96. Rebel writing: how brandwank is killing your comms

People don't engage with you when you shout out them, buy my stuff.

They engage when you show them that you understand what's keeping them awake at night.

If people say, you know, want a quick one word?

How do we write great content?

Tell stories about your customer's pain.

If one out of ten is bland, beige, boring messaging, you could write one out of ten messaging, but you're going to get one out of ten attention and results.

Screwed to the wall is a set of rules.

No running, no jumping, no pissing in the pool.

Their rules, it's quite clear.

And they haven't been written by some brand guru.

They've been written by a bloke who doesn't want you to run or swim or piss in the pool.

Hello, unicorners, and welcome to today's show.

I am Dom Hawes and I am your host today.

And today we are bringing you the witty, wild, and wise Peter Wendt.

Now, I met Peter on LinkedIn, or should I say a couple of his posts and comments bulldozed through my attention deficit doom scrolling.

Because here is a man who really has a way with words that kind of grab attention by the throat.

So the more I saw of his work, the more I liked.

And I asked Nikola, our show producer, to get in touch with him.

She did that.

They connected.

And here we are.

Peter is an amazingly frank truth teller, and on his website, Boldaf Marketing, he's published what he calls pool rules.

There are twelve of them, and we are going to look at all of them today.

Now, the thing about the pool rules is this, they're excellent, excellent rules for all of us to live by as we seek to be more effective, both as marketers and communicators.

And that's why today is really, really worth a listen.

So let's go straight to the studio and meet Peter Wendt.

Thank you very much.

Nice to be here, and thanks for the kind words.

Well, not at all.

No.

Hey, unicorn is, if you haven't yet, go look him up on LinkedIn and look back through his post history.

And if you don't laugh, you probably want to unsubscribe from this podcast.

Anyway, why don't you start by giving us an idea of you, your background, who you are, what you do.

My background background was I've spent about a decade building a couple of companies as an entrepreneur and founder, sold those, and then probably another decade or so helping other people who had founded companies and maybe gone wrong or were losing their way to try and fix them.

The last one of those I did was about 20, 1617.

Didn't really enjoy them, if I'm honest.

You're always working, walking into a distress situation, and it wasn't filling my soul.

So I promised myself that was the last one I'd do.

And then I didn't know what to do.

And as I was sort of finding my way around LinkedIn and working out what might be next, somebody contacted me on LinkedIn out of the blue and said, we're a bit lost.

We don't know how to talk about ourselves.

I like your content.

Is that something you could help us with?

Do you have some sort of workshop?

And I said, yes, I do, but I didn't.

But I soon did.

And really, that was probably six years ago, and it's just all gone from there.

I sold that workshop a number of times, built on it, built some content, built some online courses, and here I am now, still doing the same thing, still enjoying it, loving it.

When I went to look at you in more detail on your website, I found these things called pool rules.

What are pool rules and how do you use them?

How do they come about?

If you look at most websites, there's a section which says, what we believe in or what we stand for, what are our values?

And you could nearly always see the influence of some brand guru who's turned up with a gilet on and a cold cup in his hand and asked them questions about their spirit animals and their chakras.

And what they produce is often quite bland, quite vague.

WeWork's a great example.

They would tell the world they were trying to elevate the world's consciousness.

I don't know what that means.

And I believe that if you're going to set some rules for yourself, they should sound like rules.

And there's no better place to see rules done properly than if you go to your local swimming pool and screw to the wall is a set of rules.

No running, no jumping, no pissing in the pool.

They're rules.

It's quite clear.

And they haven't been written by some brand guru.

They've been written by a bloke who doesn't want you to run or swim or piss in the pool.

And so that's how we wanted to present our rules.

And we thought pool rules washington a very good way to describe it.

These are the hills we would die on.

They're what we believe messaging is all about and how you should do it.

But I think they're also a good manifesto for most businesses in terms of what their messaging should look like.

Well, we're going to look at those today, and they are really cool.

So I'm really looking forward to digging into some of these.

You recently introduced the concept of a brand wank.

If you take most businessmen to the pub, you'd have a good conversation, you'd have some banter, you might have a few swear words, a few jokes, take them back to the office and put a keyboard in their hand and ask them to write something about their business.

And they, they start speaking a different language.

They're elevating and they're harnessing and they're unleashing.

And we really, as a throwaway line, some time ago on LinkedIn, I wrote a post terming that brand wank, and it kind of caught people's imagination.

So we've used that term quite.

In fact, we're using it increasingly.

And just last week, actually, on our LinkedIn, on my LinkedIn post, we launched as a bit of fun brand wank bingo, which is a bingo card you can take into a meeting and tick off all of the brown wank you hear from the people in the meeting, and you shout brown wank.

As soon as you do a line or a row, if you got the courage.

If, if I have a feeling we might come back to Bran wank as we go through today's show.

Let's start there.

By clearing, you also use that word messaging.

Many people listening might think it's synonymous with general communication, but I'm assuming you are talking about a more considered approach to messaging as part of a brand strategy or part of a positioning exercise.

I think there's a real premium on simplicity, so we try to keep our definitions very simple.

So if you think about your brand as how you want the world to perceive you, or you think about your visual identity as how you want the world to see you, messaging is how you want the world to hear you, whether it's spoken or written.

And there are lots of, obviously, you could atomize that into lots of little parts, messaging and value propositions and taglines, all that sort of thing.

It boils down to how you want the world to hear you and what you got to say and what's in it for them and why you're the right person for them.

What stops people being bold enough to say the things they should say?

Fear of failure is probably, or fear of ridicule, or fear of pushback.

So if you think about messaging as a scale, you can write.

And if one out of ten is bland, beige, boring messaging, you could write one out of ten.

Messaging but you're going to get one out of ten attention and results.

If you write ten out of ten messaging, you could get ten out of ten results.

You might get seven, eight, nine.

You're not going to get one, probably.

But you're also probably going to occasionally get ten out of ten failure, where you do something wrong or you offend the whole world and you get a torrent of abuse.

It's that bit that stops people writing ten out of ten content messaging, whatever it is they're writing.

And so they fall back into their comfort zone, which is to write one out of ten.

But there's a phrase I'm sure will come up a couple of times today.

We talk about no man's land, which is a place where there are no customers.

There's a lot of founders who are crying into their coffee that it's all unfair.

And if you write one out of ten messaging and you get one out of ten results, then you will spend your life in no man's land.

Good.

Let's dive in.

Dive in.

God, that's a brand wank, isn't it?

Damn.

Let's talk about some of the pool rules.

Well, let's talk about all of them.

Now, I've grouped these a little bit because I looked at them before and I wondered, maybe just to help guide the conversation, whether we could group them.

And the first group I've got is under the heading of, you are not your customer.

And rule number one, which I think is really powerful, is no one gives a shit about you or your product.

If you start a business as a founder, you live, eat, sleep, and breathe as product you're bringing into the world.

And so naturally, you're obsessed by it, but nobody else is.

Let me tell you a very quick story which I think illustrates this.

Imagine you go to the pub and you meet a friend you haven't seen for a while, and you get a drink, and you go out to the garden and you sit down and your friend says to you, you're not going to believe the holiday I've just been on.

I've got some photos, and they get their phone out and they open the photo app, and they show you a picture of them standing in a bar with a drink, and you paint that, very polite, that's interesting look on your face.

And then they scroll across to another photo, and now your heart sinks and you're thinking, okay, I wonder how many of these are going to be by the time they get to the fifth photo.

You're writing a kettlebell workout in your head to do at the gym tomorrow.

And by the time they get to the 10th photo, you're looking for the exit.

Why do we react to other people's photos like that?

And the answer to that question is because we're not in them.

And the one photo where we say, stop, stop, go back, blow that one up.

Give me the phone.

Let me have a look.

Is the one we're in.

We're obsessed with ourselves.

And we wander around all day with a conversation going on inside our head, which is a conversation that's all about us.

But the problem is that our customers aren't ready for us to bundle into their life saying, look at my product, look at the features, my awards, my TED talk, all that sort of stuff.

If we're obsessed with ourselves, guess who our customers obsessed with?

They're obsessed with themselves.

And so there's a whole lot of stuff that follows on from that as to how we, how we counter that.

But that rule is, in my view, is the most important rule.

And if in doubt about any of the other rules, refer to rule one, nobody gives a shit about you or your product.

As a marketer, how do you make non marketing people understand that point?

Especially, you know, if you're a product, if you're a product engineer or the founder or you're in product management, and, you know, you tend to be very inside out thinking.

You tend to think that everyone wants the opposite of this.

Everyone loves it, and they just won't understand this comment.

What advice can we give to marketers to help them understand that no one really gives a shit about the product?

I would tell them that story to start with because I think that's quite, it's quite true.

And most people can relate to that.

They've all been exposed to baby photo.

Right now we're seeing a torrent of back to school photos.

And, you know, you look on Facebook, every back to school photos got the person who posted probably liked it, their husbands liked it, the mother in law's liked it.

Nobody, you know, nobody cares.

You posted that for you because you're.

I'm not knocking it.

It's, it's great, but it's a great example of how we don't care.

So I think the first thing I would do is I would tell them that story and I would tell them another quick story, which I think is, that is the sort of the follow on from that, which is, it's a story I tell in the workshop about how it was the day of the men's Olympic triathlon final in Hyde park in 2012.

And I was giving a talk at an entrepreneurs conference on the other side of town, a couple of hundred people in the audience.

The theme of my talk was three or four things I'd failed at.

And my idea was that if I told them about things I made a mess of, it might help them to avoid those same pitfalls.

And I told a story about a business we started in the very early noughties.

And really early on in the lifecycle of the business, we won Orange as a customer.

Orange then was the number two mobile network in the country, a customer that was way too big for us.

And it swamped everything.

It swamped our cash, it swamped our mindset, it swamped all of our resources.

And there was a point at which I thought it might actually put us under.

And I lay awake at night worrying about it, thinking, what am I going to tell my employees?

What am I going to tell my investors?

Anyway, finished the talk, and as people were filing out, it was the end of.

It was the last talk of the day.

A guy came up to me and said, peter, that story you told about how you took on a customer that's too big and it swamped you and it swamped your resources, and you were lying awake at night worrying about what you were going to tell your employees and your friends and your investors, that's exactly the problem I've got.

And I'm like, can I buy you a coffee and have a chat?

Now, what's interesting is at no point in my talk had I said, this is what I do, these are my services, this is how I can help.

He hadn't been attracted by my product.

He'd been attracted because I told him a relatable story about his problem.

So if I would tell those two stories to technical people, they're quite relatable stories.

They're not, you know, they're not artificial or abstract.

And I think that, you know, if you can't see in those two stories the pitfalls of just going and talking about your product, I think you're in difficulty.

Is there a challenge as a marketer, though?

If people don't give a shit about your product, do they care about the brand?

And we spend a lot of time talking about brand and the importance of it.

Do people care about brand?

Do you think brands have an abstract emotional impact on us that we probably don't notice?

So what if I said to you, innocent, you would have a different set of feelings than if I said to you, IBM.

So I don't think it's about caring about brands.

I think that in terms of things like names, I don't think that.

I'm a great believer that names aren't that important.

I think if you name soon become just generic and part of a good example.

Carphone Warehouse, one of the biggest companies in Europe.

Great success story.

Don't sell car phones and they don't work from a warehouse.

But we don't think about them as the car phone warehouse anymore.

It's just a name.

So I'm not sure it all matters that much.

But of course, one of the things about brands is a lot of people, when they buy brands, they're buying them because they feel the brand says something about them.

So we're back to the same thing.

They don't really give a shit about the product.

What they care about is how the product's going to make them look.

You're absolutely spot on.

People buy Macs, for example.

They couldn't tell you what the clock speed of the Mac is or how much memory it's got or what sort of memory.

They don't know anything about what's going on inside that they like it because it's got the badge on the outside which they think says something about them.

We post about this quite a lot and every single time people will go to great lengths to deny that's why they buy a Mac.

But it's not true.

It's very fun, interesting.

About a couple of years ago I went to a meeting in the IOD on Pall Mall and I was early, so there was a pret just opposite.

And I had a coffee in there and it was probably 10:00 in the morning.

So it's full of freelancers who were sort of moving around London in between meetings.

Everybody was on a MACD.

So these are kind of designers and that sort of person.

Then I went across to the IOD for my meeting which was full of businessmen.

Directors found, you know, people, corporate.

Everybody was on some sort of Microsoft device.

So you can't tell me there's not an emotional pull for all of those people in prep.

They wanted to stay away from corporate.

There's anathema and corporations.

Not all of them, but a lot of corporations like Microsoft, because Microsoft does corporations very well.

So you're right, there is a very.

Good rational reason to use Macs as well.

I must say I'm on a Mac myself at the moment, is you can buy them used so they're cheap and they have a residual value.

So actually the rational thing, but no one likes to talk about that specifically.

Apple is cost of ownership actually is really attractive, but there you go.

That's a feature, not an emotion.

Let's talk about message, though, while we're talking about this.

Rule number two, pool.

Rule number two, it's all about the message.

Another post, which we do occasionally, which gets lots of pushback, is message versus design.

So words versus design on a website, I believe firmly that the words you write on your website are worth 100 times what the design of the website is and what it looks like.

So we have used to build our website and we also introduce into some of our clients a very good designer.

I won't tell you his name because he works for another corporation.

This is a bit of a side hustle, but he's the creative director for quite a big company and he won't start designing until you give him all your copy because he says that the personality I'm going to give you a website is in your copy.

A couple of examples, I think, which back this up.

Dropbox.

So when Drew Houston invented Dropbox because he was on a greyhound bus going across America and he'd forgotten his flash drive, and so I had no access to his files.

So that was the beginning of it.

And he put a.

He had the idea, made an explainer video, put it on a website blank page, just with a sign up field underneath.

And he signed up 75,000 people.

No flashing carousels, no things sliding in or flashing.

Just a white page with an explainer video.

75,000 sign ups.

Go to the Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffetts company, go to their website.

They've just become a trillion dollar company.

I'm never quite sure.

Is that a thousand billion dollar value company?

It's the same website they've had since the.

Well, they probably built their first website when the web was invented.

And it's the same one and it is boring and dull and beige, but the messaging on it is just, you know, is everything.

So there's no design at all on there.

So I've never heard anybody say, I looked at this website and I loved that way that carousel moved across the page.

And I thought the way that they slid in that opt in form was fantastic.

I must call them and do business.

They do.

Look at the, they think these guys, the way they express themselves, the way they're, the points they're making and the way they're doing it is right up my street.

I'm going to give them a call.

So, messaging Trump's design every time in my book.

Okay, unicornists.

There we go, messaging Trump's design every time.

If you disagree, get in touch with me via LinkedIn and let's have a chat.

But I think I agree with you.

Messaging is the number one most important thing.

And on that note, pull rule number eleven, which I love as well, which is don't be better.

Be different.

There's a lot of debate at the moment about, you know, differentiation.

It's impossible anymore, but it's just not.

I don't think I've seen a really properly differentiated product.

Maybe once I saw, I met the founder of Skype very early on in their life, before they became famous, I looked at what they were doing.

I thought, this is a game changer.

Game changer is Bram Wank.

I apologize.

That was something which was going to really change things, but I haven't seen many like that.

So differentiation, the way you differentiate yourself, could be as simple as your personality.

What innocent did wasn't they made smoothies.

There was tons of people who made smoothies before, but they did it in a sparkly, entertaining, playful way that we all loved.

And it was aimed at kids to start with.

And it took off like a rocket.

Let me tell you a story that I think illustrates it very well, which you may have read.

There's an article which I think certainly on our blog, we may have published it also on LinkedIn, but it's about Virgin Cola and what they did and compared to fever tree and what they did.

And there's a very good book which I recommend anybody with aspirations in marketing would read.

It's written by two guys, Al Reese and Jack Trout, and it's called the 22 immutable laws of marketing.

And it was written, I think, late eighties, early nineties.

So some of the references in it are outdated, but the laws are timeless.

And the first law is what they call the law of leadership, which is don't be better.

Be first.

What they're saying is that the product that wins is not the best product.

It's not the most cleverly constructed product.

It's probably not even the product with the deepest pockets.

It's the first product into the market.

And the reason the first one normally wins is the first one into people's minds.

We are creatures of habit, and the Cola wars is a great example.

Coke v.

Pepsi.

They've been at each other's throats for 100 years.

We all grew up somehow.

We don't know how, probably choosing one or the other.

So we're all coke or Pepsi.

Some people are seven up or Fanta people, that's the niche.

But most markets will sustain two leaders, Coke and Pepsi, Visa, Mastercard and so on.

What Richard Branson tried to do with virgin Cola was to come into a market and aspire to be one of the leaders.

So he wanted to displace Coke or Pepsi.

But the problem wasn't the budget or Pepsi's place on the supermarket shelves.

It was the fact that in the consumers heads, we'd made that choice already and we weren't about to go and revisit it.

We don't change our minds easily.

Most people bank with the same bank all their life.

If you smoke, they smoke the same brand of cigarettes all their life.

We're creatures of habit.

So I wasn't personally, I'm a coke person.

I probably discovered that when I was five or six and I drank Coke over Pepsi all the time, but I wouldn't drink virgin Cola.

And so he spent millions of pounds, got nowhere.

I think.

By the time they eventually wrapped it up, the only market they'd taken a leadership position in was Bangladesh.

So it failed because he ignored the laws of marketing.

If you look at fever tree, exactly the opposite happened.

So the two guys that started fever tree looked at, they started just making tonic and they looked at the tonic market, dominated again by two leaders, schweppes and Canada dry, and they thought, what are the leaders doing wrong?

That we can do better.

And if you look at Schweppes, for example, the branding, their little tins of tonic are just yellow.

There's no branding on them.

Fever tree.

Okay, well, we'll have a slightly playful, interesting, lively brand.

Schweppes is full of man made ingredients.

So fever tree majored on that.

It's all natural ingredients.

It's natural quinine.

But if you look on the tin, it's not just natural quinine, it's natural quinine from central Africa.

It's very glamorous to try and sort of play up that sort of slightly artisan feel.

If you look on the tin, they have tasting notes.

The standard tonic is orange with a gentle bitterness.

So it's playing up this whole, we're not just a blande, man made boring brown with something a bit sparky.

So what they did was they separated themselves from the tonic category and they invented the artisan tonic category, which they couldn't be first in the tonic category, but they can be first in the category they've invented.

And it took off from there and they dominated that category.

And I don't know when it happened, but not long ago.

They now sell more tonic than schweppes.

So they obeyed the laws of marketing and the law of leadership and have been a huge success story.

And you would have thought if I said to you 20 years ago, there's this unknown brand, these two guys in west London, we don't know them, and there's virgin, who's most likely to start a soft drinks brand and succeed.

Everyone would choose virgin, but actually, the two guys who started fever tree did it smart.

They also obeyed a few of your other pool rules, which leads us on to the importance of focus.

Pool rule number eight, stop trying to convert everyone.

Fever tree created their own category.

They didn't care about the majority of the market.

They knew where they were entering it and that's all they were focused on.

Talk to me a little bit about why you think so many businesses are afraid of focus, and they do try.

To convert everyone, especially in the early stage of business.

Your natural instinct is throw the biggest net out there that you can in the hope that when you pull it in, there'll be something in there.

And there will be, but it's not a sustainable, repeatable process.

The psychology behind it is that nobody goes to bed at night having bought something they had no intention of buying when they woke up.

We're not certain.

You might have bought a Mars bar or a packet of peanuts, but big things, b two b stuff.

We're not impulse buyers like that.

If you're selling CRM systems, you're not going to, just by dming 10,000 people, persuade loads of people to buy a CRM system they had no intention of buying.

But they're out there.

There are a large group of people who've got CRM on their mind, so what you need to do is to find them and we can talk about how we do that.

And then once you've found them, you need to keep reminding them that this is who I am.

So that's what billboard.

I'm not an advertiser, so the advertising world might all tell me I'm wrong here, but I think that's generally what billboard advertising is about.

If you see on the side of the road a big billboard for the latest model of Oaks wagon, a lot of people are going to drive past that because they have no interest at all in.

But the people who are on their mind to change their car, my car's become unreliable or the contract's about to expire, or we need a new family car.

That's going to prompt them.

It's going to jog their memory that they should do something about it.

And so I think that we need to find those people that we would describe as the semi converted, the people that have got CRM on their mind.

And we need just to keep on gently reminding them that here we are, we're a CRM.

And that's not just by saying, talking about our product.

We can do that in lots of interesting ways in lots of different places.

But the principle that underlies it is that people don't go to bed at night having made an impulse purchase they had no intention of making when they wake up.

We can't convert people just by telling we've got a great product and hoping it'll work.

So this is the pool rule, actually, that I think led to our very first conversation, because we.

I think we're engaged in a thread about the importance of focus.

And you said messaging isn't about trying to persuade people they're hungry.

It's about finding hungry people and giving.

Them a big stake, a big stake to focus on.

And that's a lovely image to keep in your mind as you're thinking about your own segmentation.

And targeting, of course, is find people who are hungry, then give them a big stake to focus on.

Yeah.

And if you look at what's happening in direct marketing at the moment, we all see it.

We get our DM's on LinkedIn, are flooded with people.

We get tons of direct email coming at us.

And that's because people think that all they got to do is put a product in front of us constantly and they'll convert and they won't.

And there's a really important part in all of this, which is part of this, reminding people gently and regularly, is about building a relationship until they get to know you.

And what seems to me to be happening is the new generation of marketers seem to want to shortcut that relationship.

In fact, they want to outsource that to you.

They say, here's my product, and if you like the sound of my vibe, go and look at my website, go and look at my instagram, go and look at my LinkedIn.

And then when you've done all that, come and buy from me.

And they seem to want to outsource the whole building a relationship back to you.

They have these sort of spam machines which just throw shit out into the world, hoping that something will stick and it just doesn't work.

They're so irritating as well.

It's like, firstly, they're easy to identify.

The good news is they're easy to identify because firstly, they put quick question in the subject headline.

So, quick question.

Hi, Dom.

I couldn't help noticing that you are insert job title.

And you've done an amazing job at insert company.

I do this.

If you'd like to book some time with me, here's a link to my diary.

Yeah, as you say, I love the concept that they're outsourcing everything to us.

It's like, I will go and develop my own relationship with you and when I'm ready, I'll book your time because it's probably more precious than mine.

It's completely barking.

Yeah.

I'll do all the legwork of getting to know you and I'll go and have a look around your website and I'll get to know you.

When I'm ready, I'll come by.

It's not going to happen.

It's like, thank God you emailed me.

I hadn't thought of getting a CRM before until you mentioned it.

Exactly.

There are no customers in no man's land pool.

Rule number four, we mentioned no man's land earlier.

It's a little bit going back to this.

You can write content.

That's one or it's ten.

I think you have to ruffle some feathers.

If you don't ruffle some feathers, then no one's going to talk about it.

If no one's going to talk about it, there's no engagement and then you're stuck in no man's land.

So no man's land is where people who write one out of ten messaging and content live.

And it's got.

And we have a bit of fun with it.

The sort of people that live in no man's land, people who are.

Maybe it's a bit disparaging, but, you know, founders who are handing out coffee through drive in windows and.

Or drawing hearts on coffee foam at Starbucks, you know, it's not the place to be and you don't have to live there, but you've got to have a little bit of courage to get yourself up the one to ten scale and ruffle a few feathers.

You do that by having an opinion.

Yeah.

You need to understand what you stand for.

You need to understand what's really important to you in your business.

We say to people, there's a few exercises we do, but, you know, think about if you were a.

Imagine you're a superhero and you, what, what evil have you been in relation to your business?

What evil have you put on earth to solve?

And that helps people to sort of focus on.

Okay, what, you know, what evil are we solving?

Stop talking about.

We'll improve your customer services and we'll get, you know, do faster and cheaper and all that sort of stuff.

But tell me what you're trying to, what evil you're trying to solve.

And then, you know, once you've done that, okay, well, take that evil and now create an enemy.

One of the things I think is evil is telephone, cold calling.

It's not for all the obvious reasons.

I just think it's can telephone.

This is another post which gets lots of heat.

Can telephone, cold calling work in the hands of an expert?

Yes, but, you know, it's not the most efficient way to do it.

I could travel to Edinburgh on a horse and cart.

I'd get there, but it's not the most efficient way to do it because someone's invented a car or a train or a plane.

So we say to people, create an enemy.

And when you create an enemy, it's much easier to start to write stuff which might ruffle a few feathers.

Now, I don't care how many people rise up with their pitchforks against me saying, I'm a cold caller.

You're wrong, because they're never going to be my customer.

So I don't really care.

I mean, I don't care what they think, because on the other side of the equation are people who say, we absolutely agree with you.

We think content is the right way to do it.

We're just not sure how to do that.

And some of them say, can you help?

Guess what?

Bingo.

They are your potential customers.

Exactly.

And that's pool rule number six.

Of course, don't be afraid to offend the right people.

And the right people, therefore, are people who are never going to be your customer.

Yeah.

And it doesn't matter how many people you offend, as long as you're delighting enough.

So we should be careful about this word offending people.

We're not being gratuitous, we're not setting out.

I could write a post which offend the entire world, but it wouldn't do my business any good.

It's got to be in relation to your business.

So go back to that who's our enemy?

And let's not be frightened to take them head on and take the flak we get back for it.

Nike are brilliant at it.

You probably remember the Colin Kaepernick episode.

He was the guy of the american football player who was the first guy to take the knee in protest at some the police.

And there were some killings of some african american people.

And that obviously was very controversial.

And Nike then did ran out ad campaign.

He was a Nike athlete.

They ran an ad campaign which was believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.

And he was the.

It was him.

So that is a really good example of how you ruffle feathers but delight someone, offend others.

That touched on probably the two most controversial topics in contemporary patriotism and racism.

And a lot of people were burning Nikes and protesting against what Nike had done and boycott Nike and would never touch them.

But there was an awful lot of people who absolutely were right behind it.

And you have to believe that the people who were right behind it were Nikes.

They were young athletes, african American, and a lot of them obvious Nike customers.

And Nike, the proof of the puddings in the eating.

Nike took quite a nice little sales spike just after that.

But they weren't afraid to attack a real ruffling feathers issue head on.

And we'll talk in a minute about what happens when the flat comes.

But they were happy and they've got form.

They've done that a few times.

I think we're not being offensive gratuitously, we're just not holding back on what we think.

I get it.

And I think Nike, again with the ad they released just before the Olympics, which was really hard hitting and it spoke to the character, the obsessive character of what it takes to be the best.

And it really upset a lot of people.

And I wasn't a massive fan of it myself, but I'm not in their target market.

But I absolutely get why that would have, would have hit.

And I think actually your mechanism, the superhero and identifying an enemy is a really nice way of encouraging people to think outside in.

So we talk a lot about inside out and outside in here.

It's part of what we've been talking about today, instead of thinking about you and your product, because we know no one gives a shit about it.

The enemy you're identifying outside the company is the problem you're solving for the people you want to talk to.

It's a really nice way of trying to identify that and create content towards it.

It's fabulous.

And if we go back to the very beginning where we said that some people don't engage with you when you shout out them, buy my stuff.

They engage when you show them that you understand what's keeping them awake at night, your enemy and your stories about your enemy will be stories about your customers pain.

And that's if people say, want a quick one word.

How do we write great content?

Tell stories about your customer's pain.

On the flip side, we talked about Nike and how they are very happy to plant their feet, make their point and stand behind it.

The problem a lot of people have and where it falls down is they make these bold statements or these bold posts or bold ads, whatever it is, and then as soon as the flat comes, they crumble.

So we've seen it a couple of times recently.

There was that Apple ad for the new iPad, which was a hydraulic crusher.

Yes.

Yes, I did.

Crushing all those creative tools.

What they meant to say, I think, was we compressed all these tools into one iPad.

But actually, as soon as I saw that ad, I thought, oh, no, the imagery there is, we're crushing creativity and machines are taking over, and everyone thought something around that.

Now, if that had been Apple under Steve Jobs, he'd have said, bollocks to all of you.

That's a great ad, and we're sticking with it.

We believe it.

Modern day Apple said, no, no, we're really sorry, we apologize.

And they withdrew the ad.

Bumble did something similar.

They did an ad about, I think it was sort of attacking celibacy, saying celibacy is not the answer.

And of course, that, you know, there are people who are celibate for reasons other than romance and relationships.

And there was a huge wave of anti bumble.

And so bumble went into retreat and pulled the ad.

And so I think there's a.

It's not a.

One of our rules, but maybe if we do another version of the rules, it would be.

And it would be if you write something that you believe in and people are offended, let them be offended.

Well, you do have some rules on being tough and being a little bit more outward looking in that way and pull.

Rule number five is harden the fuck up, because bold messaging isn't for the faint hearted, and it's going to attract criticism.

Right, exactly that.

It's easy to write a bold post that's going to ruffle some feathers.

Anyone can do that.

It's not quite so easy to press post and put it out there, and then it's even harder to see some of the reaction.

People, we like harmony.

We like everything to be happy in the house.

But if you're writing a ten out of ten messaging, you can't do it without some criticism, some flack, some hard pushback, and in some cases some abuse.

And it goes with the territory.

You either don your coat of armor and just take it or go back to one.

So I think poor rule number seven gives some hints about how you might handle that, because that rule is welcome.

Controversy and confrontation with open arms.

How do you choose where and how to be controversial?

So there's somebody I met on, I know from LinkedIn, I've known him for a few years, and he's a sales trainer, and he's nurtured an audience that have come to him because they like what he does with sales training and the content he puts out there.

And he wrote a post about, I'm guessing, three or four months ago, berating female football commentators.

Nothing to do with what he did.

And the likelihood is that what he would have seen is half a dozen people liked it and commented, those are his, you know, his misogynistic mates.

But what he wouldn't have seen is the probably 100 people who unfollowed him or the several thousand people who made a mental note not to go near him.

So if you draw a Venn diagram of people who don't agree with your outrageous views on misogyny and your audience, the overlap, which is going to be reasonably big, is people you piss off for no good reason and you're losing an audience because you just want to get something off your chest.

So you've got to be a bit careful about your subject matter and it's got to be related to what you do.

If you want to go and rant about that sort of stuff, create a false idea and go on Twitter and do it, because there's a sewer there to play in.

So I say to people, stay away from culture wars.

This is not about knocking the competition.

In fact, we created an enemy.

We have to curate that quite carefully.

It's not about saying the opposition to crap.

We can do that.

We can reposition them in much cleverer ways than that.

Yeah, knocking ads don't work well in this country.

I agree.

I agree.

I don't know if I'm generalizing too much here, but it seems to be an american thing.

Look at what's going on in the presidential election.

I don't think I've heard many policies.

What I've heard is lots of why the other person's awful.

So I think we stay away from that.

Stay away from the culture wars, stay away from your personal rants.

But, you know, when you.

But if you believe in what you're saying in relation to your product and your principles and your values, don't hold back.

As I say, we have.

Cold calling is dead.

Words always trump design.

Another one we've done recently, which I believe in is most headlines on most websites are awful.

They'd make fantastic sub headlines, but they're not good headlines because they don't do anything.

And I get lots of people coming back at me that, you know, can you look at our headline and tell me what you think?

And they're all expecting me to say, that's fantastic.

And generally they're nothing you have to nicely say.

So I think if you and the other one, which again gets a lot of pushback, is people who in their LinkedIn profile, put a string of letters after their name, who are they doing that for?

They're not doing it for their audience.

Most people don't understand what those letters mean.

I've seen people with more letters after their name than they got in their name and they're doing it for them.

And it's about feeding their ego rather than feeding.

And again, I'm not being rudeness.

Well, I probably am, but.

But you can understand if somebody spent three years doing a degree or a qualification or spent a year and 30 grand or 50 grand, whatever, he's doing an MBA, or they've done a life coaching course, it's the centre of their world.

And it goes back to this, nobody gives a shit, but it's the centre of their world.

And so they put it up there thinking it's going to be the centre for everybody else and everyone's going to go, wow.

I spent some time in the army right at the very beginning of my career and I went through Sandhurst.

I remember the day I got commissioned and I was allowed to wear one pip on my shoulder.

I put it on and I walked out into Camberley, the town that Sandhurst is in, thinking everyone in Camberley is going to notice.

Problem is, there's another two or 300 people doing the same thing and we didn't even notice each other, let alone the population.

Been watching that for the last hundred years.

But it was the most important thing I'd ever done in my life up until then.

And so I thought it was important for everybody else, but nobody gave a shit about me or my product.

It is an interesting one.

So there's a reason there's a qualification section on LinkedIn, which of course is the right place to put MBA and all those various fellowships and all that kind of stuff.

The other thing is people care more about things and they bias towards things they discover rather than things they're told.

So if you just have your name because you're a human being and someone is researching you and they discover that you've got these qualifications, it will resonate better with them than if they just see it in your headline.

The only reason I think, for having it in your headline is to help weed out really poor personalization attempts.

Because I did for a while, I was guilty of this.

I had, I'm a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and I had Dom Haw's FCIM and I used to get, dear Dom FCIM, you know, then they've got dreadful personalization.

The other thing, of course, is, you know, LinkedIn is meant to be about relationships and it's hard to develop a relationship with someone properly if their name is confusing.

And a name followed by 16 different qualifications is very confusing for the brain to process.

Got to keep it simple.

Stupid, I think.

And it also plays well into pool rule three.

And I love this pool rule because I see so many companies and so many people posting to social media actually sort of about themselves, their profile, their humble brags, and no one cares.

One of the trends I've seen really recently is companies do profiles of their people.

Today we're going to profile John Snooks, who works in the quality control department.

And it's like their normal posts will get lots of engagement and distribution.

This will get three and they're all internal, but still people keep going with these.

And other than maybe to please John Snooks, I've no idea why people do them.

But your pool rule speaks to that one very well.

I think the rule is you're expressly forbidden to talk about your qualifications, your awards, your achievements, your fucking TED talk.

And then the last, which covered on that ridiculous string of letters after your name.

Seriously, you're embarrassing yourself so that it's a derivative of nobody gives a shit about you or your product.

People care about themselves and their own problems.

This stuff sits at the center of our world and therefore we think it should sit at the center of others.

It does give us a problem, though, because we do at some point in the relationship we do have to talk to people about our product, otherwise they don't know what we do.

And I think there's a way of doing that.

I think even in your content on LinkedIn, a very simple example, most people would say is something like, you must use our fantastic 60 day diet powder system.

It'll help you to your clothes will fit better.

And imagine 60 days from now walking into a local nightclub and all heads turn and you're the center of attention because you look so fantastic.

Now the end of that is quite nice.

But the problem is, as we've started talking about our product and we're likely to lose people.

You said earlier on those DM's, you see, there's a formula.

They lose us because they talk about themselves at the beginning.

And those red flags are easy to spot.

The biggest one on LinkedIn is people who start a post.

I'm proud to announce I don't read anymore because I know exactly what's coming.

But imagine if you were to do that the other way around and say, imagine 60 days from now walking into your local nightclub and all heads turned because you're looking fantastic in your new outfit.

Your clothes fit better, you feel better.

We can help you do that with our 30 day diet break.

Whatever it is, you've got them.

You've pulled at those emotional heartstrings first, and you've got their attention.

It's exactly the same post.

I haven't changed any of the words.

I've just moved them around a bit.

We started by talking about them and telling a little mini story about their problem.

And then once they're listening, then we say, now this is how we can help.

So that plays into another pool role, which I really love.

And it's expressed as you don't promise a better camera.

Describe a better cameraman.

Market to who people want to be, or market to what they want to be, not to who they are, which is what you just talked about with the nightclub example.

Marketers will call it the transformation.

So rather than tell people all about your product, show them a picture of what their life would look like after they work with you or used your product.

And you see, you see it all over the place without probably realizing you're seeing it.

You look at a holiday brochure, they don't show you pictures of the baggage carousel and how efficient it is, or the transfer and how efficient it is, or how comfortable the seats on the plane are.

They show you a picture of the beach and the blue sky and somebody drinking a cocktail.

They're trying to create an image in your head of what life is going to look like when you get on that holiday.

Picture a young sort of ten year old boy who wants to learn to play the guitar.

And he's standing in a guitar shop and one salesman saying to him, now, this guitar has got cap gut strings, and it's got this fantastic reinforced fret and, you know, et cetera, and the kids just going to sleep.

The guy over here picks the guitar up and says, look, if you do the lessons, I'm going to give you for the next six weeks, you'll be able to play this and plays the opening bars to Romeo and Juliet from dire straits.

And this kid's mouth hits the floor because he's showing him a picture of what his life will look like.

So that transformation is really important because, again, you're tugging at the right emotional heartstrings rather than there's a place in our brain which processes the emotional stuff.

There's a place in our brain which processes tax returns and council tax bills, and there's a place in our brain which processes Bambi's mother being killed and that sort of thing.

And that's where we want to be.

And so you have to do that by telling people stories about their pain.

What's keeping them awake at night.

Peter, we are coming towards the end.

We haven't covered all the pool rules.

I don't want to do that deliberately because I think people need to go to the website and see them apart from anything else, because the illustrations are absolutely fabulous.

Love those.

Are they done by your creative director?

No, no, we bought those.

They did?

Well, they're fantastic.

Let's leave our unicorners today with some homework.

If they want to stand out, if they want to make a mark, if they want to find a hill that they're going to die on, what process can they go through?

And then how can they find out more about you?

So I think the process they can go through is sort of, we can pull together a couple of things we've talked about.

I think the first thing I would do is ask that question if I was a superhero.

What evil have I been put on the earth to solve?

And so who's my enemy?

What am I trying to.

What's the enemy?

I'm trying to fight?

And I think once you created that enemy, then think about that enemy in terms of the pain it's causing your customer or your potential customer, and write a story about it.

And the real trick, the real challenge when you write that story is don't mention your product.

You just want to mention, if you look at, I would say, 99% of our posts on LinkedIn, we've probably written thousands over the years.

You might see a call to action in the last line.

Otherwise, we don't mention our product.

We just rather like that guy at the talk I gave who heard the story about his pain and came and talked to me.

We try and tell people stories about their pain, so they come and talk to us and they.

And they do.

So ask that question about which evil are you here to solve?

Use it to create an enemy.

And then when you've got the enemy, and you know what the pain your customers lying awake at night worrying about, tell them a story about that.

But don't mention your product.

And if you want to send it to me, I'll happily give you some feedback.

Well, you can send that unicorners either direct or you can send it via me.

And let's choose the best three and we'll send them a little pack of goodies of some unicorny goodies.

Let's do that.

Brilliant.

So how can people contact you?

So I'm on LinkedIn.

Peter went.

That's w h e n t.

That's probably the best way.

Our website is Boldaf Boldaf dot marketing and my email address is peterwent.com.

Well, I told you Peter was outspoken.

What an amazing interview.

Thank you so much to Peter for taking the time to come and speak to us in the studio.

But thank you to you too for taking the time to watch or listen to this episode.

Now, if you want to talk to me about any of its content, you can find me on LinkedIn.

And there's a link to my profile on the show notes at unicorny Dot co dot Uk.

Why don't you connect to me?

I'd love to be connected anyway.

Now, if you did like the content and you want more, please give us a thumbs up or please subscribe.

And if you're feeling really kind, well, honestly, I'd love you to write us a review today, though.

That is all we have time for.

Thank you very much indeed for listening to the show, and I will see you next week.