Marketing Lessons From a 74-Year Old Blues Legend
Posted on 22. Mar, 2011 by Daniel Levis in action, Articles, Blog, blues, campaign, creative, fear, Inspiration, legend, lesson, prospect, skepticism, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, strategy, target, testing
I’m having the first barbecue of the season on my back porch. And I’ve got Buddy Guy’s raspy vocals and stinging guitar riffs pumping through the speakers…
The man’s chops are clearly massive, yet oh how he plays… with such exquisite humility. Not the slightest need to show off… preferring to surrender himself totally to the music… allowing his audience to shower him with never before revealed inspiration.
74-year old Guy has been noodling around the same three-chord blues progressions for almost 60 years. Imagine how terribly easy it would be to fall into a million ruts over them kind of eons.
Yet with each new album this guitar legend seems to find an ever-widening expanse of fresh, new and exciting truths to explore.
I think the same can be said for the honest practitioner of sales and marketing. The more experienced we become, the more we should realize we don’t know, and the more there is to discover…
To the genuinely inquisitive, the mysteries of the universe expand in direct proportion to our efforts to unravel them.
Like Buddy Guy, we should be continually murdering the predictable, finding ways to combine things that don’t seem to go together, and discovering the new and exciting hiding within the familiar.
Useful as they may be, the rules of thumb and best practices we live by as marketers should never become lodged in our minds to such a degree they crowd out critical evaluation, simply because they satisfy a desire for certainty.
The list of marketing truism is long and comforting. But the truth is: Long copy doesn’t ALWAYS out pull short copy. Video sales letters don’t ALWAYS out pull text. And the fear of loss does not ALWAYS trump the desire for gain. Insert your favorite doctrine here.
Such dogma – even when arrived at through valid testing and experience in our own private marketing sandboxes – should always be questioned within the context of the situations we find ourselves in. Shop worn theories should be tested against other less accepted ideas. Indeed, we should demand that they prove their validity every time out.
The curse that kills higher response is marketing-on-auto-pilot …
If a given strategy works in one place, there is no guarantee it will work in another. Even within the same context, there is no guarantee that if something has worked in the past that it will work the same way now. The very fact that something works well means it will be overused in the marketplace. Eventually people become resistant. And response drops like a stone.
I say none of this to discourage you or to dissuade you from adopting those things that work in one contest and applying them in another. Just keep an open mind. Accept little as gospel. Experiment tirelessly. And let YOUR market be your guide.
Of course, it is difficult to see things from different perspectives, isn’t it? Bringing new concepts and ideas into your marketing is difficult.
Think back to the process of creating your last campaign. You began with a reasonably blank slate. Your mind was open, actively inviting new ideas. But sooner or later you had to commit to developing one of them. And pretty soon, the forest began obscuring the trees. And you lost your objectivity.
How do you get it back?
The ultimate creative exercise …
Give this a try. Before you finalize your next piece of sales copy, put it in front of somebody whom you know is a good prospect for whatever it is you’re selling. And ask them to read the copy out loud. Don’t email them the link. Go to their house or office and give them the link to type into their computer while you’re sitting there with them. Pay them to do this if you have to.
Now, as they’re reading your copy out loud, sit quietly with a print-out of the page they’re reading. Watch and listen as they read while you make notes on the print-out.
Do they smile here? Sound confused there? Do they add extraneous comments under their breath in different places as they read? Do they ask you questions when they come to a certain point? If so, engage them in dialog about their questions, concerns, and skepticisms? And mark up your printed copy with notes.
Find several more qualified prospects and repeat this process to see if there are common reactions that need to be addressed… that fly in the face of accepted sales and marketing dogma… and that lead you to some new angle or approach.
I promise you this simple little exercise will open your eyes to things you can’t possibly see on your own, either because you’re too close to your own business, or because you’re not part of the target market. In either case, you’re likely to find some popular marketing truisms shattered.
Try it on for size with your next important project. Feed off your audience like the father of screamin’ guitar blues.
Until next time, Good Selling!
Marketing Lessons From a 74-Year Old Blues Legend originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.
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