Humpty Dumpty fell and all the king’s horses and men couldn’t put him back together again.
This nursery rhyme popped into my weird mind as I read Seth Godin’s latest book, “We Are All Weird.” In the book Seth says that the one-size-fits-all mass market is dead. In my mind that’s Humpty – a bloated way of doing businesses that has crashed to the ground and can’t be put back together no matter how much the mass marketers would like to make it that way again.
Seth makes a case for focusing your sales on the weird and not the masses. In order to understand this better here are two of my examples. Apple Pie and Chevrolet. How much more mass market can you get but those two American icons.
Here’s how you sell those two things to the weird. Instead of selling a plain old apple pie you can get anyplace, you sell apple pie made with organic Granny Smiths grown in your own garden with organic nutrients. The pie contains honey that came from the hives in the apple orchard that are used to pollinate the trees. The flour is milled from organically grown wheat at the local cooperative mill powered by a stream as it was done for centuries. And, with every pie purchase one dollar is donated to the mill and the customer gets a free badge to wear showing that they support locally made and grown, organic, fruit and grains.
And, the Chevrolets you sell are the 1965-1970 Chevy Muscle Cars like the Camaro, Bel Air, Nova SS Convertible, Chevelle SS and the Corvette. That’s it. You don’t sell 1964 or 1971 models. And, you don’t sell GTO’s or Barracudas or any of the other muscle cars from that time period. You sell to the weird.
This book will change how you look at business now and for many years going forward. People have more interests and choices and they have the money to choose what they want to buy – not what you want to sell them.
You have a choice now. You can buy this book and learn and become one of the weird selling to the weird.
Or, you can keep trying to put Humpty back together again.
By the way, the hard copy version of this book is a limited edition that will sell out by my estimate sometime this weekend. If you want one, get it now.