Behind the Scenes - 8/30/24
Dear Friends,
Sorry I missed last week. There have been a lot of things going on that have required my very focused attention. For those who are new to our emails, I try to do this email once a week where I go into the details of what is happening behind the scenes of our small business. If you want to catch up on prior messages, check out the blog here or just jump right into the story below.
A little while back I received an email from a very nice gentleman who expressed some curiosity about why I do these messages. After some back and forth, I was able to get down to his deeper question which as I could tell, was, "why did you send an extremely long email about the nuances of small business debt restructuring to new customers who may have never gotten an email from you." This is an entirely fair question, and one that deserved deeper thought.
After all, it is a rather small group of people who would likely find it interesting. For those who haven't been keeping a close eye on things, it may come off as though we are in trouble. Rest assured, we are not in trouble. I will never let this company go out of business. I will be making them by myself in my living room if I have to. Some days, keeping the ship afloat in its current form is trickier than others, but that's all part of life.
So for a new customer, who hasn't had much prior contact, this would be a strange first email indeed.
That is partly why I added the part in the first paragraph about going back to read previous BTS messages. Hopefully it helps those who are just joining the story to get into the fray. But back to the question at hand. Why send these emails, or better yet, why send them to everyone? Surely many people don't care that much about this, and to be honest, my frank delineation of our backend decision-making may turn some people off. It doesn't precisely put our best foot forward in terms of our public relations.
I honestly don't know the answer to the question. Perhaps we would be better off doing more curated newsletters. Shorter and with a more positive spin on things would be nice. So I guess I'm asking for feedback. What do you think would be best?
Beyond this, the week has seen a lot of work, but that's on a new(ish) secret project that I'm hoping wraps up soon. So instead of talking about that, I want to talk about what I've been listening to while I work. It's totally changed my thoughts on our advertising strategy.
I came across a gentleman named Rory Sutherland on Instagram reels. It was a snippet of one of his talks, and it made me go listen to his now famous Ted talk from 2011. He is an Ad Man in the fullest sense of the phrase. The old-school type from the 1950's and 60's before everything was purely metric driven. I love hearing his insights, and as a whole, I think he is correct in most of his thinking.
He points out that in business we like to look for the numeric "Newtonian" solutions as he calls them. We look for empirical measurements to quantify human behavior, and then try to ascribe rational reasoning behind why those metrics may be true. This methodology is based in logical and traditional economic thinking.
It also happens to be totally wrong.
Humans don't think rationally. We certainly don't make decisions rationally. If we were like the people in the economic models we would be totally trusting, fully know all the options, and completely rational, making decisions based on nothing but factual data. No one is like this. Most people aren't even close to this.
He talks about how in reality people often make decisions around small, known or unknown details. He advocates for businesses to have a "director of detail", someone who has incredible power to change things, but a very small budget. Ironically he is describing me. I have ultimate authority to change virtually anything about our product, marketing, website, offerings or packaging, and I'm constrained by a very tight budget.
His storytelling is very good and I would recommend you all go and watch some of his presentations on YouTube. Even if you are "just a consumer" you will be delighted to hear things and go "yea, that's me he's talking about." Overall, many of his stories are used again in different talks, but each time there is something new and good. I'm waiting for my local library to ship in a copy of his book "Alchemy" to read.
I'll give you an example of how one of his points has shaped a new ad we just launched. He talked about how when given good news and bad news, we instinctively latch onto the good news and minimize the bad news. Perhaps it's optimism, but it means that sometimes using a good news, bad news tagline can help people focus on the good they might otherwise ignore. Avis famously used a variation of the tagline "We may be number two, but that means we try harder" in the 1960's which is genius.
This has led to a few new ads, but one of my favorite (which you might see on Instagram or Facebook) is simple. It's a video of our product with the following tagline: "Bad news is that it's expensive, but the good news is that its better." Which I think perfectly encapsulates the reality of our company. People often forget that comparing our price totally overlooks that "you get what you pay for" is a rule of life.
This is just one of our new ads like this, and I hope that you all see them and enjoy them in the coming weeks and months. I've been inspired by Mr. Sutherland's talks to re-evaluate all our little details and work to make them better. His main point, and the one I want to leave you with, is this.
When it comes to marketing, results are not proportionate to inputs. Oftentimes, the small changes have enormous upsides.
Stay tuned for more letters in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin MurdyCEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
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