Crafting Products the World Truly Needs with Laurier Mandin

All right, so how do you make things people actually need and want? Right? That's the subject of our show today. You have a product, you have a service. Do people actually need it and want it? That is what we're talking about. How do we know that? What's the process? What are some examples of companies that have done that really well? We're talking about today how to make your company something that your, your product, your service, something people actually need. And hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, host of the Skilling Up Business podcast. I hope you need it and want it. We work very hard to make sure that you need it, want it. Hopefully I'll learn something today that will help us to upgrade this to make this show something even more important in your life. But if you like it, subscribe, turn on your notifications, follow us. You know, like that. You'll get them every week, wherever you are right now. Share it with a friend also. But you can also go to our website, scalingcoach.com where there's a huge back catalog of more than 600 shows on everything to do with scaling up your business. We also host monthly workshops on scaling up. We've got a couple of year in person intensives where we do annual planning and mid year replanning. So all kinds of things and more@scalingcoach.com so go check it all that. All right, listen, I am joined now by Laurier Mandan and Hope I said that right. So Laurier, please, let's bring on Laurier for the show. Laurier, welcome to the show.

Hey, Bill. Super happy to be here. Really excited about this. I've been listening to some of your back episodes and you've had some fantastic guests and delighted to be included with those guys.

Thank you so much. So for everybody, Laurier is the founder of a company called Graphos Product, but we're particularly talking today about his book I Need that and it's subtitled creating and creating and Marketing Products People are Compelled to Buy. So how do we do that? Like, that is a really interesting thing. He's got a process, a framework called the Coveted Condition. And he's the host of Product Knowledge, Product marketing podcast. So I'm delighted to have you on the show once again.

Thank you again.

Let's get into it. Do you have, what's a product that you've bought, not including your own that you couldn't live out without? Like, what is it about, you know, is there something that you could think of that you just really love that hooked you?

I've Got a bunch of them. And I am a fan of tech products. One of the ones I talk about in the book, I go back to when I was 15 years old and I got into competitive cycling. And on my bike back then, I had this thing, this clunky old analog speedometer. And the thing chewed up my tires, it slowed me down, it created all kinds of problems, and it really made my riding miserable. But I needed, I needed metrics, I needed to know what I was doing. And this is in the day before anybody had ever seen a bike computer. So I didn't even know something like this existed. And I was at the point of frustration in my cycling, my young cycling career, that I was on the verge of giving it all up. And I was looking at other things and starting to get involved in some other sports and. And I came across an ad for this product called the Cateye Solar Cyclo Computer. And I saw this product and I saw what it could do and I saw how it could give me these analytics that I was writing everything down in a notebook and tracking stuff manually and mapping things out and figuring out my distances manually. And I had to get this thing. So I went out and I cut lawns all over my neighborhood every single day until I had enough money to buy that Cateye solar cycle computer. And it literally changed the way I rode. It changed everything I was doing. And so I would use that thing in the summertime and in the winter I had an add on to it that let me use it on my. The wind trainer device that I used at that time. And that was great, except for the solar batteries didn't stay charged. So I would put them up on a light in the bathroom and it happened to be a hundred watt bulb. And that melted my Cateye Solar and totally destroyed it. And I saved up all this money. So I went and got a job at a grocery store and got enough money and I bought another Cateye Solar. And what I talk about in the book is that this, this whole thing happened not just because I wanted this device, but because I, I felt through the daydreams, through this coveted condition I had, as I call it, of being a better athlete, of enjoying what I was doing more, having real accurate metrics and none of the downsides that this thing became something that it was not negotiable to me. And as a, as I grew and became a product maker, this, this was kind of one of my most compelling examples. Because of whatever happened in my brain, I did not technically need that thing. It wasn't something that I depended on, I could have done everything I needed to do in my life without it. But in my mind, which is where everything but our basic survival needs exist, the needs that we have are entirely constructs of our mind. So from, from reflecting on that and looking at products that I'd worked with, where my customers would come to me and they would say things like, how do we get people to need this thing? They'd often be in this entrepreneurial point of desperation where they feel the world needed this thing, they've put their life savings into into it. They've invested all their investors money and nobody seems but them and you know, their, their insiders to feel that that product is truly needed. What does it take to make people say, I need that? And so that got me thinking years ago and I started working on the frameworks that I use today to help not just create a feeling of need, but to understand the root causes and what needs to go on inside of your, your buyer's mind to make them feel that they need your thing as much as you, the person who created it, believes they do. And you know, you recognize as the product maker that there's a need for this. You're willing to dump years of your life and all your money into making it. And you'd think that the buyer would also feel that way, but that's not the case.

It's funny. So I did about 45 triathlons over and some marathons over about a 11 year period. And I was never that fast or great at them, but I enjoyed them a great deal. And then I also did some century rides and metric and, and imperial century 100 mile rides and I, and then over time I had like six different bikes. And then I, and then I had the fancy carbon race wheels with the tubular tires that you glue on instead of. And. And then I started saying, right, like I have to have a power meter. And in the beginning, like the, the power meter to measure your output and track that against your hard and your performance. And everything was like you had to get it in like the crank or the HU hub or like it was a really complicated thing. Then eventually, now it's like it's just in the pedal of, of the, the pedal spindle on your bike and it got simpler and simpler and simpler, right? And then that your watch or your cycle computer could be just right on there. And it's got GPS and it's got everything glonass. Like, you know, you could have all the different things all feeding it all at Once, and it just, like, keeps getting better. And I. I always felt like I needed the next best thing right now. And I had the special helmet and the special. Do I need any of that? I'm. No, I'm, like, in the middle of the pack sometimes the back of the pack. Right. Like I need any of it. My bike was, I don't know, $6,000 or something like that. You know, like, you can spend a lot more today on, you know, carbon specialized racing bikes and stuff, but. But all of it's kind of ridiculous. And yet I felt like, oh, I have to have that next thing. Gotta get that.

I always find it kind of amusing. You'd have these guys that are 30 pounds overweight, and they're just trying to shave every ounce off of their bike. Right. They're gonna spend $10,000 to take a pound off that bike.

I. Bike. Yeah. Well, I guess the arrow is worth more than the weight, unless you're doing a lot of hill climbing. But a different kind of cycle.

Rotating weight is. Is more important than just static weight, of course. And there's those. Those factors like that, but it is. You know, when you get involved in something, when you become an enthusiast, too, that whole level of what you need changes entirely. You. You need pro chef equipment to work in your kitchen, even though you really don't. You know, a really good chef can go into your garbage kitchen and make stuff that you couldn't possibly create. But we get these ideas that it's. It's the stuff we don't have that's holding us back.

And sometimes your best meal is that thing that you had at Lakeside on a backpacking trip that you made with a pocket knife.

Nothing can. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's really good. We're right into it. This obsession with things and design and all of that. Was it really, like the beginning of the cycling, or was there anything about you as, like, a little kid that you could see was fascinated with product design and obsession over things?

Well, I always like to look and figure out how things were made and take them apart. But, you know, it was only. I only really got into product marketing accidentally. I went to journalism school, and when I was 21, 22 years old, and I came out of there and started a magazine with some friends and. And from there, I thought that was a really tough business to be in, but I learned that I liked making the ads and I liked writing content, and I like doing that stuff. So I started an agency in the middle of a recession. I got a really good deal On a corner office downtown in my city, on the kind of the best corner location in town where I stayed for almost 30 years. And in that place, I learned on the job other things. I learned how to actually really do marketing, how to do how to make websites and do digital marketing, how to design really great packaging, all those pieces and kind of naturally gravitated into physical product land, into creating and finding ways to promote these things. And I think, I don't necessarily know if that went back to loving product when I was younger, but there was something about mechanical and physical things and the impact that they could have on a person, whether that's perceived impact or real impact. And sometimes you don't even know where the line is as we're talking about, you know, whether it's pro chef equipment or fancy triathlon bikes, it becomes irrelevant to you. You have this sense of need for these things and you will justify them, you will make sacrifices for them. The barriers are erased when you feel that something is a need and not a want.

You know, it's so funny. I, like, immediately go to all the little things that I have obsessions with, especially around gear and things like that. I have obsessions with things that I feel like I need. And I, I, we had one set of knives when, when I got married 30 years ago and, and then I don't know, 10 years ago, we're like, this is ridiculous. We need a new set of knives. So, you know, 20 years in, we buy another set of knives. And then those are a little bit better. They're not the super chef level knives, but definitely an upgrade from the first married knives. And, and then at some point a couple of years later, I'm like, these knives are crap. And, and, and then I, I was at a buddy of mine who's kind of a amateur chef and, and he's like obsessed over his knives and he's sharpening them. I realized, oh, you know what? I need to sharpen my knives. So now I bought a special knife sharpening thing like, so that I could keep them really sharp. And I read the different reviews and I found the one that would be really good if I wasn't going to use the whole like, Whetstone proper method of, of full fetish knife sharpening. And I still don't use that though. That sits up in the cupboard. But, but you know, as we approach the big roast carving season, you know, then I'm like, okay, maybe I need to get it down and sharpen all the knives like once a year. It doesn't really matter.

Great one.

Yeah.

I do a little plug for. I do a daily email newsletter and just probably last week I did a post about a knife shop. It's a Japanese fancy knife shop not far from where I live. And what this place does is their kind of job. When you come in the door, it's amazing. They've got all these beautiful things all over the place, but they approach it by educating and training people off the street to become knife aficionados. And it really works, you know that once they, they get you in there and you're cutting tomatoes or whatever it is that is hard to slice, they'll teach you how to prepare and how to use knives properly. And it's this indoctrination that turns. It's a, it's a brilliant way to create a need in somebody because once you've done that, once you've learned how great these things are, your pretty good Cutco knives kind of suck. And you don't want to go back to using those things. You'll always remember that better experience you had. And so, you know, I've got a client that for years this is one of these guys that had just everything. But I would get him these really beautiful Japanese knives. And you know, his first response was, oh, those are sharp. And you know, by the second or third one it's like those things are truly amazing. What else do they have? And you know, just by using these things you get spoiled. So that's. I think that's a good point that you make. You know, with something as simple as a knife, it doesn't have to be crazy high tech and new. That's a kind of an ages old product that is a specialty item that has this whole huge market. All you got to do is get people to recognize that they need that in their kitchen.

Well, we're going to get into some of the stories. The book is I Need that and I'll have you tell some of the stories. I'm reminded again as you're talking about so many different things, but you called out Cutco knives and I should shout out that one of the past guests on the show is a gentleman by the name of John Rulin who there's. So go look for the old show. John Rulin is R U H L I N and John wrote a book called Giftology and he built a whole business around his Cutco business. And yeah, yeah, John passed away recently at very way too young and tragically. But the book and the lessons I think are really relevant to us around creating Powerful expressions and using gifts to connect with people. I have a couple of knives from John that are like gifted to the Gallagher family and they're inscribed on the side of these Cutco knives and we pull them out and every time we pull on mine I think about John and, and what a sweet human he was and like that. So. Right.

Powerful connection. Yeah. And I actually, I think I in, in all the books I've read, read so many business books, I believe I read his because I think he also talks about, you know, hotels, gift gifting cookies and things like that. You know, the, just the experience of receiving something that you're not expecting and the value of doing that and, and also that all of a sudden then those things get a place in your heart and in your lives. And I think that that's super important is that that's why product led growth is such a big thing in the software world, is don't just tell me that I need something, give it to me, let me adopt it, let me see and experience how much better it is than the thing that I'm doing now. And now the resistance is gone. I've. You don't have to tell me how good it is because I'm a user. I'm, I'm that aficionado of that thing and I, I can't. I talk about the coveted condition, which is, is, it's a long term desired future state. It's me wanting to be that better cyclist down the road and wanting to be fit all my life. Not just in the moment being faster next week at a race, but having this long term future state that if whatever it is that gets me there is taken away, then that's unbearable to me. So that coveted condition is something that I'm not going to give up for, for pretty much anything. You know, if, if I'm, if I have the ability to get there and to get it back, then I will. And so product led growth is all about having, putting somebody into that place of the coveted condition and making, leaving it unbearable, making going back to regular knives unbearable.

You know, I had I think about like this obsession with gadgets and gizmos and the, like the next thing, even if I didn't necessarily need it. As a kid I had this Texas Instruments handheld calculator that was really cool. And then later I had an HP calculator and that was cool. Did I use all of it? Not that much, but it was really cool in the work that I did. And then I had very early stages of portable computers that were like lunchbox type and briefcase size and small suitcase, and then eventually laptops and things like that. And then I had the organizers, like the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton, and then I figured out how to connect those to gprs and other, like, streaming so I could start to get email and messaging on them. And. And then. And then one day I'm watching one of these Apple Keynotes, the Jobs keynote, and he rolls out this new device because I at the time had an ipod with a million, you know, well, not a million, like 50,000 songs or something on it. And I had. And then I had my phone because I was a very early mobile user. And then I had my organizer, and he rolled out this thing that put them all in one. And it didn't even do everything that I needed and wanted, like the notes and the syncing and all this stuff wasn't as good as I already had in my different devices, but it put it all together so elegantly. So I started thinking, I need that. And then I started thinking about how can I do without the things that I already have that it doesn't have? And how to work around the fact that I want. Wanted it so badly. That elegance of bringing all together. I started to figure out how to deal with the compromises.

That's interesting that you mentioned. Your tech story sounds a lot like mine with adopting all these different things and transitioning from one to the next. And in the book, I talk about that. I had a Palm Trio that was. It was a pretty good smartphone when Jobs made that announcement. And I loved it until I saw him make this presentation and talk about how bad a stylus was and how stupid it was to have this keyboard on there. And. And so there I was sitting on a tile floor with a perfectly good smartphone in my pocket with hundreds of people waiting to get my iPhone when they rolled out. So it's. It's an amazing thing. I. I didn't need that because I had. I had it covered.

Trio 650. Yeah, I had the trio 650. In those days, it was pretty good. It's a color screen. It was like, you know, the size of your thumbnail.

But, yeah, it had a touchscreen, too. You had to touch pretty hard. You had to gouge it a little bit to. To get it to work. And that's where you have this inertia scrolling and just the level of advancement, I think, and that's something that I talk about too, in the book that's really, really important, is to get to that level of, I need that you can't just make something. People would think that if you make something that's twice as good as whatever that status quo is, that that's plenty, you're off to the races. And that's just a huge, huge problem, is that that's not nearly as good. There's this thing called the planning fallacy. And that means that, you know, as, as product makers and as entrepreneurs, we're driven by unrealistic optimism about likely outcomes. We overstate the potential gains and we underestimate the costs and impacts and things, the friction that's going to slow us down. And there's a guy, Harvard Business School economist and professor named John Goreville, he did a study on what the actual resistance is and what, and what the, the problem is on with this planning fallacy on the innovator side. And consumers actually overvalue what they already have their status quo to begin with by at least three times. So a factor of three, they're skeptical about any new products performance that's coming out. They're generally unable to see the need for anything new. They're satisfied with the solution they've got. I think some tech people notwithstanding, and predisposed to see what they already own is anything but the happy status quo. And the product makers on the other side of it are overvaluing their innovation's value to consumers by at least three times. They're convinced the innovation is amazing. Everybody's going to see it's amazing. They're predisposed to seeing this clear and obvious need for the product in everybody who sets their eyes on it. And the innovators are deeply dissatisfied. They can't stand, just like me with my old bike analog speedometer, they can't stand the status quo. And so when you have that three times skepticism and resistance on the buyer side and the three times over exaggerated view of how good the product is on, on the innovator side, you end up with nine times this kind of disparity of nine times. So in order to get, according to Gourville, even to be able to break the resistance and not end up in a stalemate, you've got to be 10 times better across whatever benchmarks exist. So that's what, you know, that Cateye Solar had to do. For me, it was, it was at least 10 times better. If you, if you put it all together, the iPhone, with all the things it did in order to just smash the industry and smash the mold and be copied by every other smartphone maker on the market, it had to be at least 10 times better. And you know, those types of things. I think innovators, anybody who's coming up with a business idea, if you have a restaurant that you're opening and it's 10 times better than anything else around, you're going to do fantastic, you're going to break through loyalty, you're going to get people changing their habits, you're going to have everybody in town talking about you. So it's kind of, I don't think it's necessarily just a magic threshold, but it's also setting your sights at a level that makes sense to be truly needed by people. Compared to all of the, the resistance, their status quo bias that they have, that's super, super strong. I mean, I think you and I, because we're more of the earlier adopter type, we have less of that resistance and we're looking around for new things and whatever we have starts to look old to us more quickly than for a lot of other people. But and innovators, I think also anybody who is out there making and creating new things and trying to break molds, they are also not able to think like most consumers who, because they don't have a status quo bias, they want to change the world and they don't like the world the way it is.

You know, I'm struck by. There's a parallel, I think, also to the company itself, right? We're talking primarily about products and services here, but the company itself is like, it's much easier to get people to work with you and to retain people if you declare something extraordinary. So we're gonna do like this huge thing in the world and people wanna be a part of that. When I go and I see a company and, or, you know, thinking about working with a company and they're like, here's what we're up to. Can you help coach us? And they're like, we wanna be number one in the world. I'm almost immediately sold, right? Like you had me at hello, you had me at number one in the world. I'm interested. Like, you're playing a huge game. Number one in the country. Two, number one on our category, like that kind of thing. Now why, why does your thing matter? Why does your company matter? What do you actually care about? Where's the heart and soul? All that comes next. But like, we wanna double our business. Not so interesting, right? By comparison. I mean, look, everybody wants to do that, right? Especially if you could keep more of the profit, which is often harder to do than we think. But that, that something bigger and Better. And I think about my kids also, like my kids from a very early age like had big ambition and then they didn't kind of lose it. They didn't say oh and become, I don't know, cynical and bitter about it. As they began their working lives, they still were like, how do we do something on a global scale? How do we work with the very best in our industry and do the very best things? How we do, how do I do something that affects everybody's. Whatever it is, both the kids and I love that, that whole like that reach for something because that gets us excited about it.

And that's, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned, I think you said in one of the episodes I listened to that your kids are growing up and you're into grandkids right now. But I've got a 10 year old and a 14 year old and you know, I think they're 10 Xing everything that I had done when I was at their age. They're near 100% average at school and they're 10 times the athletes I was at their age there. I, and I'd like to take some credit for that and say, you know, my wife and I do focus a lot on parenting and, and that's the one thing that I walk away from business things to do is to be there and be present for my, for my daughters. Despite that, I'm pretty, I'm pretty client and business obsessed. But you know, I think it, it can be generational too that you, if you have these values and you really, you, you look at not just being a little better than others, you want to be orders of magnitude better than whatever the status quo is, that much better than the competition, that much better than com than your competitors in sport. If it, it's totally different from if you're just saying, ah, you know, I only compete with myself and you know, if I, as long as I'm happy, that's what counts and I'm no insult to people who are content like that. If, if that is what brings you joy is sitting on a mountaintop and, and, and that's all, then I think you might have found something. But for entrepreneurs and people who are highly motivated and want to achieve, really want to achieve greatness, I agree. Having setting that bar high and saying we want to be the best in the world, maybe not at everything we do, but at this one thing or these few things, that's where we're going to, we're going to hone our skills and nobody is going to be Better than us. And it's hard to come up with something in that business or performance part of your life that's more inspiring than having that true belief. You can do it, right?

Yeah. You know, as you speak, what comes to mind is. Is this tension between ego and serenity. Right? There's. There's like the ego is driven to build and create and make a mark and do some things like that. And it's powerful and useful. It can get out of control. Right. Be unchecked and stuff. And then there's this whole serenity side of things, of being chill and peaceful and connected and just grateful and that kind of thing. And I like, I want both of them, but there's definitely a tension sitting in my bedroom in the morning, having coffee, reading the news or contemplating whatever and looking out at the trees and feeling blissed out by the. The fortune of my life to live where and the way that I do and that kind of thing. And then I'm like, okay, now I have to get out and f. And do something in the world because I said I want to help 5 million people before I retire. There's like, those are not like one in the same. And then I'm burning along and I get a little tired or stressed out and I go take a walk and I look up in the redwoods and I'm like, oh, yeah, calm down.

I think those. Those two things that ambition and desire to succeed and the quest for serenity are probably one of the greatest human intentions that we have inside of ourselves. Right? Because if you're someone who really wants to be successful, you recognize that success doesn't just mean hitting those objectives and being the best in the world. If you're the best in the world and you're falling apart and you're, you know, you're letting yourself go and. And, you know, physically and mentally, you're not in a good place, then, you know, you're failing. And so it's. There's this. This human need to find the balance of those things, to find the balance of things you love to do, and that make you better emotionally and physically and better as a human being in your. In your community and going out there and kicking everybody's. But which, you know, totally opposite kinds of things.

You know, it's probably a good segue to your story from the book about Ken. Tell us about Ken.

Ken, I start off the book talking about this entrepreneur who shows up in my office, and he's got this suite of smartphone accessories that he's got all the confidence in the world when he's presenting them to me. He's got this fancy aluminum briefcase with carved out coves that perfectly fit each of the accessories. And it's only when I ask him so what's the problem? He tells me that he's gone and created these things. He's got a warehouse full of them and they're not selling. Nobody is buying these things. He's getting bad reviews. His, this is his dream. He wasn't by his career was, he was an engineer and he kind of came up with this idea that if he could make these things, it would, people would buy them. He bounced the idea off of all the experts that he knew. And everybody said, you know, this is a billion dollar idea. Go for it, make this thing can. And most of those people, in the end didn't buy them. His own friends and the people who did his product validation work for him wouldn't even buy one. His, his brother had one and put it and displayed it nicely on his desk and kind of helped him pitch it to other people. But there he was feeling everybody lied to him. He, he'd built this thing and he asked me the question that I've had more than one person asked me is how can I make people need this thing? And you, you can't. You, it's, it's a really tough answer. If you haven't built that into the validation work you did starting out. If you didn't establish that people did need it, you've got a really tough road to hoe to get people to change their habits and to replace the accessories they do have with this suite of things that now they've got to carry around with them and switch between. And you know, you think it's all better because each one of them performs its task much, you know, much more smoothly, more efficiently than a standalone. But the rest of the world doesn't think that. So Ken's story was it wraps together not just the lack of validation problem or lack of understanding of what it takes for someone to recognize that they need something and to overcome that friction of adoption, but he also had something called a fragile dependency. It was right at the time when the phone connections were changing to USB C and his was USB and the charging part of it was being replaced with wireless chargers. So he had all these fragile dependencies that were just smashing on him and, and working against him. So he was looking at building new adapters for this product that wasn't even selling in order to save it. And so he was just kind of this, this perfect storm of errors that someone can get themselves into. And he was a guy with a, you know, a tremendous ego. And here he was humiliated by what this whole experience had done to him. And, and, and he was, he kind of became this, this personality that kind of represented everything that I needed to help people overcome and as early as possible. And that's why it was the impetus for writing the book. Because the book itself is geared not so much at how to take your product that nobody wants and make people want it or need it, but how to do proper validation in the early days, how to establish from people without pitching to them the product, whether or not that is something that has a chance at success. And then how to market it effectively, how to future proof your business so that you're not just building something for that moment in time where something with this one type of connectivity is going to make you rich, but you've got to have a plan for a long term vision for what's going to come next. So all of these things together are essential to creating and marketing things people need and are going to need for hopefully a long time in the future. And in this world where it's really hard to know what people are going to be needing or what our individual spheres are going to be like even a year from now.

So I'm guessing can got a multi million dollar lesson there.

Yeah, Ken probably in that range. You know, he, he made three chip trips to China looking for a manufacturer. He, he was very, very deeply invested and did a huge production run to start out coming out the gates because he was so confident that this thing was going to be a success. And so yeah, it's a, a big setback in every way I think in someone's life to go through that. It was, it kind of dismantles you, I think.

Also I've made multimillion dollar mistakes more than once and I just try to use them for the rest of my life and share them. Not only use them myself, but also share them with clients so that not everybody makes the same mistake. And so I think of it then as tuition, right. I went to one of the best schools ever. Cost me millions.

The school of Hard Knocks is not cheap, but it does make an impact, right. Because it's very productive, personal, very exciting.

It's not super exclusive school. It's just hard to stay alive in that school. So I think it's really interesting, right, like the mistakes that we make along there and where we go and the need to validate in thinking broader beyond products and services, Jim Collins talks about bullets before bombshells and the idea that, let's test some ideas before we invest a lot in something. Let's see if it works. And I hear so many times I show up with a client planning session or annual strategy session or even in a phone call, and they tell me about an initiative that wasn't even on our radar, and they're like, ah, we just. We just blew 50 grand or 150 grand or some amount of money on something. It totally didn't pan out. And I'm like, I never heard about this. Where did you go from, like, whatever to doing a fairly significant investment in something that we did no testing on? Right. Like, how. How did that happen? Well, it was going to work.

This.

This marketing vendor had done it a jillion times before, and it, like, it really works. And they've worked with the best companies. And I'm like, oh, I can't tell you how many times I've told you that the easiest way to make $10 in online marketing stuff is to spend 100. And it's guaranteed almost.

Almost. You still not guaranteed almost.

Yeah. And I. Look, that's true about our products, too. I had a meeting. Well, I didn't have a meeting. My team had a meeting at my last company, and they were in a sales meeting for our fashion jewelry brand with a major department store. And they were like, you know, and then one of the buyers said something like, it'd be really great if we had some rings like this. And my team heard that and their ears picked up and they came back and they spent about two weeks solid working on this new ring product program, like, whole assortment of things and how it worked together and displayed and all that. And they went back and they showed it then to. And they flew up and they met with the department store again, and they're like, ah, this is really great. We don't have any money for this. And they had made the mistake of running with like, a little moment of inspiration and then putting all their energy. And I got caught up in it too, because I didn't hear it or double check. Like, okay, well, you know, that's interesting. You say, like a ring program. Well, where would that go? And when would you do that? Do you have any money for that? And what would be involved? Like, they didn't do any of that, like, second step validation around the whole thing. They just heard something like, Ken and they had an idea for something. They ran with it because their friends said, oh, yeah, that'll Work, right? And we. A recent guest, the Show Guy Kawasaki, shares a story about marketing research that Steve Jobs shared some very version of. And they basically said, look at Apple, people tell you stuff in focus groups all the time and they're not worth a hill of beans because they'll tell you, oh, yeah, the, that yellow one's really great. Like, you know, we want the yellow product. And then you say, okay, thanks for coming in, and we have some gifts for you on the way out. And then everybody will go pick up the black or the white one. And it's like, so what people tell you. And I remember we did research for the fashion jewelry company once around sustainability and fair trade and all that kind of thing. And then we produced a line of, of like eco products. And with the assumption that there would be a little bit of premium. And people, nope, they were like, yeah, they'll say everything in a survey about how important that is. But if it was, you know, 10% more, forget it, we're not doing it.

Isn't it funny how, you know, what we consider input is often what we're looking for or what we want to hear. And there's one of your guests that was talking about how if the sales team gets one bad signal that the product's too expensive, then they come back and everybody is demoralized because now they believe that the product is more expensive than it should be. And I've seen the same thing happen with clients. I've got a client that does a luxury pillow. And we were talking with the marketing team and one of the people said, well, we've got this problem that nobody. I'm trying to remember what it was, but there was a user problem that she said, and we've got to do, we've got to deal with this and we've got to, you know, talk to production and find out why we have this problem. And I went and looked through the social media feeds and one person had made a comment about this issue that they were having. But sometimes it's like that's a sample size of 1. Now we're all going to spend time and resources trying to fix something that's, that someone has detected. And I think that it's just a human thing, is that, you know, if you're, if you're creating a product and you get somebody saying something negative in a review, um, it could be that other people are having that problem and only this one person has vocalized it. But you've got to do some kind of validation to make sure that that's that's real. And you're not just being flipped around by something that is is an opinion of one.

Yeah, we have one of our scaling up programs. We have several thousand companies in IT around the world and, and then we have a variety of coaches and trainers that work in the program and people will pick up on something and then fix it. And then other people go, oh yeah, that's a good idea. And they' and then every now and then somebody says, wait a minute, what problem does this address? Do? Are we really having an issue here? Why are we reinventing stuff? But we're all, most of us entrepreneurs at heart or in our past and so we just jump on newness, whether or not it's needed.

I had a client that came to me, this was during COVID and this was a very successful large business that had number of successful products. And during COVID someone on their team decided that they had the technology through existing products to create an ultrasonic sanitizer. And so they, without doing any research as to whether or not this was, it was for phones and handheld devices and things like that, without doing any research, they said this is the opportunity, we're going to go and build this. They made 100,000 of these units. And when they sent me the test unit and I plugged in and I thought something was wrong with it because it was so loud that you didn't want to be in the same room with this thing when it was operating. And it had to go for something like six hours to do its job with all this noise. And so there they were, they ended up with they made a hundred thousand of these things. They had 90,000 still in a warehouse almost a year later. And almost everybody who bought one was really unhappy with it. So you know, not only did they not do the validation but they also did didn't test the product at all. You know, I don't know what there was for prototyping or what there was for actual customer experience. But sometimes, you know, just. It's not just the small businesses and startup entrepreneurs and inventors that come up with these things. In fact, entrepreneurs are usually more finicky and more likely to at least make sure that the thing works and does its number one job really well. But I've seen and that same company had a few different products that they kind of knee jerk launched like that that ended up being problems for them.

That's interesting. I worked on a little bit more peripherally on a telecom related product years ago when I was at Sprint and this thing Worked and it impressed all of us around our offices and on speakerphones and things like that. And then we did a Super bowl ad kind of highlighting it. And we had I think an hour and the super bowl had no call to action of any kind, no phone number, no nothing like that. It was just like a teaser of a tech to come. And I think we got 2,000 calls within a few minutes. And people are demanding this thing. And then we decided we'd kind of roll it out. It didn't work at all. It only worked in the most narrow of circumstances. And we got ourselves convinced that it was ready and it was nice, not ready for prime time at all. And it was really like an embarrassing kind of a thing to have happen. And expensive. Right.

It created a lot of stress, right?

Yeah.

Because there you are racing to get this thing to market and, and now because you got all this demand, you can't let people forget about it. You've created this massive pressure to produce it and to. And to ship it. And when it ships it, it's, it's kind of. Yeah, to. If you've got a brand, it wrecks your brand.

Yeah. So what's the dog brain? You talk about the dog brain. Tell us about that.

Yeah, well, and there's more to that part of the story. One of the really important things that in order to talk about need and how we get to need things, I felt I should go into not just the psychology of need, but also some small basics. At least some give people an understanding of, of how our brain functions to get to get us to that level where we start daydreaming about something and where we what, what happens inside of our brain as we're going through websites and all of a sudden either something gets our attention or we hit that back button. And so, and I didn't want to write a neuroscience textbook, but I felt brain science was important. And the more I started studying it and talking to people who, who knew a lot about new neuromarketing and about brain science, the whole more I realized that it is really central. So basically our brain, there's what they call the triune brain model. And our brain has three main parts that evolve separately and have very quite different functions. There's not as much collaboration and passing the baton as you think, but it's more of a three way wrestling match that goes on a lot of the time. So the oldest part of our brain, we talk about the lizard brain and that's the basal ganglia and brainstem. And those parts there are Just our. The responses, the things that keep us alive, they make our heart beat, they keep us breathing, they tell us when we're hungry or thirsty. That's the middle brain, and it's not really responsible for much other than that. But above that is. Most people have probably heard of the limbic system. So it's the thalamus, the hypothalamus and the amygdala and other parts, and those parts work together. If you think about a dog's quick, impulsive responses, intense emotions, that's. The limbic system operates like that. It's these, you know, the fight or flight. It's getting excited, pouncing, cowering. It's this amazingly fast part of our brain that if I were to show you a picture of an angry face or a snake, for just 2 milliseconds, you're going to. Your dog brain will respond to that and have a reaction. But consciously you won't even know that you saw something. You won't even be aware that you were exposed to any kind of an image at all. So it's super fast. But it's also the part of your brain that dishes out dopamine. And there's a lot of talk in marketing circles about dopamine, and everybody seems to know what that is, but that is the limbic system, the dog brain that is. It doesn't even have the. The ability to process language. It processes visuals. It processes the. The kind of. The inputs from reading and things like that that do that are. That we are able to, to put through to it. But if you watch FMRI scans of someone who is making a buying decision, it's happening. That decision making is happening inside of the limbic system or the dog brain. And then, then the big part of our brain on top of that, I call the tank brain because that's our neocortex and that it's about 400 million years newer than the dog brain. And it is the rational brain. But it's also. It makes up about 2% of our body weight, but it uses about 20% of our. Of our energy, of our calories, just to run that big part of our brain. So we don't like to turn it on and think deeply and put it to use when we're making buying decisions. So most of what happens, and the research shows this, that, that that active dog brain makes decisions for us. The rational brain, the neocortex part of your brain rationalizes the decisions that are already quite instantly made by the dog brain. And even if we're stimulated in other ways to make decisions. The rational brain thinks it made those decisions. It will justify them. It stands up for the dog brain and defends these things that it otherwise, if it had the time to think about, might have told it not to do so. When we're, whether we're doing basically anything that gives us dopamine, we can attribute that decision that we've made to do it. Whether we're going into online gaming or making purchases or posting on social media when we shouldn't be. That's all dog brain stuff that our addiction to dopamine is, is driving us to do. So it's a really interesting interaction that I go into more in more detail in the book. But in essence too, our big brain, the neocortex, is 250 times slower than the dog brain. So if we have long tedious information that requires analysis on a web page or in our marketing, this neocortex that is so high on energy usage and so slow moving, it's. It's not even going to enter the picture most of the time. We're going to just deflect it away by, by boring it. And that's one of the things that if you were in school, if you ever remember you had a boring teacher or there's a topic you didn't like, the brain doesn't analyze it. It's a lot of work to analyze and understand what it is that you're being taught. So what does happen though is, and happens really easily is we, when we're bored is we go into daydreaming mode. And so if we can kick our audience with that, things like our coveted condition into that mode of dreaming about what this product could do for them. Now we're putting those parts of our brain to optimum use where we've got the dopamine from the dog brain telling us, you need this thing, you need this thing, you need this thing. And you've got the neocortex doing what it does with, with such great facility that it can do it when you're sleeping and dreaming and imagining and creating pictures of you in the future, when you're using this product or having access to this service or whatever it is that's being sold. So that's, you know, from the buyer perspective, if you can use these techniques to flip somebody into the there, that's where wants turn into needs and where something that you've just learned about can become something that's an obsession. Because you go, you know, by default, whenever our brain's at rest, it's going to go back into that mode of dreaming about ourselves in that ideal future state again.

You know, Simon Sinek talks about that in the why thing with relation in particular to companies, but also about products and services. And Aubrey Daniels talks about that in getting more out of people, like tapping into that emotional center. The thing that we care about. We know from that like decisions and action are driven in, in that limbic part of the brain. And then we justify them, we work them out, we coordinate them with that whole upper brain. We figure out what we want. So I figure out what I want, I make a deep decision that's not too conscious and then I figure out how to pay for it and how to convince my wife I needed that and justify it later. That's all the higher brain part.

And that's exactly, that's what your rational brain is working on. It's working on the justification part. And you know what you're going to say when that credit card bill comes in about that line item on there, that's kind of big.

How do I afford it? You know, and, and I, I'm also reminded of, and this is probably, we're, we're getting long in the show so we should probably wrap here. But when I, you know, when I was young, people smoked a lot more and the Marlboro man was a very famous advertising kind of icon and he sold just through his appearance and the imagery and that kind of thing, this idea of a rugged, independent, strong masculine figure. Right. I think he was gay and it turned out he died of cancer. But that's a whole separate conversation later. But people wanted to be the Marlboro man, but it had nothing to do with, well, if you, you know, inhale this carcinogenic substance, it's gonna make.

Smoking doesn't get you there. Yeah. You talked about, you know, when you grew up and I think you probably when you went to house parties as a kid, just remember the, you know, you could hardly see across the room with all the haze of smoke. And that was from the Marlboro man and from people's doctors telling you this.

Is, I identify with that today. We still do it with beer and other kinds of. I'm that kind of person. I wear those jeans, I wear those boots. I like we have these. I'm part of that tribe.

Yes. And it's, it's positioning yourself as being someone who belongs in that tribe, who fits in that tribe and kind of shares those aspirations that those like minded people have in being there.

It's a fascinating. Well, that's probably a good place to end it. How do we tap into that with our products and services? That's the work to do. And, and I think probably people now want to read that book. Yeah.

I'll give a hold up to the screen for the people who are watching on.

If you're watching it is on screen. I need that. Laurier Mandan is the author. You could find it on. We'll put it on. There's the title on the screen as well. I will put a link to it in the show notes. But you can find I need that on Amazon or wherever else you get your books and that kind of thing. It's a great, great place to go. Great conversation. Thanks for joining us to talk about.

All this for listeners. I should add it's also available on Audible, so.

Oh yeah, fantastic. Some of you struggle to read a business book. Try listening to it instead. And we know this one's got great stories in it and we'll make a good read for you. Thanks again everyone for watching for listening. Big shout out to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, who created the whole scaling up framework that is at the core of our work in helping companies grow. And to the folks at Storion Cameron there in the background getting our show ready and out there the door each week. And Seth and Christelle and everybody who produce our show. Thanks again everyone for watching for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.