10
An End To Selling ‘Stuff’

By Dan S. Kennedy

People think about their businesses in ways that sabotage rather than elevate. How you think about yourself and your business can be imprisoning or liberating, small or big, trivial or important or profoundly important, ordinary or exceptional, competitive or unique, innovative or repetitive, focused on your deliverables or focused on their meaning, you choose how you think. Those choices ultimately control how others think about you. This is no small thing!

If John Brinkley had thought of himself as a doctor—really, or as a surgeon, or as having a medical practice, or in any, way, shape or form, in terms of the core product or service he provided, it’s extremely unlikely we’d be writing this book about him. Brinkley certainly thought bigger than most, bolder than most, on a more epic scale than most. But most importantly, he thought in terms of customer wants, not in terms of goods or services.

This sounds quite simple. As I re-read the last sentence of that paragraph, I thought to myself: heck, everybody’ll instantly react: well, that’s nothing new. I already know that.

Admittedly, it’s nothing new, although it was pretty darned revolutionary in John Brinkley’s days of ascendancy. I write about it constantly, there’s some mention of it in virtually every book I’ve ever written. Much of the Uncensored Sales Strategies book I contributed to, chiefly written by former, infamous Mayflower Madam, Sydney Barrows is about this idea. The latest way I’ve been talking about it is in terms of being product-centric vs. customer-centric. My consulting work with private clients has featured this for over 25 years. No, it’s nothing new.

And maybe you do know it. But I often point out, the fat doctor who smokes, knows. It’s not that he was out sick the days they covered obesity, tobacco toxicity and cancer at medical school. It isn’t that he didn’t get the memo. There’s even a warning right on the side of every pack of cigarettes. It’s pretty straightforward. It says: these will kill you. He knows about all this. But his knowing hasn’t translated into doing. In fact, his behavior is in opposition to his knowledge. That’s the way it is with most businesspeople, most advertisers, most marketers. They know what I’m talking about here. But their actions remain in opposition to it.

The thing to be thinking about is: how can I help my target customers get what they want? Not: how the devil can I sell what I’ve got? But, most business owners spend most waking moments thinking about selling their stuff, not identifying, understanding and fulfilling wants. Most take a merchandising approach, not a psychological approach.

It’s rare to find a marketer as pure about this as John Brinkley. It’s certainly something to aspire to.

HIGH VALUE QUSETION: how can you best help your target customers get what they want—and be perceived as doing so?… NOT: how can I sell my stuff?

In many venues, for some time, I have been urging people to “stop selling STUFF”—including my books No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, No B.S. Sales Success In The New Economy and No B.S. Business Success In The New Economy, and my newsletters, No B.S. Marketing Letter and No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent. George Carlin’s shtick about this has become reality: everybody simply has way, way, way too much stuff! Their houses are giant storage sheds of stuff, into which they squeeze a bed, toilet and microwave. How much stuff does anybody need? Or even want? We may very well have hit that wall. This was, in my opinion, a contributive factor to the recession that really took hold of America in 2008 and 2009.

We must now elevate our game to marketing by values and selling with deeper meanings. Exceptionally successful (as I write this) big companies in touch with this are Disney, Apple, to some extent, Michelin, Subway. Wal-Mart is attempting this transition. Starbucks drifted from it and is trying to return. Every marketer needs to be very aware of this savvy movement away from selling stuff, study it wherever they observe it occurring, and bring it home to their own businesses.