The Toyota Prius was a fascinating car from a marketing perspective. At the time of launch, it was the first mass marketed electric hybrid car. It was initially aimed at the green and eco-friendly crowd: people keen on minimizing their carbon footprint. As a result, the marketing leaned heavily into using the ethical angle. They deployed guilt to reach eco-hipsters.

It was like this for a few years, often with “manly man” types ridiculing both Priuses and their owners. Then, at one point, Uber took off in popularity. At the time, when we lived in London, it seemed that every time I hailed an Uber, the Prius was the most common car used. At first, I almost missed it. Eventually, I asked one of my drivers why he was driving a Prius. And he said:

“it’s actually the most economical car possible, in terms of running costs, because I get twice the mileage on the same tank of petrol.”

The Prius appealed to these drivers on a completely different business level. If your livelihood depended on your cost structure, you became more competitive. To some extent, the typical London-based Uber customers may have preferred taking a Prius because of the original eco-hipster argument. A hybrid car was not only cheaper but also better for the environment. So in addition to the cost angle, there was an indirect marketing upside for the drivers.

This is an excellent example of promoting social change through rational arguments. For an ethical argument to go “mass-market”, an innovation needs to appeal to the pragmatists, as per Geoffrey Moore’s classic book Crossing the Chasm. For this to happen, it needs to overcome a lot of skepticism. And it needs to have clear practical implications, in order to be a “common sense” choice. Even for an ethically superior product, most buyers need a practical rationale. Only then, it can spread and stick among the majority of people.

The practical argument for diversity

For years, I was looking for something similar in the context of diversity. I’ve been looking for hard evidence of the benefits of diversity. As an idea, diversity itself always resonated with me. Especially as a bootstrapping serial immigrant, I often felt out of place and disadvantaged relative to my peers. I felt empathy for minorities and outsiders. And often including them benefitted everyone. Yes, I acknowledge I did have it easier–growing up in the US as a white male. There were lots of pressures related to skin color, which I never felt.

This year, #BlackLivesMatter and racial unrest in the US has sped up this social change. Other minorities have also made progress. Women, in particular, which have been a “minority” despite being half the population. The conversation has already shifted, and the denial has stopped.

I still believe these changes will be to everyone’s benefit. The main reason is that we all benefit from a clash of different perspectives. The more homogenous a group of people, the more they will be subject to bias and blind spots. The more variety you have, the greater the chance of reducing those distortions when making group decisions. It’s worth considering the impact of diversity. Include more perspectives and achieve a more robust outcome.

Opinions are like stocks

As a shorthand mental model, you can view diversity in organizations analogous to modern portfolio theory. In an investment context, owning a larger number of uncorrelated financial assets leads to better overall outcomes. There is a quantifiable benefit from this. The more stocks you have, the less you are exposed to company-specific risk. To some extent, the same is true with industries. If the travel sector gets hit hard by a pandemic, if you have some technology stocks, you’ll come out ok.

In a management decision making context, the same holds true for uncorrelated opinions. Having a number of uncorrelated opinions helps a group come up with a more robust view.

There are many ways to benefit from this. One way I’ve seen this done explicitly is using personality assessment tools like DISC, Myers-Briggs, or Kolbe. Everyone is different. You can baseline how much natural preferences might skew the team perspective. Different people notice different details. It’s worth being mindful of potentially missing yet complementary perspectives. For example, in IT there tend to be a lot of data-driven logical people. Having someone who is more relational or “heart-driven” participate can incorporate more intuition into a decision.

Also, personal background, race, or orientation can also provide useful angles which a homogenous group of proverbial old white men could miss. Many businesses started to serve minorities, which the “white establishment” thought wasn’t viable. For example, Black Entertainment Television. Or major podcasts aimed at the Latino community.

Implications for managers

In the context of a specific company, we also often deal with people from different departments. They have different backgrounds, a different personal network, and often different goals. All of these would additionally influence their perspective. Converging onto a shared company-wide perspective helps create a common understanding of what best.

Often problems or challenges go unresolved, simply because we aren’t aware of them. Or we don’t see the full importance of resolving the problem, because we underestimate the full implications.

You can also go too far, according to the picture above. If you start to gather too many opinions, it stops adding that much extra value. The incremental value of a 201st opinion will be much smaller than a third one. You will have heard most of what’s worth taking into account much earlier than 201 interview earlier. There may be patterns in the data.

But you don’t have much risk of missing something obvious due to your own blind spots and “unknown unknowns”. With any decision, there will always be some risk which you can’t diversify away. Regardless of how many opinions you gather or who you ask, you still have to live with it. At minimum, you’ll achieve the main benefit of diversity in opinion: more robust outcomes. Ones that take into account all facts and which are less subjective.

If you’d like to read more, the above is an excerpt from my book Align Remotely. Bringing together diverse remote teams is an art, one you need to master if you want them to achieve high performance. Read on over here.

One of the key factors in getting a message right is making sure you pre-empt the question “why should I buy from you right now?” For sales of expensive enough products, i.e. more than a candy bar or a book, that is the key question.

In markets that are “solution aware”, the focus of traditional copywriting is often around articulating benefits to justify features. But within your market category, your direct competitors will offer the same benefits. So the real question at that stage is why a prospect should buy–specifically from you. Why your product, service, or solution will uniquely address the customer’s need. This is a really hard question, because it requires self awareness in addition to all of the work you are already doing, to be able to answer it successfully.

There’s three aspects to this:

1. It’s clear to you how your product differs from alternatives in the marketplace, both competitors as well as alternate ways of addressing the problem

2. You communicate it clearly and falsifiably.

3. You can effectively articulate why a transaction should happen right now.

Let’s dig in, shall we?

1. Differing clearly from Alternatives

A Launch Tomorrow client had developed a sonar based device to identify cancer cells, in order to aid physicians during surgery. As medical device experts, the founding team were struggling to describe their invention. When I started working with them, founders were largely marketing their efforts via technical papers in medical journals.

As a result of working together, one co-founder discovered the product is uniquely positioned as the only audio-based technology relevant for ovarian cancer surgeons. It could be used with all existing tools to significantly improve patient outcomes, reduce the amount of cutting required, as well as time required to recover. This meant that by focusing on this one group, he potentially had first mover advantage in a lucrative niche using a very narrow message.

Essentially, he discovered his invention had little competition in a slice of the multi-billion dollar cancer treatment market. But the slice was billions of dollars in size. He previously missed this, because he was so focused on developing a working technology. Once he had this positioning insight, it was just a matter of deploying it in every sales and marketing interaction going forwards.

It could be as simple as being able to introduce the product with one sentence, which immediately helped sidestep the difficulties they were facing when trying to describe the product.

2. Falsifiable marketing

Falsifiable is a big and fancy word that serves as a gold standard with respect to messaging. This term originally comes from Karl Popper and his thoughts on the scientific method, but it has a quite practical application to persuasion. Essentially, you make a bold and surprising claim using a number or time frame. Then invite the customer to to prove you wrong. To try for themselves if you are right.

Here is a classic commercial where it was used qualitatively, to pull the customer in, entertain a bit, and also subtly point out the point of difference Wendy’s was trying to stress:

This makes it pretty clear that Wendy claims to have more meat in their burger, compared to competitors. So that was the clear answer to why the customer should buy from them.

Ideally this is numeric. As a result, either your claim is true or it’s false. There is no gray area. And it’s quite objective. The hackneyed example here is the “30 minutes or less, or you get it free” delivery for Domino’s Pizza. If you called to order a pizza, the clock started ticking. Either the pizza arrived in less than 30 minutes or not. At the time, it was a differentiator. Customers were used to waiting up to an hour for a pizza to be delivered, often receiving it cold. And the message carried a clear additional benefit, if it took longer than 30 minutes. In this case, the short message embedded a guarantee .

3. Establishing urgency

Finally, the time sensitivity is the last part which helps cement a good positioning message, even though this is quite different for B2B and B2C. On the B2C side, there are a long list of standard copywriting techniques around limiting availability, digging into fear of missing out, like “time is running out…” to communicate or sometimes even manufacture urgency. Take a look at the swiped.co archive of famous salesletters using urgency effectively.

Trying to do this in B2B, for example in B2B enterprise software sales, could end up blowing up in your face though. This is better left out of the positioning, but explicitly included into the sales cycle. Sales consultant John Paul Mendocha advocates the use of what he calls the “calendar close”. On an in person basis, you pull out a physical calendar, and ask when they need the solution by. That way, you can have an open discussion about when it would need to start. And you get a clear indication of whether or not the sale is urgent for this particular prospect.

Here’s a quick example of repositioning a tech product

MargenTech invented a VR system to help train ship captains by simulating difficult situations and making sure they engrained the right habits under pressure. But they were having trouble marketing it. The conversation usually died down, after the novelty factor of using VR wore off.

Emre Ucan, co-founder and COO, realized during our discovery process that in fact he was selling the wrong thing. Instead of selling a VR training system, he could use the same technology when selling "insurance" against accidents to oil shipping companies. As one oil tanker carries about $1bln in inventory, accidents can be extremely costly to shipping companies (not to mention the ecological damage). This new positioning opened up a completely different pricing strategy, and ultimately helped him attract a potential strategic buyer for the entire business.

Next steps

If you’d like some help with positioning your product effectively, reach out to Launch Tomorrow and book a discovery call to explore options that might work for you.