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August 07, 2007 | Written By Mason Hipp
Earlier today, I was pondering life while making a glass of lemonade. Not an instant-mix lemonade, mind you, a real live hand-crushed glass of lemonade from real lemons. Have you ever had real lemonade? It’s positively delicious.
Okay, so what’s my point? Real lemonade and the instant stuff really aren’t that different. They’re both mainly sugar, water, and citric acid—the difference is entirely in the details. But those details add up to quite a difference.
Marketing is the same way—the vast majority of it is the exactly the same. Almost everyone markets in the same mediums: every website wants to be ranked in Google, everyone has to have business cards, etc. The funny part is, most people are even saying the same thing.
How the heck is anyone supposed to decide what to buy? It’s all in the details.
The details can make you stand out. Even if everyone has a business card, you can still stand out by making yours subtly different. I met a guy who had a business card with one corner rounded and his logo was slightly embossed; those two details caught my eye and we ended up working together. Those two details made his card stand out from the hundreds of others I had collected that day.
The details will show your quality, or lack thereof. Have you ever seen a website where all of the images and text just flow perfectly together in a harmonious thing of beauty? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a website where nothing really lines up? People will look at the details of your marketing and your products, and they’ll use them to determine how good you really are.
We are trained to look for the little things. After years of continuous advertising, we have become trained to skim through information and avoid anything that fits a known pattern. Essentially, we filter out all of the stuff we’ve seen before and know about. What we actually look for are the details, the little tiny things that change from one person to the next. The question is: what are your details saying about you?
If you want to run a fabulous marketing campaign (or, I would say, do anything really well) then you ought to pay a lot of attention to the little things. The things that actually make the difference.
I agree entirely. We’ve been fed with so many over-the-top adverts for so long now, that we really do scan for the little things that sway us.
Of course, it’s nice to get the big details right as well. ;)
Michael - it’s funny that you mention the big things. If you take a look at the url for this post you’ll notice that there’s a “kindof” at the end. I was going to add in a little section that explains how the bigger things can make or break you. If you don’t have a website, for example, all the details in the world can’t save you.
In the end, I decided to make that a separate article. It will be posted soon, keep your eyes peeled : )
- Mason
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