chart. There are two axes. The Y-axis, it's good and on the X-axis, it represents different. Good is what everyone chases. This is like high quality, functionality, clear design, value. Different is what actually gets people's attention, think fun, unique, surprising or unexpected. This access gives you four quadrants. The bottom left is not good and not different. This is obviously not a place you want to be. The bottom right is different but not good. The top left is good but not different. So an example, this would be, let's say you are a toothpick company and you launch a new toothpaste and this the same plastic base and typical bristles that you see in the grocery store or anywhere else and it's value at the same price. Is it good? Yes. Is it different? Absolutely not. Or let's use the same toothbrush example for this different but not good. Let's say you build a toothbrush that has that same plastic base, but instead of being bristles, it's horse hair. Different? Yes. Is it good? Not at all. Why I'm using a toothbrush example? I don't know, but you get the point I'm trying to make. Where you really want to live is in this top right corner, which is good and different. And being good and different doesn't just apply to the product you're creating. It applies to the content you would create, your distribution and how you show up as well. The honest company, the video that I had created last week that just pulled out of DTC, originally nailed this. 10 plus years ago, a natural personal care company for both adults and babies wasn't very common, so it was very good and it was very different. There's more brands started to model that same thing, they started to blend in like everyone else. Same product, same story, same content. Where they should have shifted wasn't necessarily in their product because it was still such a good well-known product. They should have started to change how they showed up organically in throughout their content. A quick example of this is is Judy's family cafe. It's another breakfast spot on paper nothing different, nothing unique. But instead of marking with flyer signs and pictures of pancakes on Instagram, Judy turned herself into a character no restaurant business had seen. She stitched herself into a viral videos that were already popular, became loud polarizing and almost impossible to ignore. Same food, same category, completely different outcome. Now she's opening several different restaurants all throughout Illinois. Most brands play it safe in this top left quadrant where they are good, but not different. Thinking this is the smart move. Let me be like ever everybody else because if so and so has proven this model out so can I? Problem is is this is where people go to die a very slow death. They get that safety and protection, but little do they know their profitability decreases year in and year out. There's just too much content, too many browns and too many noise to be like everyone else. If you don't make people say I never thought about it that way or I've never seen anything like this before, eventually you are going to be invisible. Drive to live in quadra2. Want to stand out and grow professionally, you have to be good and different.