Choosing People + Shahla
I worked from NYC this past week and, as long-time members know, that means I spent my lunch walking 60 blocks hunting for great marketing. Sandwich boards, signs in windows, or, in today’s case, a sticker on the ground. We’ll get there.
Marketing in NYC is counterintuitive — most businesses seem to think that since there’s so much volume and competition, a broad message is the best approach. Every person who walks by their store is a potential customer, so, try and get every customer. Sandwich boards and signs that say things like “delicious coffee” or “hot pizza” or “sale” are everywhere. The playbook is to describe the thing you make and try to add urgency.
But these approaches ignore the law of marketing: all anyone wants in life is to be chosen.
As a business, your job is to make customers feel like you’re choosing them. Out of all the people you could've built someone for, you did it specifically for them. Marketing isn't about describing what you make, it's about describing the customer you make it for.
On one block in Soho there were four coffee shops — three were empty, one was packed. The three empty ones had generic “coffee” messaging — hot, delicious, some sort of roasting pun.
The packed coffee shop had this sign outside: “You’ve been looking for Vietnamese style coffee in NYC and coffee + condensed milk doesn’t count. Welcome.”
This messaging chooses a specific customer. If you love Vietnamese coffee, and you can’t find it, this problem language speaks directly to you. And the specificity of the problem builds trust — if they know you think coffee + condensed milk isn’t authentic, you trust them to make it authentic.
The goal with marketing is to purposefully exclude 95% of people — to confuse them, even — but to be hyper inclusive to the 5% of people you’ve built the product for. Marketing is vetting for people who will be successful with what you've made.
Towards the end of my walk, I saw the best marketing of the day. A block littered in these stickers:
Apparently, some guy had met someone named Shahla on this block waiting to get into a bar and they’d hit it off but he hadn’t gotten her number. So, he made stickers with a QR code with his information on it, hoping she’d come back to that location and see it.
A bit extreme, but that’s definitely choosing someone. And, if you’re Shahla… you gotta at least go to the website. You can’t walk by that.
Your marketing should feel that way to your customer. Like you chose them out of a giant lineup to build for. Like you used the nuances of their problems and process as your product roadmap.
Obviously, this starts with you choosing a specific customer to build for. Specificity builds trust, problem language converts, “for everyone” gets passed by.