Big bold statement

Volume #15

What’s your Big Bold Statement?

"Many a small thing has been made large by
the right kind of advertising." Mark Twain

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing marketing expert and best selling business author Andrew Griffiths www.andrewgriffiths.com.au

(Andrew was one of 25 top sales and marketing experts from five countries that I interviewed for my brand new marketing resource The Unfair Business Advantage Report. This is being released in mid March 2011.)

In our interview Andrew talked about the importance of differentiating your business from all your competitors by having what he calls a Big Bold Statement.

What I liked about this strategy of having a Big, Bold Statement is that any business can use it. So let’s take a look at how this strategy works...

Andrew explained it this way...

There are so many businesses; it’s so competitive if we don’t stand out in some shape or form than we just get lost amongst the masses.

So we’ve got to be a shining star amongst our competitors and one of the best ways to do that is to make a big, bold statement about what your business is.

So when someone asks ‘what do you do, what is your business?’ You can be excited and proud to tell them all about it.

Here’s a good example of coming up with a Big Bold Statement...

Andrew was contracted by the Government to go out to regional Australia a while back and help small businesses that were in areas that were struggling.

One particular business that he came across was a general store in the middle of nowhere in Queensland.

It was a typical old general store that is dusty and it’s on a road, it’s a through road so everyone kind of drives by. This old store had been there for 100 years and it was an old lady that ran it and she was hard as nails and bitter and twisted because no one would stop at her general store.

People just kept driving past and not stopping. All she got in her store from the tourists was dust she reckoned.

The store itself was interesting because it was in two parts. One half of it got so full of junk about 30 years ago, old mining and farming equipment that they literally closed the doors. It was full of all this stuff still and they just moved the general store next door.

Andrew was looking at all of these things, he is talking to the old lady running the store and asking can you tell us how long has it been a general store for?

And she said ‘oh well over 100 years’.

Andrew then asked ‘Is it the oldest general store in Queensland?’

Her comment was ‘well it could be.’

Now Andrew is a marketing guy, so ‘could be’ was close enough for him .

So the big bold statement was he made this business...

‘The oldest general store in Queensland.’

Andrew then rang up friends in Cairns, 800 miles away and said to them right we need some signage done up, we need it to say ‘the oldest general store in Queensland’ on these new signs.

Then what he also thought about, adding to the next part of the story was ‘ok we need a bit more of a hook here, half of the shop that’s filled with junk, if you have a look at it, it’s actually very interesting.’

‘If we kind of open that door we could have people walk on in, we could actually call this a museum. And the door, the path through all that stuff leads into the new general store. So we could have a museum and why don’t we make it free entry for this museum as a great hook?’

So all of a sudden we’ve gone from a non descript general store with dust on the side to the oldest general store in Queensland with a museum that has free entry.

And bizarrely this whole thing literally turned the business around overnight.

Andrew got some very cheap signage done, put them up and before long there’s film crews from around the world filming this general store. Busloads of tourists are stopping and getting out the front and getting their photo taken with the oldest general store in Queensland.

They are buying ice creams and doing all these kinds of crazy things.

It got featured on Japanese television shows, German television shows, it’s in Lonely Planet travel guide books, this is the place you have stop to have a look at. Now nothing changed there apart from some signage about the Big Bold Statement.

(Now it is actually the oldest general store in Queensland, so Andrew did do some homework to make sure that he wasn’t telling a fib.)

He turned a non descript typical, there’s thousands of little general stores like that in outback Queensland, into something significant that stood out and all he did was come up with a Big, Bold Statement about the business.

Here’s another example of the value of coming up with a Big, Bold Statement for a business.

Andrew was contracted by a restaurant about 10 years ago. It was called Mango Jam. This restaurant was interesting because it was a real challenge for the people who had just bought it. This restaurant had gone through a number of different changes in its history. It has been a bar, nightclub, it had been a restaurant, it had been a gay bar at some time, all these different kinds of incarnations and it had really lost its identity.

So it had just become a kind of a faceless restaurant on this street in a tourist town.

The owners were pulling out their hair because they said ‘we don’t actually know what we are’. They had a real lack of identity and the business was really, really struggling. So they contacted Andrew and said ok what can your company do?

Andrew suggested that they make a big, bold statement about their business.

However the first thing he did though is he had to figure out what is this business or what should it be?

So Andrew went around the local town, this was in a place called Port Douglas.
He surveyed every hotel in Port Douglas and said ‘tell us what kind of restaurants are lacking in Port Douglas. What isn’t here?’ And then he surveyed tourists on the streets ‘what do you like about Port Douglas, what didn’t you like, what restaurants were there? What was missing?’

Overwhelmingly all of the feedback that came back was that there were no family restaurants in Port Douglas.

So Andrew said to his client, ‘this is what you need to become, you need to become a family restaurant.’ Even more importantly you’ve got to become the number one family restaurant in Port Douglas.

So they transformed the restaurant. They got some people to come in and teach the staff how to interact with families and children, they made this fantastic colouring books, they got all these kind of things that were doing around kids, the staff dressed much more colourfully, they had little kids visors made up with the menu was underneath the visor so the kids could look down at the menu.

This literally transformed the business overnight and in many different ways.

First of all everyone knew what they were and the hotels could recommend Mango Jam to families. If there was a family, mum and dad and two kids standing at reception and they say ‘where should we eat tonight?’ The response from the staff was simple. ‘Oh, the best family restaurant in town is Mango Jam.’

Now Mango Jam didn’t really change a lot of stuff. The cosmetics were the colouring books and the staff and the attitude, and a few more kid’s items on the menu.

So really not a lot changed. But there became clarity about what the business was and you’d hear the guys on the phone when they are talking to customers. Oh what are you, oh ‘well are the number one family restaurant in Port Douglas.’

That was the big, bold statement that they promoted.

Now interestingly enough about a year after Andrew helped transform this restaurant and they started to win awards as the best family restaurant in North Queensland Andrew got a phone call from the head of McDonalds in Australia at the time.

He was ringing up to tell Andrew he hated him and the reason he hated him was because he goes to Port Douglas regularly with his family. And his kids insisted that they eat at Mango Jam for lunch and for dinner every single day.

He said it was just driving him crazy, (he said this very tongue in cheek) but he really rang to congratulate Andrew on what he had done with the restaurant.

The interesting thing about having a Big Bold Statement about your business is that
people are naturally attracted to what is different, what stands out from the crowd.

So you really do need to be able to define what it makes you different.

So try and put some words around it. Just write them on a bit of paper, write them up on a wall, what do we do different, what do people say about us?

A second step would be to ask some of your customers, assuming you are already in business and perhaps you are looking to try and make that statement.

Ask 10, 15, 20 of your top customers. What do you like about us? Why do you deal with us? Why do you keep coming back?

Then, be prepared to use that bold statement everywhere.

People ask ‘what do you do?’ Well I’m the oldest general store in Queensland, I’m with the number one award winning family restaurant in Port Douglas, whatever it might be.

As Andrew explained, once people have that clarity of a big, bold statement that is often a turning point in their business.

Action Exercise:

I love Andrew’s idea of a big, bold statement and it’s something that any business can do with a bit of thought and creativity.

So do what Andrew suggests.

Ask 10-20 clients what they really like about you and your business.

What are you well known for?

What would you like to be well known for?

What is your big, bold, statement?

I’ll be in touch again soon with the next volume of Easy Business Success.

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You can email Graham on

graham@twomac.co.nz

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