A Tale of Two Clients
The names and business types have been changed in this article to protect the innocent and the not so innocent…
They were the best of clients. They were the worst of clients.
Or so would Charles Dickens have written, were he an account manager in the fervent digital economy that now whirrs around the spoke of the 2020s.
Ideal clients come to marketing agencies with world changing ideas. Full of purpose and intention to make a spirited difference for everybody. Those are the dream clients who know how to generate traction. They simply open their mouths and people listen. Everyone loves a rogue that’s taking a risk for the little guy.
But stable businesses don’t always work like that.
Ultimately, they have to be about the bottom line and as a result you often get die-hard sales-makers and ruthless operational gurus standing at the helms of companies. And these guys want a formula for making cash.
Here are two stories about companies in similar situations; one didn’t want to change and the other took our tools on board to grow and sell their business.
Company No.1
The first was a bread company. Their bread was good. It wasn’t the best bread, but it wasn’t the worst. No special ingredients. No links to organic farming. And no donations to third world grain production to give back to the community. The bare minimum spent on brand – but a great sales record.
Their agency approached us because one of their rivals had come up with a new product range. Super-bread. Bread full of special additives like acai berries and Himalayan pink salt. They wanted something like that to market their bread.
But they didn’t have anything. Nothing special. Nothing standout. We’re probably repeating ourselves a little here.
We have a saying at Sold. The problem is the way. When you get stuck with a brand, you make the sticking point the brand. What do we mean? Well, in this case we decided to go for a ‘simply bread’ direction. Bread without the politics. Bread without the cause celebre. After all, you don’t want a mouthful of ethics with butter and jam every morning, do you?
The agency couldn’t get their heads around it. They still believed there had to be something special within the bread that we were missing. What they were in fact missing was the great big gap in the market…
Company No.2
Second company came to us – they sold used goods. We’re not going to tell you what kind of good because again, it would give the game away. Now as you know, a ton of websites and different sales outlets sell used goods. You can even just go to eBay and get a fairly good audience. Or Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace if you want that quick, local sale.
They needed a different angle. Again, where one didn’t quite exist. Or actually… In respect of a classic Mad Men ‘It’s Toasted’ moment, perhaps it did.
You see all second-hand goods are made the same. When they come off the production line and leave the factory, what’s the difference? However, when you buy something second hand, you’re buying something else…
You’re buying the condition of the object. Which is entirely dependent on the person who has owned it. And what the person gives the object is a story.
Rather than selling the goods directly. We decided to sell the history of the product, where it had been, how it had performed, why the last user liked it… Because the next buyer actually cares about the last owner.
This brand decided to embrace our ideas. By taking on a proposition that set them outside the conventional thinking in their chosen marketplace, they then set about developing product features and capabilities that reflected this different way of doing business.
Now? They’ve completed contracts with two of the biggest, most significant players in their space who believe that the brand’s ethos represents a different proposition from their own. By deploying a different idea, an alternative way of business, they’ve managed to find a niche that’s attractive to a previously forgotten audience. And as a result, those other players now want in on their brand…
In many ways Sold has adopted a similar position. We believe that sales messaging and proposition is often the last factor that businesses consider. Many marketing departments become obsessed with image and how the business is presented. Remember that everyone’s got a great looking website, but very few people are bothered by what it says – until they see a site that really nails the reason why people should do business with them…
And this is where we stand apart as Sold. We’re about putting the idea first. Because when you know why your customer is buying you (not that Simon Sinek of Why you’re doing it) – then this dictates the entire rest of your marketing strategy.