You must give people their opinion of you. This is something that I’ve been saying for a long, long, long, long, long time. And it dates back to my learning from when I used to be a door-to-door salesman.
People form an opinion about everything; anyone, anything, any person, any company and they form it very, very, very quickly.
And once an opinion is formed, that opinion will be tough to change or altere over time. So I recommend that you start off by giving people their opinion.
Now let me explain that in better context. Take car sales, for example, I’ll mention BMW. A lot of people aspire to owning a BMW, they may drive a Ford or a GM or a KIA or something like that, but they may say “Oh I’d love to have a BMW.”
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But, why? Why? They’ve never had one. Why? Because they would say “It’s the ultimate driving machine. It’s reliable, it’s fast, and it’s more comfortable.” Despite having never actually had one, owned one or driven one.
This is all down to marketing and branding. When I say opinion that relates to branding. But for most of us, most companies, branding is something we can’t afford to do and to be honest, unless you are a huuuge business it’s a complete and utter waste of time (and still a waste of money for them, too).
If you consider it as an opinion, then that is different. Yes.
If you give people their opinion and tell them your service is a higher quality, why would they doubt it? Of course you have to then back it up to prove and reinforce this and then that opinion is formed.
However, if you wanted to be cheap and cheerful, if you said “We are the cheapest” and you wanted that as part of your branding (something I don’t recommend by the way), then people will decide you must be the cheapest.
They won’t go off comparing prices to everyone else. They’ll probably agree with you. But you’ll have to back it up.
Go back to cars and take Lexus. Lexus is a posh Toyota, made by Toyota. It contributes something like 3 percent of Toyota’s total sales, but contributes something like 30 or 40 percent of Toyota’s profits. Lexus has proved to be very, very important to the overall company.
Now when they bought it out, it is a high quality, German, Mercedes, BMW equivalent brand for Toyota. But, when it came out on day one, I would have said “Well Lexus is a high quality…” whatever.
How did I form that opinion? Because they told me it was and I believed them. Now I’ve never, in fact I’m not even sure if I’ve ever been in a Lexus, maybe once, but I’ve certainly never owned one and even now, I would imagine that Lexus is a high quality car.
And it’s only on hearsay. I don’t know anyone who owns one. I just assume it is because everyone tells me, and it’s backed up and it’s reinforced, and reiterated over and over.
So think carefully about your product, think carefully about your service.
Position yourself and tell people the way you want them to think.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
Today, Tuesday, time for a Tuesday Toolbox Tip and today I’m going to recommend a fantastic image altering service called Canva.com. Canva is free.
If you talk about using Photoshop or that kind of service, Canva does a lot of this, there are other tools, other things you obviously can’t do, but to form quick images on the Internet and overlay text on top, I use Canva every single day.
If you go look throughout the Marketingforowners.com site you will see images created using Canva. It takes seconds and it’s free.
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