January 17, 2018
Street cred
For the last week or so, we’ve been talking about standing out from the crowd in order to justify premium rates.
My first suggestion was to adopt a contrarian stance toward something your audience considers a essentially “natural law” of their business.
My second suggestion was to become the “go-to” person for something of value to your ideal buyers by going deep into a specialty or area of expertise.
Today, I’m going to suggest my third and final approach to standing out from the crowd:
Have a remarkable experience.
I left this one until last because it’s the one over which you have the least control.
It’s a lot harder to spontaneously trigger a remarkable experience than it is to debunk a business myth or to choose a specialty.
What do I mean by remarkable experiences? Here are several off the top of my head:
- Getting your hand caught in a crevice and cutting off half your arm to make it back to civilization.
- Walking on the moon.
- Digging your spouse out of an avalanche with a broken ski tip.
- Posting a video of your doped up kid on youtube and getting 150 million views.
- Selling enough raffle tickets to pay for an uninsured friend’s stomach cancer treatments.
- Safely landing a disabled commercial jet in the Hudson river.
- Spending an entire year off of the internet.
Obviously, you can’t simply decide to experience most of these things. In fact, most people would probably prefer not to experience them.
However...
If you happen to have a remarkable experience like this in your background and it somehow maps to the services you provide (or could provide) to your clients, it would make for some super powerful street cred in your marketing.
Yours,
—J