The Snow White Hallucination

Ask­ing the right things to the wrong people

(or why good ques­tions can lead to horse­shit answers)

Once upon a time, a king with great plans for the future, tor­ment­ed by the fear of leav­ing his work unfin­ished, decid­ed to sum­mon the wis­est astronomer in the king­dom. When the expert arrived, the king asked one ques­tion: ​“When will I die?”.

The wise one exam­ined the stars for three days and nights, and returned with a very spe­cif­ic response. ​“You will join the gods dur­ing a hunt, due to a heart fail­ure, on the very day of your fifty-sev­enth birth­day”. Dis­ap­point­ed, the king had the sage exe­cut­ed and imme­di­ate­ly sent for the sec­ond best, known for his prag­mat­ic approach and out­stand­ing cus­tomer reviews.

The sub­sti­tute of the recent­ly behead­ed, see­ing how things were cook­ing, pon­dered for a while before accept­ing the chal­lenge. After three weeks, the sage came back. ​“An extra­or­di­nary coin­ci­dence, Your Majesty”, he said. ​“The stars revealed you will die exact­ly one day after I do”.

Not only did the schol­ar get to keep his head, but also got a life of com­fort and plea­sure grant­ed by the king, in the belief that a hap­pi­er life would trans­late into longevity.

The king died first.

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White Noise & White Lies

Award-win­ning. Bespoke. Eth­i­cal. Hon­est. Com­mit­ted. Friend­ly. Nice. Data-dri­ven. Full-ser­vice. Lead­ing. Pas­sion­ate. Love what we do. Results-focused. Goal-ori­ent­ed. Ground­break­ing. Rule-break­ing. Dis­rup­tive. Yet spe­cial­ized. 438 com­bined years of expe­ri­ence. Sea­soned. Expert. AI experts. AI pio­neers. Spe­cial­ized in <add more than two things>. Guar­an­teed. Smart. We lis­ten. More, hard­er, bet­ter. We care. 

Those are the mantras of my indus­try. Emp­ty phras­es that every agency repeats to exhaus­tion. Not posi­tion­ing, but rep­e­ti­tion­ing. 

There’s so much noise every­where. What are the lies, plat­i­tudes and tropes your indus­try repeats?
How do you differentiate?

Relat­ed: Per­sonas, Fun­nels and Bar­ney the Dinosaur

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Mir­ror, Mirror

I don’t know any mar­ket­ing teams that sit down and decide to write shit­ty, undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed con­tent with a hid­den agen­da. I think the prob­lem lies else­where. It has to do with incen­tives, pres­sure, and a com­bined lack of aware­ness and self-awareness. 

Imag­ine this sce­nario from the inter­sec­tion of your indus­try and mine. 

1. Some excit­ing SaaS is grow­ing fast after an IPO. 
    
2. They need to expand their cus­tomer base while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly milk­ing more mon­ey out of pay­ing cus­tomers to keep the stock price ris­ing. 
    
3. They start cre­at­ing fea­tures that are sup­posed to make your busi­ness stronger, but in fact are choke hold­ing you into their prod­ucts.
    
4. They aggres­sive­ly hire sales peo­ple and agen­cies, so who­ev­er you ask will tell you they’re ​“the fairest of them all”.
    
5. The more agen­cies recruit­ed, the less work for each. So they must quadru­ple their own sales con­tent. The lie becomes ubiq­ui­tous.
    
6. The buy­er (you, for exam­ple) on the oth­er hand, needs to go through a pro­cure­ment process full of inter­nal pol­i­tics, con­straints, uncer­tain­ty, bud­gets, hopes, and fear. 
    
7. The deci­sion will involve an aver­age of 11 peo­ple. You spend most of the time per­suad­ing, explain­ing, nego­ti­at­ing or bar­gain­ing with oth­er folks. 
    
8. There’s not enough time to research, not enough under­stand­ing of the impli­ca­tions, so choos­ing the easy path of the loud­est main­stream plat­form is the only way to be able to deflect respon­si­bil­i­ty in the future.

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Some peo­ple lie for the same rea­sons oth­ers drink the koolaid: Nobody wants to get their head chopped off. 

It’s the rea­son so many com­pa­nies are locked into Sales­force but don’t use it enough.

Or why the mar­ket believes Shopify’s claim to be a B2B plat­form, or to sup­port grow­ing busi­ness­es while they twist their nuts with hid­den costs.

It’s the same prin­ci­ple behind eco­nom­ic bub­bles, the AI Hype, and many oth­er bat­shit crazy things we came to accept as normal.

If every­thing is taint­ed by this con­cate­na­tion of poor choic­es forced by sneaky incen­tives, what can we do? 

Relat­ed: Game of Ecom­merce Thrones. Big­Com­merce vs. Shopify.

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Through the mir­ror and back to reality

We have the tough task of tra­vers­ing the big dig­i­tal changes ahead. We can only suc­ceed by mak­ing good, informed deci­sions and changes. 

Mea­sure the truth

Ana­lyze and mea­sure how you’re per­ceived, as objec­tive­ly as pos­si­ble. Sur­vey cus­tomers, research your­self. Dou­ble-check your posi­tion­ing and how you’re con­nect­ing with your audience. 

Put the truth into perspective

As Mr. Beast said (am I too old to quote that guy?): ​“Con­sul­tants are cheat­codes”. They’ve done what you’re try­ing to do many more times, and with a more spe­cif­ic, niche approach. You’re too close to your own business.

Find one you trust and ask for open advice. Val­ue the peo­ple who can tell you what they think fear­less­ly. Even if it hurts, and you hate it, and it makes you want to take their heads off. 

Han­dle the truth

If you embrace their feed­back, then it’s manda­to­ry to fig­ure out how to apply the nec­es­sary changes. Don’t let insights rot in an aban­doned fold­er. Take action to improve your strat­e­gy, tac­tics, results, and rev­enue, through bold choic­es, not fear. 

Relat­ed:The Hid­den Costs of Inaction

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Your com­pa­ny is unique

This means there are no sil­ver bullets.

No mag­ic bench­marks, no pre-cooked recipes.

Fol­low­ing what’s main­stream will nev­er lead to unique posi­tion­ing and differentiation.

If every­body goes pop, go punk.

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Speak­ing of headless… 

We don’t sell Big­Com­merce, or say it’s bet­ter because they’re part­ners. We’re part­ners because we think they’re the best plat­form for our tar­get customer.

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