How to create a remarkable product

Protip: your product is the marketing

A reader, Brian, messaged me after the last issue on great ad creative stems from a great product, with this:

I've been pondering “recommendability”. The best marketing is a product designed to be recommendable to others, and if you have such a product, any marketing or advertising you do will be smooth as silk. At least, that's the theory. The question is: how do you design products and services for recommendability?

I think I have an answer. Maybe not the answer.

The key is to create something truly remarkable. That is to say, something worth remarking on. We tend to only remark on things that surprise us (by either exceeding or subverting our expectations).

This line of thinking comes from Seth Godin's "Purple Cow", which argues that the product itself is the marketing.

This means that the product solves a particular need so well, that people can’t help but tell the others about it. This tends to only be possible by focusing on a very specific person with a very specific need. Godin calls this the “minimum viable audience”: deciding exactly who to serve (and more importantly, who to not serve).

As Derek Sivers says: “proudly exclude 99% of people” - that still leaves you with 80 million people.

Workshop Tactics started this way. It is a bunch of workshop recipes, for designers. Actually, for one (junior) designer in particular who was keen on learning how to facilitate design workshops, after only ever experiencing soul destroying meetings.

The promise of the product is embedded in it’s strapline: “Ditch dull meetings. Design better products”.

This resonated with them (of course, because the solution is the opposite of their problem), and further - a tiny tribe of people I found in my network shared a similar need.

By saying to anxious, meeting-weary designers “hey, I made these just for you” means you’re already cutting through a noisy world. Especially when you go on to say “and they’re not made for anyone else - and they're going to help you confidently bring people together to put the design process into action”.

When you make a specific promise to a specific person - and actually deliver on it - it’s clear to see how this can become a remarkable offering.

And the coolest thing is that there tends to be thousands of these tiny tribes. There are a loooot of people in the world.

This is evidence by the fact Workshop Tactics has sold over 100,000 copies. And to my surprise, designers remain a fairly small segment of these sales. Turns out that putting a problem-solving process in a super accessible format is… super valuable to a lot of people.

In summary, remarkable means “worth talking about” and being “worth talking about” is delivering value above what is expected. So, find out what one person’s pains are, and solve them beyond their expectations.

Thanks Brian, I hope that was useful - maybe not. Let me know by replying or commenting.

Cheerio!
Charles.

P.S. To new readers, it’s great to have you! I write this newsletter to not toil in obscurity and to help share advice that has helped me. And the best part is I will never try and sell you anything, ever - hurray!