Positioning

What are your flaws?

by

Every product has flaws.

So does every service, every piece of content, every work of art, every person, every institution, and everything you see all around you has flaws. There’s nothing exempt from this rule.

But that doesn’t mean everything is bad.

It’s the contrary.

Flaws give meaning and value to everything you use and consume. Perfection is another word for meaningless.

The things in life that don’t have flaws, don’t upset some group of people, or don’t work or function exactly as some group of people would hope, those are all meaningless and have nothing to offer.

People differ by nature.

Everyone has different needs and requirements, different interests and passions, different tastes as well as dislikes. Something that’s perfect for everyone, by definition, has to be so bland, so generic, so stripped of everything that gives it meaning, that it becomes all but useless, obsolete, and devoid of meaning.

Give me one valuable product, one great work of art, one anything really that does everything perfectly for everyone all around the world.

But let’s get back to why I’m yapping on about this.

What I wanted to make clear is that whatever it is you’re creating, it has to have a flaw.

And wherever there’s a flaw, there’s an opportunity.

More precisely, there’s an opportunity to highlight, not belittle, but highlight, maybe even exaggerate, your flaw. Talk about all of the flaws you can find about your product, then talk about why your creation has that flaw, what that flaw allows it to do or why it needs to have that certain flaw for it to work as you intended to do.

Every flaw gives meaning to a creation.

Highlighting the flaw turns it into a strength for the right group of people your creation is made for while automatically disqualifying and repelling everyone it doesn’t benefit (which would’ve been awful customers to deal with anyway).

A high-powered industrial vacuum cleaner will make a lot of noise—that’s considered a flaw. So highlight how much noise it makes by clarifying the noise is exactly because of the extremely high suction capability the vacuum cleaner has (something your ideal customer wants).

On the other hand.

A compact vacuum cleaner made for at-home use will obviously be a lot less powerful because it has to be a lot smaller, and more compact, maybe even with a pretty design, to fit in with the interior or be easy to hide away in a closet or a shelf. Highlighting the flaw of it being less powerful than an industrial one by explaining how a less powerful one allows it to be as small as possible while also being completely silent during its use.

Now, you might find this to be a stupid example, but either way you get the point.

Highlighting your flaws and turning them into sales angles is an extremely powerful copywriting tool that could singlehandedly ‘disarm’ your, oftentimes wary, customer from most (if not all) his objections—or at the least it won’t cause your customer to dismiss your product if he has to learn about your product’s flaws on his own without your explanation as to why that’s the case.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about how to talk about, promote, and sell a great product (or even how to create one) then you might want to check out my Product Creation Made Easy framework.

It definitely ain’t cheap, but that gives you an indication of how high of a quality you can expect from it.

The product wouldn’t have been nearly as good, nor would I have been able to create a high-quality one, if it hadn’t supplied me with the resources I needed to support myself while I kept working on it to make it as good as it could humanly be.

Not to mention the amount of praise and kind words I get from people who bought the product at the current price.

Anyway.

Enough time talking.

Check out Product Creation Made Easy here: https://alexvandromme.com/product

 


It ain’t about what you’ve got to offer.

by

Instead, more often than not, it’s about how you paint that offer.

Sure I could tell you about how I’ve got a 12-module course that’ll teach you the ins and outs of product creation, without any of the laborious and time-consuming task of doing interviews, surveys, or any of the nonsense ‘market research’ methods.

I could go on and on about how every module is written with simplicity and clarity as the main focus. And how it takes less than 3 hours to go through while covering all three different phases of developing and selling a new product (I.e., ideation, creation, and launching) without leaving not a single important detail behind—yet still making it so easy even a 10-year-old could do it.

I could say that.

But would that be as impactful as telling a story about how almost everyone who went through my course, no matter their skill level, whether they were a course creation master, or had no prior experience creating any kind of content whatsoever—let alone having written even a single article anywhere—and applied my teachings told me how much they learned from the course… and more importantly… how fast and easily they made back their initial investment ten times over.

I’ll take my chances and say that way of saying it would have a bigger impact.

Anyway, while we’re on the topic.

Why don’t you check out my Product Creation Made Easy framework out?

Click this link for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/product


Great positioning or a happy accident?

by

I don’t often talk about this, but I used to be the president of my fraternity about 3 years ago back at university.

(The uni/student culture in Belgium is quite different here, so it’s not exactly a fraternity—a lot more “professional” for one—but that’s the best explanation I can give in just a few words, so let’s stick to that terminology for now)

One of the events we organized was a mentorship-type program where (close to) graduating students get in touch with working professionals in the field to help them figure out what to do and where to go after graduation.

A lot of fun and a lot of help for many students.

Anyway.

During this event, the alumni would start by giving a quick elevator-ish pitch about who they are, where they work, and what they do.

One guy we invited (and accepted) to join as a mentor had started his own company where he builds software infrastructure aimed at helping other maritime transport businesses digitalize the tracking and monitoring of their supply chains.

He gave his pitch in a very corporate and professional manner—almost like a consultant would present his solution presentation to his clients.

Another mentor who joined the event was one of Belgium’s leading experts in explainable AI who, at that time, still worked in the IT department of one of the biggest Belgian banks.

His pitch was the exact opposite of the first guy.

Instead of going for the professional and consultant-like approach, he went for the informal and student-culture type of talk—cracking jokes, making fun, talking about the exciting trips and after-work parties (which may or may not involve lots of drinking).

And this made me think.

At the end of the day, they both share the same type of information (who they are, what they do, where they work). But the way they presented themselves and, by extension, the type of person they were talking to, they were completely different.

Same information, different target audience.

Now I’m not saying one is better or worse than the other.

It all depends on who they were speaking to and what they hoped would happen. Maybe the first guy wanted to attract high-quality profiles to hire for his own while the second guy simply wanted to attract a wide range of students to get a recruitment bonus.

Or maybe I’m completely wrong on that and it was nothing more than the personalities of both those people.

Who knows?

What I do know is that there’s always a million ways to position the same (and I mean the EXACT same) information to a thousand different audiences.

And if you’d like to learn more about how to speak to your target audience, specifically through email, then you might want to check out Email Valhalla.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


I might get cancelled for saying this, but …

by

I don’t enjoy the classic James Bond movies.

You see, my family has this almost bi-weekly ritual of re-watching (or watching for the very first time in my case) all the James Bond movies from Dr. No in 1962, starring Sean Connery, all the way to Daniel Craig’s No Time to Die released in 2021.

I just now finished watching For Your Eyes Only with Roger Moore.

And man.

Maybe it’s on me. But these movies just aren’t it for me. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is.

Whether it’s the slow-moving pace of the plot. The predictability of the story. The pure lunacy of how Bond never actually does much, except mindlessly walk in somewhere, gets spotted, attacked from behind, shot at, ganged up on, and eventually abducted, only to have the enemy play pranks on him instead of getting rid of him right then and there, and then magically getting out as if nothing ever happened (and this cycle repeats multiple times throughout every movie).

Now don’t get me wrong.

There’s a lot the movie does right (the box office numbers and popularity speak for themselves). But there’s so much more it does wrong—or it does for me at least.

And that’s what I’m getting at right now.

It’s ok if I don’t like the movies (at least the older ones, I do enjoy the more modern adaptations). Maybe I’m simply not the right target audience for it. It’s made for other people to enjoy who like these types of patterns, these types of plot lines, and these, almost whimsical, adventures (as the later movies got more serious and less comical).

And that’s the same for you and your business.

You don’t have to please everyone to routinely get $100+ million box office numbers (most made $500 million with less than a $50 million budget or more in today’s money).

All you have to do is to get popular in the right market, to the right people, and keep giving them what they want again and again.

And if that’s the case.

Then you might want to consider employing the wonderful art of email to keep your customers close, stay in constant connection, get to know them better than they know themselves, entertain them, and promote your new offers time and time again, with knowing for absolute certain that they’ll buy whatever you're putting out (because it’s also aiding their lives, never forget this part).

The best part?

Email Valhalla shows you exactly how to do all of the above.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.gumroad.com/l/valhalla