#21 – Book test: 22 Laws of Marketing, is it working?

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the. Becoming Great podcast, where me and my buddy and boss Eric Berman are exploring how to build a great organization and how to become great people and a great organization.

[00:00:15] We’re talking about this great dot com. A next generation charity that would give away 100 percent of its profits to charity.

[00:00:25] And today’s episode is going to be a little bit different than usual. It’s going to be a practical episode where we talk about marketing and how to implement some ideas. We have learned from a book called 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

[00:00:43] It totally stealing my part here. Now you’re gonna you’re going to get to explain why. Why? Yeah, I guess. Yes. I’m setting up the.

[00:00:54] So the book is called 22 Immutable Loss of Marketing. And we’re going to talk about how to use that in practice. And Eric is gonna explain why we think that is important. But before I let Eric do that, I want to say a few words. Why I believe Eric is qualified to even talk about this. And on paper, it’s quite obvious he had founded the online marketing company called Catina Media that is now public and that is what he has spent his entire career learning. And I also know that Eric is the biggest nerd you could ever imagine when it comes to marketing. All day, every day. Right now, he’s thinking about marketing and social media and how to build a brand. Eric Berman, how are you today?

[00:01:43] I’m feeling joyful and playful and in the mood for interrupting people when they talk too long.

[00:01:49] That’s me. And I’m here with you, my beautiful friend Amy, who.

[00:01:54] Well, if you were one of the people watching this on YouTube, instead of listening to the podcast, then you can see that behind it there is a big shelf of books. And you know how all of us buy books that we don’t read them? Yeah. I mean, it’s not like that’s who’s actually read these books. So he’s just a qualified. Yeah. Well, to be honest, he doesn’t know anything about marketing, but he’s really good at learning stuff.

[00:02:19] It is the perfect sparring partner in this to challenge ideas and come up with new angles.

[00:02:25] I’m looking at it. And as as you mentioned, we we’re going to talk about the book, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. What really strikes me with that book was that it completely changed my perspective on how we could or should build great and how. Well, in practical terms, how do you do marketing and why does marketing happen? And. It’s actually meant for like big ask corporations and how to get your slogan out there if you Nike, but it’s a place a lot to small organizations as well.

[00:03:05] And how you can target and look at your product. And I wasn’t we weren’t planning to do an episode about this. But when I read, it’s like, hey, Emily, you need to read this because I need a sparring partner in these kind of business ideas to see if this makes sense or if it’s just me who get excited about something.

[00:03:26] So if someone is listening to this and they now hear that we’re going to talk about a book and maybe they haven’t read the book, would you say that you recommend that person to go and read the book before watching this episode, or what would you say?

[00:03:40] I think they should read it five times before listening to this episode. Otherwise, that’s not gonna make sense.

[00:03:46] No.

[00:03:47] To be honest, I don’t think they need to read the book that they would. We will talk about a few chapters here that made them up most sense for a small business owner.

[00:03:56] And if they want to build Charlotte or Nike or whatever, then they should definitely read the full book and do it that. But it’s a short book. It’s an easy read, and you’ll get a long way from just reading an article on medium. So we will post the link below. And if he has Google 22 immutable laws of marketing and medium, you will find a great book review that will give you more or less half the value of reading the actual book. I was really impressed by just reading that part.

[00:04:27] All right. And so let’s jump into this.

[00:04:31] Are you excited?

[00:04:32] Yeah. I was again for the eighth video views on YouTube. You saw that? I just jumped. I’m super excited.

[00:04:41] All right. So two weeks ago, I was going to build a Web site for myself and.

[00:04:52] I’m a YouTube nerd. I love learning on YouTube. So a lot of educational channels on YouTube are doing marketing for a Web site hosting company, I guess. That is called Squarespace. So I’ve been I’ve been seeing Squarespace everywhere and I haven’t really looked at any other options. So now I’m gonna build my own Web site. And I ask Eric, OK. So which Web hotels should I use to build my Web site? And Eric says, Well, I have already built my Web site. It’s on this platform called Wickes. It works really great. I go for walks and in my mind I’m thinking, oh, do Squarespace because that feels like home. Why? Why did that happen?

[00:05:37] Well, so worth mentioning here is that you know absolutely nothing about building Web sites. And the person you know who knows the most about this is me.

[00:05:47] So when I give a personal recommendation that in my mind that should be a very valuable gift that I’m giving you and you choose to deeply ignore it.

[00:05:57] Squarespace Anyway, and I find that so interesting because it’s clear how our marketing has has an influential power and how important is to be top of mind that you already picture the picture in your head. That is very simple to use this product because that’s what they said on the YouTube channels and you kind of already decided upon this before you even asking for my recommendation. Mm hmm. So unless I’m saying that’s a truly shitty thing to do, what you’re doing right now, do this instead. You’re probably gonna go with your first choice because it was first planted in there. And this is so interesting to me and this is what what marketing is all about. This is why they show the same commercial over and over again. And this is why the same brands have done marketing for 20, 30 years and just printed themselves into your brain, because if they are the first thing you think about, then it’s gonna take.

[00:06:54] Mm hmm. So.

[00:06:58] Here, obviously, Ben. Well, first, let’s explain the first law of the book. I think this concept would make more sense then. So the first chapter of the book is called First is Better Than Best. Could you explain to your understanding what they mean by that?

[00:07:18] Yes. So in short, what they’re saying is that it’s better to be the first one doing something than it is to try and beat someone else. And they take an example from, OK, who was the first man landing on the moon? And I guess Armstrong, everyone knows that. And it was the second guy. No one and no one really knows. And it’s the same thing applies to business than that if you’re the first one doing something that people are really excited about it. But if you’re being better, then it’s suddenly subjective. It’s like who who is actually better? First, you can’t argue with who is first, but who is better at landing on the moon. Probably not the best example because obviously I would be the best at landing on the moon. But it becomes subjective so people care about what’s new. Because that’s something completely new, something that never happened before. But we don’t really care that much about who’s better because it’s hard to tell if I’m giving you two different toothbrushes. I’m going to say which one is better. You’re probably gonna have one opinion. I’m going to have another opinion. And no one’s really going to care. But if I’m the first one showing you an electric toothbrush and the regular. Giberson Well, it’s it’s electric. It’s a machine. I want that one. And it’s the same kind of approach.

[00:08:40] So if someone is landing on the moon in a better way, we’re not really gonna care about that, are we? But in this case, though, Squarespace, I doubt that they were the first Web hotel out there. But they were the first one that I heard about. So a difference there.

[00:08:59] Yes. So to clarify, it’s not a hosting company. It’s not a Web hotel. This shows how much you know about these things. It’s a simple tool to create the Web site. And then they can host it for you so they can be a Web hosting agency as well. But that’s not what they do. It’s not their primary thing.

[00:09:17] So what what they do is that they have created a very simple way of building a Web site, and that’s the exact same thing that Wix does. And once again, even if I say Wix is better, you didn’t really care about that. And it’s subjective. I don’t really know which one is better. You cared about what was the first thing in your mind. And none of those two brands are big enough to have a world domination in terms of building a Web site and in a simple way. So it’s still. Who would become the first one to really be that? On the other hand, if I if I ask you to think of of a search engine, you will go straight to Google. And Google wasn’t necessarily the first one either, but they are the first one now. People think of them as the first one. So there is not really.

[00:10:11] It’s a very hard job to try and challenge Google. Even if I were to build a better Google. People would still stick with Google because they’re not looking for anything else. Yeah, but but when search engines first came out, when they started to happen, I mean, Google was almost first there were AltaVista, Iberia and some other guys, but then people were constantly looking at testing because no one owned the space. But today it will be really hard to beat it.

[00:10:36] So Squarespace planthat a perspective in my mind, but I believe in because I was manipulated by marketing. And for me to change my mind, I need a very compelling reason to do so in my mind. I need to think that there side a big problem with headspace as Squarespace, or that your VIX is at least 50 percent better for me.

[00:10:59] The order changing. You’re probably not going to change your mind at all unless I say so. It’s very hard for for me to say this one is better if you like what they’re doing that you’re like, yeah. Probably not. But if instead I say this is a completely new way of doing it, you will get the VR version. Yeah, there’s. Oh wow. One of your version. So then that’s something that will add a completely new perspective. If there is something new in it, then it matters.

[00:11:30] But if it’s if it’s just better, you’re you’re gonna have a hard time believing me.

[00:11:38] Yeah. And this brings us in to the second law that is called the law of category. So could you explain what this second law in the book means?

[00:11:49] Yeah. Is it okay for hold out and I’ll just explain how this the first law applies to grades and to their kids. What’s what’s interesting with this is how does this apply to grades and in what ways did this changed my view of how to create a product? So my ambition when I’ve been thinking about the grade for the past two, almost three years and I’ve been drawing this up in my mind is how can we create something that is better than the other Web sites out there? I haven’t really been thinking about how can we do something that is new. There are a bunch of different functionalities in the casino marketing space where I think that, OK, we could create a product here that is slightly better and probably 10, maybe 20 percent better if we put a lot of effort into it and. By having even more bonuses or even more offers or more focused on on these things that people genuinely care about today. But the problem there is that people are already loyal to their websites where they usually find their offers and their bonuses. So for them to even believe that mine is better at first, they need to try it. And they’re probably not going to try it because they know where they’re usually going. So in that way, we would really need to prove that we’re better and that’s gonna be really hard.

[00:13:08] How? I might not even help. It might not even help. However, if we focus on something completely different, we don’t even need to be the best we can. Just say that we’re that guy. So let’s say instead of focusing on the bonuses that everyone does and being the best at that, which I believe we could be, we could focus on who has the best customer support and we just test the customer support. We talk to them. We see how quickly they reply, how nice they are to us. And we focus on that and we can say this is where you find the best customer support. And everyone is just focused on bonuses. They are still curious about customer support because they haven’t read about that before. It’s my thought about this, so I didn’t consider that before at all. And I was like, OK, can we be the best one? Just analysing customer support. So instead of competing with all the thousands of Web sites out there being the best at bonuses, we’d be best at customer support. And if you’re curious about bonuses, you’re still going to care about the support. So you could look at that as well. So this completely shifted my mind from trying to be the best at what everyone already does to just thinking about how can we do something that no one else does and be the first one doing that.

[00:14:21] And customer support is something that came to me right now as an example. We could do that for 10 or 20 different things. We we’re like, OK, we want to be doing this new thing that no one is doing. And I think that makes makes a lot of sense.

[00:14:39] Yeah, totally. And this leads us into the second law, which is the law of category, and this is what you’re describing now, that if you cannot be first in a category because you unfortunate if it kind of were first one of the first with your old company. So if you can if it doesn’t matter to be better, maybe you can set up a new category and you can be the first in that one.

[00:15:03] Yeah, exactly. So that’s pretty much what we’re doing. So the law of category says that if you can’t if you can’t be the first in one category, it’s much better to set up a new category than to try and beat the other guys. And then instead of marketing yourself, you can even market the category. So people are aware of that and they will put you ask that company. So one thing that comes to mind now, to take a completely different example is a friend of mine. He’s got a company selling organic toothbrushes. So they’re in bamboo and completely regular toothbrushes. They’re not gonna brush your teeth better, probably worse than a regular toothbrush. But they are the first ones made out of wood and bamboo or whatever they’re made up. And instead of them trying to say this is the best toothbrush, they say this is the first one that’s good for the environment. And they’ve gone from like sero to selling millions of toothbrushes every year in. I don’t know, three, four years, something like that by just inventing this category. And they would never have been able to be the best. They can’t beat Co-locate or Pepsodent or these guys, but they managed to be the first one that is good for the environment. And then people are willing to buy it. My my my parents have that. And I didn’t tell them about it. I saw that when I was home. You got his toothbrush and it’s a similar thing here.

[00:16:32] So by inventing the environment friendly toothbrush, then this works. And we’re then going to do similar thing by.

[00:16:43] Inventing the we are comparing customer support category. Instead of saying we’re comparing the offers and a lot less people care about having their toothbrush organic, they care more about having one that brushes their teeth. But enough people care about it to choose it. And to give yourself a space in the shelf. Mm hmm. And personally, I believe the same thing goes on for Who Wants to play Casino? That a lot of people still care about the customer support. Enough people do. And you will be unique. So then you can only talk about. Yeah, but you should definitely buy an organic toothbrush or. Yeah. But what about the customer support? You don’t even need to mention your own brand name because people are gonna to curious about the category and look for something in that category. And that’s where you dominate.

[00:17:36] Right. And.

[00:17:38] I think one thing that makes great really stick out even more than something like customer support is the fact that this is a casino that is also a charity.

[00:17:48] And this is a completely new field. And would you like to elaborate on how you think that affects our marketing?

[00:17:56] Yeah. So we are going to give away 100 percent of the profits, and that’s probably, as far as I know, inventing a completely new category within the casino space as well.

[00:18:07] And.

[00:18:09] I I don’t think that’s gonna be a powerful marketing tool. Unfortunately, it’s something brand new. It’s something that no one does. But I don’t think enough people care. I’m not sure this is just in my head. It’s not. We’re not giving away hundred cent of the profits because it’s a marketing strategy. We’re doing it because we believe it’s the right thing to do.

[00:18:32] And I believe that.

[00:18:34] People who wants to play casino all wants to do anything else are mainly looking for a good experience, a good user experience, and if the company gives away a hundred percent of the profits to charity or not, it’s not going to have a very big impact on the experience. So if you were to buy, let’s say you were buying a new bike. You have two options. One of them is looking better and has more stuff and one of them gives away 100 percent of the profits to charity. Then my guess is you would buy the bike that looked better and they’d have more years. Even if the price were similar.

[00:19:17] Well, I’m not 100 percent convinced of this theory. I still think there could be a value for gamblers. The fact that all of the profits are given away and the value I see is that it could be a way to justify gambling and gambling for a good cause. Maybe this could be the only way someone I’m not the only, but one of the ways someone can find a positive reason for gambling. I want to give away money anyway, but now I can also get some enjoyment out of this.

[00:19:55] It makes sense.

[00:19:58] Yeah. I’m not sure that I’m right in this. And I would love to be wrong.

[00:20:02] So I don’t want to. In my head, I don’t want to rule that out completely because I see how that could be a completely separate category that is more distinct than customer reviews. If that makes us more distinct, maybe not more relevant, but more distinct and maybe for some people.

[00:20:23] I think this this is all. These are all very interesting aspects of it. Dan blerd. Yeah.

[00:20:29] And regardless, regardless if we were to to tailor ourselves to be the customer support focused one or the charity focused one, it has still shifted my perspective. My perspective was less focused on being the best. Let’s market us as the best and everyone claims to be the best. I would not I would not have thought of the idea of let’s market us as the charity of alternative. So if we’re going for focusing on giving away 100 percent of the profits, then we are once again creating something new. And that’s where the space that we’re taking. And I’m not sure if most people care about charity or if most people care about customer support or if it’s a third or fourth or fifth thing.

[00:21:13] I do think people care about feeling good. So if we can.

[00:21:19] Show in emotional videos or images that the money is being used to good costs.

[00:21:26] Maybe it’s giving someone food or water, something that everyone can relate to. Then they can get if they can get a more positive emotion from gambling. That is what they’re paying for anyway. They’re paying money to feel good.

[00:21:39] Most excitement. Maybe they can feel virtuous as well.

[00:21:46] I haven’t thought about it this way before, but what you’re saying makes sense and it reminds me of of of me a couple of years ago. And there is this show in Sweden called The Music Help, where a lot of celebrities and random people advertise out. They do something for charity and you can buy it. And all the profits will be donated to charity and. A couple of years ago, I saw all charity equal. Now I know that there is a very big difference which organizations to donate and how much different that will do. But back then I was like, Hey, this is I want to give away money anyway. I might as well get something fun for it. So I ended up having dinner with a Swedish comedian, a monkey. But the end and paid. I don’t know, two and a half thousand euros for that is because to charity. So I applied the exactly thing thing that you were saying now that I want to gamble. I might as well do it for good.

[00:22:38] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:40] So you got a positive experience from meeting this famous Swedish guy and you got a positive experience from donating the money that would you would be donating anyway.

[00:22:50] Yeah. It’s a way of justifying gambling. It’s for a good cause. And it is. Yeah.

[00:22:57] And I think we are going to pick organizations that are so effective than even if not all of your money going to the costs, you’re still going to end up doing much more good than if you were to give it to your random charity at a supermarket.

[00:23:13] Yeah, for sure. For sure it was.

[00:23:17] What becomes interesting with this as well, if we tie this into to the fifth floor. The fifth floor is about focus and the importance of sticking to one thing. You look like you want to say something.

[00:23:29] I want to say that we skipped law three and four years. So we’re not confusing here because we think law five is more relevant to talking about. So this.

[00:23:38] Basically, we’re gonna jump around between the chapters because I think that these are the ones that apply the most to great. And I think that these laws are the ones that apply the most to small businesses. And unfortunately, I don’t think that the marketing manager of Nike or Red Bull is listening. So I can’t give him advice. And if he is, I he’s probably beating the shit out of me in marketing regardless. The fifth law is the law of focus.

[00:24:04] And what they’re saying here is you can basically just be really good at one thing and the second you start doing more things. People get confused. So one example here could be Mercedes. They have, for most of their existence, been been thought of as big luxury cars. And that’s what they do. And then a couple of years ago, or maybe ten or fifteen years ago, they also started doing small, cheap cars because they they want to do that as well. They want to make more money, obviously.

[00:24:40] And what happens then is that at first these small, cheap cars, they they benefit from the brand of Mercedes. And people are willing to pay a premium for having a Mercedes, even if it’s a small car. So in the short term, they make more money. But after five, 10 years, people start getting confused about is Mercedes big luxury cars or is machine is small cheap cars and they want to pay less money for a big fancy Mercedes because now they don’t really know what they’re buying. It gets confusing before it. Yeah. If you own and you see this, everyone know that you had a big fancy car. So if you you’re missing this keys, whereas on where? On the table. People like, oh, you’re cool.

[00:25:22] Yeah. It’s like never, never, ever drive a Rolls-Royce because you are not going to want to drive a smaller or less fancy car. But Mercedes then loses that. Yeah, that. Right.

[00:25:34] So before if you had a Mercedes keys lying on the table. People know that you had a big fancy car and you could be proud of that. Now you might have a small shitty car, but it’s a series.

[00:25:44] So you don’t get any of the credit for that big luxury car anymore?

[00:25:48] No, you got less so. But what can happen? I’m not sure if it happened in the case of Mercedes. But what can happen is that short term, you create you create a brand, a new brand of small cars that looks exclusive. But long term, you need to pay the depth of that by having your big fancy brand losing some of its credibility.

[00:26:09] And that’s the tricky part. So this is the law of focus. And this would then apply in the same way that you can only be one thing. Or you can.

[00:26:19] It’s much easier to be one thing than two things. It’s probably theoretically possible to be both luxuries, big cars and luxury small cars. But it’s a lot harder because it kind of counterproductive each other since the same thing here, then it’s hard to be both the charity just, you know, comparison sites and the customer support comparison sites. Those things are tricky too, because they they don’t have anything to do with each other. So people don’t know which word to tie you to and what you actually doing.

[00:26:51] So couldn’t we have one part of great that includes to share the site? And if we do, let’s say we do paid ads to customers that we know on Facebook are liking casinos and charity and then we market a specific part of our site to those people.

[00:27:10] Yes, we could do that. However, this is probably if we go back to small businesses. This is probably the best way of doing it because a small business will never be the first top of mind thing unless they they had the intention of growing rapidly. So a small business that are happy to be a small business can do that because they’re never gonna be the word. You’re never gonna be a small a small business is never gonna be big luxuries, cars. You’re not gonna beat Mercedes, but you might be able to be the first car that runs on grass or whatever. It could be even if it’s a small business, because you might be able to to to do that and target people who really want a car that goes on grass aggressively. Shitty analogy. No shit analogy, but it doesn’t really matter.

[00:28:00] The point here is that you can do more than one thing, but it’s really hard to be associated with more than one thing in someone’s brain before they start getting confused. So let’s take Squarespace as an example. You think of them as easy. That’s your go to thing, because in the YouTube commercials that you’ve seen, they say this is the easy thing. However, if they were also going for the most advanced.

[00:28:29] Yeah, then you wouldn’t really know if this is easier or just to function. Yeah. Yeah. So it would confuse you and you might have gone with Wix, which I recommended because I say they’re better because he would have been confused. So it’s a similar thing here now. Easy in advance. They’re kind of contradictory. Charity and customer support isn’t, but it’s still confusing since you do know less about what to think of. Yeah, and it’s if I say the word this necessay, say the word animal to you, then you’re your brain. Don’t really get a picture because you’re not really sure which animal I’m saying.

[00:29:03] I’m scrolling to animals in my mind.

[00:29:06] Yeah, but it was the elephant. Yeah, you get a very clear picture and it’s the same thing then. So if if great we’re totally associated with charity and I would say great. Then it would be OK. But that’s a charity thing. But if it’s also a customer support thing, your mind wouldn’t be able to make up its mind and you would feel confused.

[00:29:25] So I think the Segways really nicely in to one of the concepts in the book that is called Owning a Word in Your Prospects Mind. Yeah, that is exactly what spread Squarespace has managed to do with me. They own the words simple or easy, not easy. I would say to own the word easy in my mind. So it would be very difficult for someone else like Wix to compete with the word easy because they already own it.

[00:29:50] In my head, yeah. So which were done? Would you prefer for grades to own in a prospect mind? Simply. Great. Or.

[00:30:01] Yeah. So westbend nine hundred thousand dollars on buying the name grades. And with this analogy I think great is a crutch. Shouldn’t work unfortunately. I mean if we would own grades like whatever people think about something is great, they would think about us. That would be great. However, it’s a very unlikely word to manage to own. So depending on where we think about these different things, I’m still I like the idea of being the best at testing. So when other casino marketing companies or other products in general, they focus on comparing, they take what’s out there and they look at their numbers and then they compare them to each other.

[00:30:45] And that’s one way of doing things.

[00:30:48] But testing to me that words means that you’re testing things and then you’re comparing based on your own results. You’re not just comparing something else. You’re actually testing it to see. So I think that’s a word that would be fairly easy to own and guess like, okay, but they are the ones who actually test these products and then give us the results. They’re not just comparing the numbers that someone is giving them. So the test has absolutely nothing to do with great innocence, but it feels like a word that could be worth owning and that could then be applied to to charity as well. Like the Ebbert they’re testing the different charities they’re seeing. Who gives what experience and they’re seeing what kind of numbers come out from it. Or they’re testing insurances in the future or testing, travelling or testing. That’s one way that they think it makes more sense than than the word great does, because here I want to lift something where.

[00:31:49] But they mentioned in the book where I see great falling short and that is the word need that we want to own. It needs to have polar thing. It needs to be polar to something. Otterson Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Polar you mean like good or bad is the opposite. So no politician would say I’m almost. Politician, because no other politician would say they’re dishonest. So if everyone is saying the same thing, the word loses its meaning. So everyone is going to say to have a quality product, for example. Yeah. So it means nothing.

[00:32:26] So it’s the same thing then if you take the casino analogy. Everyone say that they have the best bonuses.

[00:32:32] Exactly. So say yes, there are shady bonuses. Exactly. And everyone says, let’s say that they’re great. So it doesn’t make any sense. And to compare this with what you just said, now, if you say that we are testing something that cannot implies that other people don’t test them, other people are comparing. Yeah. So you have a more clear poller in the word testing than you have in comparing.

[00:33:01] Yeah, it makes sense, and one other thing that could be that we’re listing all the new casinos, which doesn’t really know as I that they’re focusing on the old. But someone might say that they focus on their well-tested and that’s been around for a long time and stuff like that. So it’s a poll out there as well that it becomes clear. Watch. What determines this or not? So one way where you could use great in this sense is probably if you are only listing very few casinos.

[00:33:32] So the opposite of great casinos, for example, could be all casinos. That’s true. So some of the biggest sites out there right now, they’re doing this. They they compare all casinos. And if we if we wanted to use great that way, I’m not saying we should, but let’s say we’re only taking 10 percent of the casinos are the only thing that we actually put aside, 90 percent don’t make the cut. Then we could use the word great like that. But at the same time, we will not be able to take all of them and compare them and say that they’re all great casinos. Even though probably all of them would claim to be great casinos. But it’s interesting. I haven’t thought about it that way either. And yeah, and I’d say the word great falls short in some aspects. And that’s one of them.

[00:34:22] What is great fun, but it’s the great thing about the word great. It’s that it’s it’s just a positive word that sort of covers everything. And at the same time, that means that it covers nothing.

[00:34:34] Yet at the same time, which takes us into another law. Which law is that day? I mean, how well have you read the book?

[00:34:40] I’m thinking we’re talking about on the spot now about I think you talk about the law of sacrifice. Yes. So what do you think? The law of sacrifice.

[00:34:49] Yeah. So the law of sacrifice was law number thirteen in the book. And I think that’s really interesting because I think it applies to life in general. It’s a place to business, but also to life. And it basically says that to be to be good at anything, you’ve you need to sacrifice something. So to be a good football player, you need to sacrifice hockey. You’re never gonna be able to be a professional in both. And that goes for for everything in life. And it’s the same thing if we go back now to charity versus customer support. That if we want to be top of mind in the thought of charity, then we’re going to need to sacrifice being top of mind in customers on board, or at least we’re going to need to sacrifice bonuses newest and all other things. Maybe we can be top of mind in one, maybe two, maybe three, but definitely not in one hundred. So it’s the same way when their seat is done that if they want to be if they want to have the best small cars as well as the big cars, they’re going to get confusing. So to stay the guys who only have luxurious cars and our luxury cars, then they would probably they should probably have sacrificed to small cars to be able to stay that way. And I mean, if if Ferrari started creating a car that only costed 20000 euros to buy, that would be a shitty deal for for a Ferrari, even if they made a lot of money on the small ones because people would care less about Ferrari after that. It wouldn’t feel fancy to say I own a Ferrari.

[00:36:21] And it’s interesting how this applies, both in running a business and in your personal life, that if you are saying yes to too many things. Yeah. Those small things you say yes to that will give some kind of benefit. But you will also lose time and energy that you could spend into the things that mostly represents who you want to be, both as a company and as a person. And I want to say here as well that if you think this idea of sacrifice sounds interesting, we actually made an entire episode about this. That is episode 19 of the Becoming Great. That is called minimalism. More of what you love. And we explain the law of sacrifice for a whole hour episode. And I think that one turned out really well. So go and check that out if you haven’t.

[00:37:11] Yeah. And basically, to sum it up that it’s easy to think that if you sacrifice something, you are just sacrificing. But in fact, you are getting something else. And the same way that whenever you say yes to something, you are always sacrificing something else because you can’t do anything else by recording this podcast and saying yes to this, I’m actually sacrificing the wrong that I was planning to do. Okay, that’s not true. I wasn’t planning to do Iran. It’s warm here. I wanted to chill. But in theory, in the summer today, I’m sacrificing all other things that I could do this very moment. And that’s the way it always is. I’m not just saying yes to this. I’m saying no to a billion other opportunities that I could use my time with right now.

[00:37:55] So when you read this book, because now we’re talking about grades. How did that you need to sacrifice things? How did that change your perspective when it comes to our current plans and strategies for building this company?

[00:38:11] Yes, in my mind, I’ve seen four different pillars of grades. And we’ve got I think that’s episode three or four of the podcast called The Pit for Perils of Great, where one leg would be a commercial like comparing casinos and making money from it. One leg would be comparing charities and giving the best information about that. One leg would be to educate about how to build organization cultures in a different way, because I think it’s a topic that’s very close to my mind. And one leg would be to create life school, everything that we think we wanted to have learned in school, but we did it and kind of do that online and everything to be under the flag of great is a great dot com slash to see in our charity business and life school or whatever.

[00:38:58] In all of these are very different and probably will.

[00:39:06] Make it a lot harder for us to succeed with anything. So now I’m asking myself, is it actually worth to do four things? Or should we cut one off, maybe two, maybe three? And if so, which one of them before I felt very convinced that this was the best strategy. And this book has really challenged that. So I haven’t decided on to kill off any of these ideas. But when before I was probably closer to adding a fifth one than I was to cutting one of the four out, and now I’m really challenging that thought it might be the best idea to kill off at least one of those four pillars and maybe two, maybe three. Yeah.

[00:39:42] Some great is only about the casino and then the shared everyday they would do is on a completely different domain, but only brands toward charity for example.

[00:39:50] Possibly or maybe not even branding it at all. Maybe the absolute best thing we could do is just make money and giving it away and not even talking about it. Not even having a podcast. And I didn’t even think about it in these terms before that we would get more value from shopping, other leg stuff that I can really see how it makes sounds now that we will get more from doing less.

[00:40:19] Ok.

[00:40:20] So then we talked about how this book have changed your perception. Of how to run great. So would you say that there is something great is doing when it comes to marketing? That is not in this book. I would do something completely different to these ideas.

[00:40:41] So the book is written in like ninety six or something. So it takes it misses out on it on the few things that I think are relevant. For example, the word podcast probably didn’t exist in in 96. So we’re doing these kind of things. So this this book applies very well to someone who wants ideas and and test them. It’s really challenged me in how how I envision Braith and how I think about marketing. And that’s after 10, 15 years of working with marketing, which is very interesting and it’s a short read. So I recommend anyone to look at it.

[00:41:16] And it’s not a Bible.

[00:41:19] So, for example, I personally believe that podcasting is a great way of marketing anything and they’re not touching upon that at all. Email wasn’t really invented in 96 either. So it’s that’s a great thing to do where we’re sending out weekly newsletters and everything said it still misses out on a lot of things where we are doing things differently and search engine optimization is how to rank. I’ve been Google wasn’t invented here. So some things might might be very different.

[00:41:49] And so, for example, if we take the. Let’s challenge the idea of coming up with something new. If if you’re working with Google, that’s your main search engine. And if you’re a small business, so you’re gonna have a hard time to invent something new. Let’s say you you want to start. You want to start selling it? This was the start of start selling shirts.

[00:42:20] And maybe what is unique about your shirts is that they are made out of some new material that no one has ever heard of. So if people are going to Google for things, it’s called Emily Farm or whatever, they’re the material that you invented is and you’re like, yeah, I’m the first one with a meal of t shirts. They will make you fly or whatever. Yeah, they will make you fly. That’s really good t. It’s like a Red Bull commercial. But so even if you have a t shirt that can make you fly, no one is gonna Google for t shirt that can make you fly because it doesn’t really exist.

[00:42:58] Mm hmm. So no one knows that that’s gonna exist. So you, you cannot actually just come up with a marketing strategy and. And use search engines, for example, to do this because it doesn’t really exist. So you would kind of need to come up with something that is closer to what exists and then piggyback on that.

[00:43:17] So this didn’t become the best analogy, but I’ll I’ll explain it more from a from a casino perspective. So what we have done in the past is comparing casinos. But if no one knows. Know that you could play casino online. Then no one would Google for it. No one would find our websites. So thanks to the fact that we were not first. Someone else were doing all the TV commercials. Someone else put this in the top of mind of people. Then people googled and they find us. So if it wasn’t if we were the first one, our entire marketing strategy wouldn’t have worked. Because it’s basically built on people looking for it. So if you have a product that. That where you are the first one, but you don’t have a big marketing budget. It’s really hard to go this way. You need to put it in the minds of people somewhere else. But if you can run a business based on something that really exists, then all you need to be is better at being found. That’s basically what we did. We became good at being found in Google. We didn’t put it first in mind of anyone. We didn’t do anything like that. Instead, we were easy to find when people know that they were looking for it. And our business model, but not our works. If we had a T-shirt shirt that made you fly because no one would look for it, even if it would be an awesome T-shirt.

[00:44:35] That is really interesting. I would like to spend an entire episode focused on what you actually did in Katrina and kind of what you invented there and what you learned from it. That would be very interesting. Yes, happy to do it. We’re running up towards 45 minutes, so. We are going to start wrapping this up, and I have a question that I ask you from time to time, and that is what have you learned today that you haven’t learned before because this podcast is about exploring new ideas.

[00:45:08] I like I’d like to hear your perspective on the charity might actually be the strongest angle for us and especially the things that but it can. I don’t like the word justify, but it can add something to it that if I would if I’m gonna gamble, I might as well do it at a place for charity. And I’ve always thought of it as not that many people gonna have that angle. But at the same time, if five people, 5 percent of all the people have that angle with their gambling, then you could take 5 percent of the entire market. And in the same way, if you’re looking at toothbrushes, if there’s only 5 percent that care about your toothbrush being Bambu, that’s still 5 percent of everyone who brushes their teeth. So when I have thinking about it as a small part and that’s a bad thing now, I think, OK, it’s a small part, maybe that’s a good thing. So this this challenge is my belief that the angle of charity doesn’t add much value, but it actually might add 5 percent value and 5 percent. This is huge. Maybe it’s maybe more people care about the charity aspect than the customer support aspect. Even if I haven’t thought about it that way before.

[00:46:21] So that’s what I’ve learned today. It’s and I like challenging the ideas. Did you learn anything new?

[00:46:28] Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I think that many people gamble because they want to feel good.

[00:46:34] And if this could be another way of feeling good on top of the excitement.

[00:46:39] You know. So.

[00:46:45] Yeah. I learned something new, and that is kind of the opposite of what you learned, and that is I really see how the shared angle could undermined the word testing, cause if there is casino testing and charity, it’s too much. And then I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t get that elephant picture in my mind. Instead, I’m just getting a slot machine of different pictures and I can’t focus on one. I just wanted to stop. So I sort of got the opposite. I can totally see why you don’t want to take the chair angle. So that’s interesting. I think we’ve got some understanding there. All right. Is there something you want to add before we wrap this up?

[00:47:26] No. Yes. Thank you for today. Give yourself a big high five and have a lovely summer.

[00:47:32] Yeah. And I want to add that me and Eric, we’re gonna do more Q and A type of episodes in the future. So if you have any questions about this podcast or something else you want to know about marketing something we miss. There’s something you want to see more of.

[00:47:47] Send us an e-mail to podcasts at great dot com. And it’s quite likely that the question will come up in a podcast in the future. And I also want to say Happy Midsummer Day when we’re recording this sunny day of the year. Go enjoy it there. I will. Cheerio. Cheerio.