When I was fourteen, any glance of lady boobies had my giggles on overdrive for the rest of the day. I was a sheltered young whipper-snapper. Heck, I remember thinking bellybuttons were, ya know, a rude bit. Until I figured out we all had one and they are all pretty much the same – smelly.
I never got off on it. Porn. I guess Debbie Does Dallas was enough for me in my tender teenage years, and the same goes for blood and guts movies too. Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a shocker – a right doozey to a naive young lad like me and, as it happened, was such a shocker it was removed from the shelves in the early eighties.
They got talked about though – a lot! Every decent video rental dude had a copy he loaned to his favourite customers! Everyone wanted to see them to see what all the fuss was about. They were remarkable – like ‘em or not.
Going back those twenty or thirty years anything out of the ‘norm’ was a shock, a kick in the head and a landmark for what was, and has become more, ‘acceptable’.
Now that most of us have seen shock horror in the likes of Hostel and Saw and with so much sickly porn on every site from YouTube to BluTube (don’t pretend you never looked) and the sad (not the teary kind of sad) thing is, it’s not shocking any more. Whatever your view on it, I bet you’re not shocked by it? Repulsed by it perhaps, but not shocked.
Once you’ve seen body parts gouged out with a bloody meat hook you’ve seen ‘em all.
It’s all become the norm. It’s actually quite boring. Like most products, services, businesses; boring. The remarkable ones stand out – but with most businesses playing the safe card, the remarkable ones are few and far between.
Many business owners think their product or service is remarkable – a cut above the rest – many go so far as to create their own hype to convince others, and possibly themselves, that they truly have something different, something better, something with a lot more ‘__________’ than any other doodle-flip made or sold by their competitors.
Some actually believe they are so remarkable that they have no competitors. We all have competitors. Unless, of course, your name is Debbie and it’s 1978 and your ‘company‘ ‘Teen Services” is doing something no other ‘business’ is doing.
If you’re having to shout louder than everyone else to get word out about whatever it is you do then you have a teeny weeny problem; Your offering is clearly not doing the shouting for you because no-one is telling anyone else and the reason for that is because it’s nothing outstanding. Self-induced hype is not needed for truly remarkable ideas, products, businesses. Anything that really does stand out gets talked about.
If something is worth talking about, guess what? People would.
No one gets excited about ‘yet another porn movie‘ or ‘yet another Friday the 13th‘ do they? And no one gets excited about un-remarkable products, inventions, and services. What’s the point? Would you want to be the one talking about ‘so what’ kind of stuff in the work canteen? Of course not. You want to talk about things that excite, things that have some ‘wow’, things that are worth talking about, things that are – without hype – totally remarkable.
If your business is ‘just another __________’ then you need to start thinking. To stand out from the crowd in a world where we’ve seen everything and nothing seems very remarkable anymore, you need to think how what you do can be better, more ________ something that is unheard of.
Playing safe won’t get you noticed. If Debbie and her friends had kept their clothes on, had she never tootled off to Dallas, would anyone have cared what Debbie done? She’d have just been ‘yet another Debbie‘.
Once you’ve seen boobies and bottoms you’ve seen ‘em all. Albeit varying in size, it’s not much to get excited about. Although walking into a mechanics workshop usually gives most hot-blooded males a smile when they observe the tasty calendars on the wall, it’s not going to make ya say ‘wow’.
If Debbie did Dallas today we wouldn’t be all that impressed, I mean shocked. In fact, we’d just brush it off as nothing remarkable, no big deal (yet another porn movie). She’d get a few minutes of fame on daytime TV, a Facebook page with loads of hormonal ‘Fans’ but a few weeks later all would be forgotten about, leaving Debbie wishing she had done something shocking (done Dallas) before we’d seen it all before.
We don’t shock easily anymore. Few things make us stop, look and listen baby, because so little is different. Or its all been done before. Our attention isn’t so easily grabbed by anything new.
We automatically assume every product or service we see advertised is just another ‘_______’. Unless, of course, we hear it is something outstanding, something remarkable.
The word soon got around about Debbie and Co when ‘Teen Services’ started offering its ‘remarkable’ services… Boy oh boy did the folks of Dallas respond. Teen Services made money (apparently). Lol.
What can you do to get people talking about your business? No you can’t hire someone like Debbie. Well, you could, it just wouldn’t be so remarkable these days.
What can you do that is remarkable?
Perhaps you already do something remarkable but the right people (those people who love to talk) don’t know it yet?
Perhaps a tweak here and there can take your offering from being ‘just another ___________’ to being the wow product or service everyone is talking about?
If nobody is talking about it, if you are constantly thinking of ways to ‘get the word out’ and how to attract more customers that the other guy, then, like it or not, you most likely are just like your competitors and don’t have anything remarkable, you have ‘yet another _______’!
Related posts:
- How To Increase Your Prices Today Here in the UK we are about to face a fairly impacting tax increase (January...
- What Have You Done Today To Boost Your Brand? How much ‘interaction’ have you done today? Have you commented on any blogs? Have you...
