It's All About the Reframe

Marketing, as with so many things in life, is about perspective.

I remember earlier in my career while I was running a small *boutique* video content agency, a mentor challenged me to call every contract won and every opportunity lost from the previous year and ask them why they made their decision to work with us, or not.

Not wanting to disappoint my mentor, and quite certain no one would accept my request for a call to discuss the above topic, I reached out to the entire opportunity list from the previous year: the entire pipeline - all of the closed-won and all of the closed-lost.

To my absolute horror, every single one of them said yes, except one who was OOO on maternity leave.

While on those calls, I was shocked to hear how happy even the lost opportunities were to give constructive feedback or explain their decision making process. *Note to services-based companies, the calls with the lost opportunities resulted in me being included in RFPs from almost all of those organizations over the following six months.

The real personal insight, however, came from the won opportunities. The clients universally said they really enjoyed working with a smaller team and not being handed off to unknown junior team members, as had been their experience with other, larger production vendors in the past. This came as a surprise to me, as I had viewed our smaller size (team of 6-7 people) as a one of our biggest weaknesses in the marketplace.

After the interviews, I rewrote our website, pitch decks, and marketing materials including language about how nimble and responsive and invested our team of experts were. Taking what I had been sure was one of our least attractive elements as a company and making it one of our leading talking points.

We were no longer a small team. We were an easily accessible, highly motivated, niche production team. We were responsive. We were 'boutique'.

Same information.

Reframed.

Slow Beer, Thick Ketchup, Toasted Tobacco

You can see this reframing mindset across the marketing universe.

Guinness, who's beer famously takes over 100 seconds to pour, reframed (in the face of an increasingly impatient world) with "Good Things Come to Those Who Wait". Flipping the (boring) act of waiting into the customer's virtue of patience and casting the product as having the value of being 'worth' the wait.

Heinz Ketchup let their marketers loose with a reframe campaign putting the bottle's labels at 45 degree angles, acknowledging a core frustration with their product, using it. By embracing the frustration the user sees the product is intentionally thick, even relating that to the product's perceived quality.

Take the infamous "Toasted" scene from Don Draper of Mad Men, where he helps a tobacco company differentiate by claiming a common phase of tobacco production, toasting, made them unique.

Practically Speaking

I was speaking to a friend the other day about his new SaaS product and about how the UI is lacking finesse. He said the product is meant to work with minimal time spent in the interface, making polishing the UI feel like a waste of effort. I suggested making it intentionally "bad" or "low-tech". Using a technical-looking font and an old MS DOS style color scheme, or making it feel like a coding environment could show the user that the value of this product is found elsewhere. It could communicate that the value is based on it's function, not it's polish.

What is your thick ketchup, or slow beer, or underdog status, or unpolished UI? How can you embrace it and turn it into a strength, a brand value, a product direction, or a marketing moment?

Drop me a note and let me know.

j

P.S. Thanks for reading the second DESK article.