The Power of Saying No in Business | Jesse Wroblewski
26 Nov 2024 · 38 min
In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim interviews marketing veteran Jesse Wroblewski, founder of Decommoditized and author of Marketing for Super Villains. The conversation traces Jesse’s journey from a 25‑year‑old agency owner who hit a breaking point during the pandemic—realizing he was wasting his team’s talent on unappreciated, “sell‑out” work—to the creation of a new business model focused on helping agencies avoid commoditization. Jesse introduces his "Universe of Differentiation" framework, a twelve‑planet map that categorizes the primary ways brands can stand out (e.g., definitive, approachable, process‑based). He discusses the difficulty of uncovering a true differentiator, the importance of translating it into a simple, memorable brand promise, and the challenge of measuring brand ROI. The dialogue explores practical tactics: using sensory cues (audio, visual, edginess) to embed brand memories, calculating customer lifetime value to set marketing budgets, and leveraging direct mail for guaranteed impressions. A recurring theme is the power of saying “no” to low‑value clients to protect expertise and prevent becoming a commodity. Jesse also promotes his book and a unique "nuclear edition" workshop where clients spend a weekend rebranding on a submarine. Throughout, both speakers emphasize the tension between creative intuition and analytical rigor, the pitfalls of jargon, and the need for intentional, data‑informed branding decisions.
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And as I was looking around at my team members and their eyes are rolling in the back of their head, I realized that like we put our refined skill sets, our genius, we're wasting it on unappreciated people. The bump in the banking account felt great, but we got to this point where we're just doing bullshit for money and we kind of felt like sellouts, right? So that was the point where I was like, no more. Like, we need to do something drastic to make sure we're never in this position again to just cater to crazy people, you know, use, use our highly refined skills for nonsense.
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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the internet where you're going to find out how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me is Jesse Robluski with Decommoditized. Welcome, Jesse.
Thank you, sir. Nice to see you again, as always.
Well, I'm excited to have you based upon our previous conversations. I'm curious where this one goes. So for the audience, why don't you catch us up on who Jesse is, what he does, and how he got here?
Sure, sure. So my 60 seconds is I've been running a marketing agency for 25 years. Uh, when the pandemic hit, I had to take a step back and, you know, kind of shut down the office, go virtual, cut some employees. And that led to soul searching, which I think a lot of people went through during that time. And I wanted to figure out, you know, what in the past 25 years was not only the most fulfilling to me but most rewarding for my clients? Where did I make the most impact? And I signed up for a couple of, you know, agency boot camps trying to figure this thing out of what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I realized that my favorite thing to do was taking almost like the most boring product ever and injecting it with so much life that it could, you know, not only stand on its own with a personality, but charge a premium in a crowded market space.
Like accounting, that would be boring.
Yes. Yes. So one of my, one of my coaches said that, you know, that sounds great, but you can't say you specialize in boring products. No one's going to self-identify as boring. I came up with the concept of what if you're on the verge of becoming commoditized? I felt the pinch when my, in my agency of becoming a commodity with a lot of alternatives popping up. So I came up with the secondary concept of helping people become decommoditized. If they feel like they're racing for the bottom to charge the lowest price, and that pride that they used to feel by solving their clients' problems because they were the only ones that could do it started to get eroded away, and now it's all price-based. I wanted to kind of inject some of that pride back into what they do for a living and give their life meaning. So a little grandiose, but that all led to me writing a book called Marketing for Super Villains, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Love the book, by the way.
Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, I saw you speaking in Oklahoma and I think your bio page most of all spoke to me because I too speak in fluent movie quotes. And I'm like, I can get behind this guy.
Yeah. So who do you, you know, now that you have reinvented yourself, so to speak, who do you tend to gravitate to work with?
So great question. Number one, we usually don't fit well with startups, right? So everyone, you know, most startups have rose-colored glasses. They think they're special and they're going to take over the world.
They are special, Jesse. They are special.
Yeah, yeah. I say we, you know, we want to work with the people that, you know, had their teeth kicked in a little bit, right? They've been through the wringer, they don't know where to turn, and they've kind of unturned every stone and they're kind of looking for the next option, right? So when you get— when you start working with a marketing agency, it's kind of like an arms race. And it's great for us marketers, right? Because it's, oh, you have to rebrand yourself. And then we do the rebranding process and then your competitors rebrand themselves. And it's like, oh, you got to redo your packaging and you redo your packaging and then your competitors do their repackaging and you drop your price and it goes back and forth. It's like this arm race. So I say, you know, becoming decommoditized or successfully differentiating yourself, that's like the mic drop moment. Like that's something your competitors, all of a sudden they're in this arm race and they're like, oh, Christian just did that. Like we don't know where to go from here. We can't compete. So that special thing, it's not always easy to come by that differentiator. Is your mic drop and you lead the industry.
I, I got your book and, and read it, uh, immediately. I sat down and read the whole thing, and then I shared it with my marketing team. And I— my recollection is, is that you have these— I think you called them planets, um, of, of differentiation. What are some of your favorites?
Yeah, so to touch on that, I've read a lot of business books even before going on this journey, and they all say find your USP, find your differentiator, and then the chapter ends, right? And they never explain, right? They never explain how to uncover— it's an incredibly monumental task. And then there's a secondary monumental task of once you figure it out, if you're lucky enough, how to explain that succinctly to the universe, right? So my goal was to almost codify how brands throughout history that have successfully differentiated themselves figure out, like, let's put, let's put a box around this and like, let's give people a starting point because you can very quickly just go off into a tangent and never really uncover your differentiator. So I created something called the Universe of Differentiation, and there are a lot of ways to differentiate, but this is just the top 12 ways that brands throughout history, large and small, have successfully differentiated themselves. And if anyone's interested, after this conversation you can download a nice little, you know, full-color worksheet, uh, along with some examples, the planets on our website, completely free. It's a great starting point. Within that, you know, we can, we can touch upon any of the planets you like. There's differentiating by definitive, differentiating by approachability, differentiating by your process, etc., etc. So I'll let the conversation go from there if there's anything in interesting that you want to—
Well, it was funny as I was reading through there and your examples, the one that just stuck out to me was, okay, we're going to differentiate ourselves as— I don't remember exactly how I phrased it, but like, we're very average accountants. Like, there are a lot better accountants than we are because there are. That's demonstrably true, but it spoke to the thing that we were good at, which was communication and relationship, the soft skill part that most accountants don't have. And my marketing team didn't like that one much.
So yeah, I mean, it's a common trap that a lot of business owners fall in, right? So I'm kind of hardwired to always chase down being the best, right? You got to be the best at everything you do. Everything's got to be buttoned up. You know, I'm into martial arts. I'm a black belt. Like, I got to go after the best, the best teacher, the best, the best, the best. And a lot of times you don't have to be the best, right? Because a lot of— I don't know if you can speak to this— a lot of our end users, our prospects, they don't know the best from the worst, right? They're, you know, so it kind of, it can be a fool's errand to say, you know, hey, we're going to offer more services or we're going to offer, you know, all these, all these premium value adds. And the client's just looking for ease of use or some other byproduct of the true thing that you're offering.
Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Well, no, I think you speak truth that most people don't want to hear, which is— and I would include really all professional services from medicine to marketing in this. The end user has no idea whether the person's any good at it or not. They're going based upon the trust, the feeling that they have. But do you know if your doctor's giving you good advice? Do you know if your marketer's giving you good advice? No, because you're not an expert. How would you know?
Yeah. Yeah.
But most people don't want to admit that, right? Like, yeah, I made the right choice, right? But did you? What, I mean, what are you basing that on?
Exactly, exactly. You know, you look at, you look at a lot of SaaS companies, majority of users use about 5% of what their, you know, software as a service offers. And they're, they're out there, value, benefit, benefit, feature. And it's really, it really comes down to, you know, that approachability. I'm intimidated. I don't know the questions to ask, but if you're out there talking this high-level feature and benefit, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with me on a human level. And make me feel like I'm making the right choice.
Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Well, yeah, and, and, and to that extent, I think professional services tend to use the jargon because they think it makes them look better, right? So I'm using all of these terms that you don't understand, uh, and that shows that I'm smarter than you. But really what it does is just confuse you because I'm like, I, I don't know what, uh, well, I mean, I do, but I, you know, what, what's, what's the difference between SEO and CRM, right? You know, like, why are you using Why are you using acronyms?
And exactly right. Yeah. It's a trap that a lot of us fall into.
Yeah. And I think it's— I think it starts with, especially with existing businesses, it starts with what we think we know about our customers. Donald Miller, when I, when I did his class, the StoryBrand guy, he described it as, all right, as experts, you're trying to communicate what you do and you are, are, have all of this knowledge and you dumb it down, uh, from, from your knowledge as a 10 and, and you dumb it down so that the audience can, the, the prospect can understand it. And you think you've really dumbed it down, but really all you've done is taken it down to a 7, right? You need to get it down to a 2 or 3. I, I recently spoke the Onward Summit, and it was a bunch of videographers and I was speaking on profit and I thought I had dumbed it down. But at the last minute I had added one more term. And as I was going through the presentation, I realized I lost the audience. Like, and afterwards, you know, they were talking to me and like, okay, now explain this to me again. And I'm like, yeah, I should have left that out because I was going too far. Uh, and, and again, I thought I was being simple.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I had the exact thing, exact same experience here in, here in New York City. There's been like a longstanding bookstore, very prestigious, and I went in and I got my, you know, I just published my book, and like, I like to donate this book to the store, you know, if anybody's interested. He's like, oh, what's it about? Like, it's about, you know, finding your differentiator as a business owner, and it's tied into marketing and for supervillains and blah blah blah blah blah blah. The book. And he's like, wow, that's great. What does it— what does differentiation mean? And I'm like, oh, I lost you on the third word of that pitch, right? I thought it was this big special, you know, astute bookstore. Like, nope. Never, uh, you can never underestimate your audience enough.
No. In a previous conversation, we talked about the difficulty of computing return on investment for brand, and I'd kind of like to explore that if you're willing.
I would love it. I would love it. Yeah, it's very—
your brain is very interesting to me because you, you don't want to get in there, Jesse. You really don't.
You walk both sides, the analytical and the creative. So let's, let's put it to work, see what it can do.
One of the things that I believe to be true is that if, if it ever existed, the idea of direct marketing, uh, where you can tie ROI to a specific spend— so you, you know, return on investment— you, you, uh, spend money on Google AdWords and you get this sale and you can draw a straight line— that is gone, if it ever existed. Now there are multiple ways people interact with your company before they purchase. An example of that is, is a book, right? You wrote a book, I wrote a book. The fact that the book exists, whether someone buys it, reads it, uses it, likes it, doesn't like it, doesn't matter. Just that the book exists affects prospects, right? But there's no way for you to quantify that or know that, right? So, you know, you spend money to print a book, put time and effort to, to create something out there, how do you quantify whether that's a good investment of your time? And this conversation could be applied to anything that you do in marketing, but let's talk specifically about brand. So you're trying to, uh, rebrand, invest in your brand, uh, and trying to decide how much is it worth? How do you go about that?
So there's a lot of— this is, this is like the most— one of the most— probably the most abstract thing in business, right?
Brand.
Yes. Everyone has.
Yes. And let me, let me pause and interject. My marketing director, who's been with me 3 years, from the outset was preaching brand. And I'm like, so as a business owner, I'm dismissive of her. I'm like, You know, that shit is for Coca-Cola. You know, we don't do branding, right? But the reality is, and this is the truth, that every business owner has a brand. Every business owner has a brand. It's kind of like culture. You can't— you have a culture as a business. You have a brand as a business. The question is whether you're being intentional about it or not, right? Okay. So having said that, Yes, it is very nefarious, uh, not nebulous. So it, how do you go about quantifying that?
Yeah. So in, in my efforts to kind of create a baseline, right? The most elegant definition of brand, because brand means something different to everyone. The best definition I've ever heard is brand is simply a memory someone has of your business.
I like that. I, I, I will stipulate that.
It could be a smell, it could be a, you know, a jingle that gets stuck in your head, really annoying. It could be a color, it could be a brand, it could be a word, a logo, whatever, right? So we as branding people, as business owners, want people to remember us. So the question becomes, how do we— what's the most cost-effective way to create that memory? We want to carve out that real estate in that person's brain so that when they see something, when they need something, they remember us. Because we're in there, right? And there are a lot of factors, right? So audio is the most motivating of the senses, right? You never see something and start tapping your foot. And like, you hear stuff, you get your body moving. It's the most, the most motivating. You can get a jingle stuck in someone's head, but the question becomes, how many times do you have to play to get that jingle in front of them? And it becomes a math problem, which is where you and I kind of, kind of, you know, gelled figuring out how we could fill in each other's holes, right? You know, visual, our eyes tell our brain what it's seeing and creates memories faster than anything else. And then you run into, you know, I'm going to be a little edgy to break through the noise. And that edginess becomes, you know, hey, it's really memorable, or I'm offended and I'm not going to remember. So there's all these factors. I'm a creative, so I don't make it a math problem, but I'd love to hear, maybe we can create a workshop as, you know, how, what, here's all the ingredients. Visual is fast, audio is motivational, trendiness or edginess will contribute to this. If you're going after a demographic of seniors, all of a sudden that edginess level goes down. If you're going after, you know, college kids, that edginess level can go up. And there's probably all these slide rules to create a mathematically successful, in conjunction with a creative brand. But I think a majority of us branders, branding people, they go, we go with gut. We're all making an educated decision as to what we think is going to work best.
I had a marketer on the podcast recently and I, I, this is not really revelatory, but the statement is that the reason why marketing is, is really hard to get right is because people behave unpredictably. And we'd like to put them in boxes and say that if we pull this lever, they're going to go up, and if you push this lever, they're going to go down. But they don't, they don't react rationally, right? And so I, I think I don't, I don't want to say it's a fool's errand to, to be able to create a construct that will predict with, with accuracy the return on investment of those things. But I do think that there are principles that can guide you, right? So that you're not wasting money. But at the end of the day, it's very hard to connect the dots. For instance, okay, You said that, uh, you know, audio is the most engaging, which I find fascinating, but I agree with you, while visual is, is processed quicker. So then you, you can take that principle and apply it to your, your process, but I, I think you have to start with some, some fundamental questions like All right, how much is this customer worth to you? Right. What's the lifetime value of that customer? Because that's going to define your economics in a, in a broad scale. Like if that customer is worth $10,000 to you over the lifetime, then you can't spend $11,000. Right. And if you spend close to $10,000, so, you know, $8,000 or $9,000, it's, it's still, you know, it still may make sense. But it's, it's real hard to scale. So you have to understand the lifetime value of your customer, and then you can start looking at, all right, what is the investment that I can make to attract more? And I don't think that fundamental question is asked enough by business owners or marketers.
Yeah, I mean, everybody points to Nike when like, oh, I just want a recognizable logo that, you know, people see it and they think Nike. They don't realize that Nike has 4,200 professional athletes on payroll that receive paycheck every week just to wear Nike, right? So it's not that logo. I mean, it's 4,200 paychecks on top of all the other things that they have. So, you know, I think your question and, landing on budget, good or bad, will demonstrate your success in the overall, in the overall, uh, marketing campaign. So if you don't have a big budget, not a big, not, not a huge deal. But, you know, Chiquita Banana put those stickers on bananas so that everybody knew that was quality. But the first million people that saw those stickers, they didn't even know what it meant. Chiquita Banana had to tell them, this is why you're looking for the sticker, this is what it means. So to have one without the other, you're gonna put stickers on everything and people don't know what the hell it means. You gotta spend that money. So if you don't have the money, maybe that sticker's not the right option for you.
So when you, when you approach a client to discuss their branding and, and you've got that budget question answered, what's the process you go through to determine what, what is the best way to differentiate yourself?
That is, you know, unfortunately going into the analytical side of our creatives, our creative world, that's unfortunately probably the biggest driver of where we take everything, right? So if you have the budget for a Super Bowl commercial, I'm probably gonna move the needle regardless of what I do, right? If you are working on a shoestring budget, I gotta work a little harder, a little smarter, to use a football analogy, I gotta find that hole in the line where nobody's looking and break through and get you a couple yards, right? I can't go head-to-head with everybody and see who comes out on top. So budget is a huge factor. How we decide on, uh, you know, you know, how that factors in, it's a lot of things, right? So if you're going after college kids and it's a small budget, we probably want to try and develop social social posts that are viral, that are gonna give you extra eyeballs because people are more willing to share the content that you create. If you want people to share the content you create, you gotta be as entertaining, if not more entertaining than Netflix that's posting right below you. Right? Now we, now we put ourselves into a creative stratosphere. If you have the budget, maybe it's just a branding and awareness play where you're in more spaces and more places that your competitors are not. So yeah, absolutely a huge ingredient that, like you said, a lot of people just overlook and they just go headfirst into the creative side and then they have this great TV spot, but they have no money to put it on TV. Right.
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Yeah, and, and that's what I love about, about your, your approach and your mindset to this, this problem, is that there, there tends to be, as, as humans, this herd mentality, right? Uh, it, it's, it's the opposite of blue ocean marketing, and it's like, well, everybody's posting on social, so I need to post on social. Everybody's doing XYZ, therefore I need to be doing it. But as you point out, that puts you into a lot more competition. And it's, you know, one of the things that I've had it circulating in the back of my mind for a couple of years, but I'm really thinking about doing it is going to a quarterly printed newsletter. Right. And my thoughts around that are, you know, in talking to my target market, no, they're not consuming any, they're not receiving any. Right. And so I'm the only thing they're going to get. It's not going to get lost in the postings on social media or on my website. And the engagement level of someone reading something that they're physically holding is much higher than the way they're going to consume it, you know, online. And, you know, but then, then you take that to your marketer and they're like, well, I don't know, we don't— we've never done that. It is a risk because, you know, it's not cheap to print and mail. And, you know, you lose a lot that you have in digital because you don't necessarily have an easy direct response. And so your tracking of it may not, you know, be, be real easy, but it goes back to my gut. Like you said, your gut, like it's, it's something that no one else is doing.
Yeah. I mean, it's very funny you bring that up. I started my career 25 years ago in the direct mail industry. And so the internet come along, I'm like, this is going to be the revolution. Direct mail is dead. 25 years later, I'm even more entrenched in the direct mail industry as having this huge resurgence. Why? Because they can— it's almost a guaranteed impression, right? I get you, I get in your mailbox, you're going to touch it, you're going to see it, you're going— even if you throw it out. Compared to digital, where I'm getting all these impressions, who knows who saw it, if they scanned it, they even remember it. So they are now in the business of creating guaranteed impressions, and they're having this huge surge back in business. So it's funny, it's funny, the cycles that you say, why are they having that resurgence? 'Cause everyone's saying, well, nobody's here anymore. No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded, right? So everyone goes here. And yeah, it's very interesting in that mindset. The pioneers will always drive those trends. And I'm sure 5 years from now when we chat, everyone's gonna say, ah, direct mail's too saturated, going back to digital.
Well, Jesse called it, we're going to see a return of vacuum cleaner salespeople. We're gonna have door-to-door.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So let's pivot, uh, and talk about your entrepreneurial journey. What challenges financially— you talked about the pandemic and the impact, uh, maybe, maybe it's that, maybe it's something else, but can you share something about your journey where you had this financial problem? It may not have been devastating, but, and how you, how you processed it, how you overcame it.
Sure, sure. So I think, you know, if I could put on my, my author and my, my theoretical, whatever you want to call it, my philosophical hat, go back into my, my supervillain world.
Yes.
Kind of explain, explain where, where a lot of these parallels come from. So the, according to the Joker from Batman, the only thing that separates him from the rest of us, he says, is one bad day, right? We're all one bad day from creating our own inner supervillain. So he was a normal guy, stand-up comedian. He was doing a job for the mafia, and his wife and his unborn child got killed. Combination of events, that one bad day set him on the path of what he is today. So I, I started thinking, what was, what was my one bad day that led to, uh, led to me flipping the switch? And agency owners, they all have, you know, multiple bad days, but I had created, you know, again, chasing that impossible finish line of being the best, created this incredible agency, only hired the best of the best geniuses and creative geniuses under my watch. And this client came in and he was a whack job, right? Okay.
He was a joker.
He was a joker. He was out of his mind. And payroll was around the corner. And he said, you know, I want to pay you guys to do discovery, right? I have an open checkbook. You know, brought me— to give you an idea of how wacky he is, he insists on paying in multiples of 11. So he would give me in cash $1,111.11, and he would stack those envelopes.
So I'm like, all right, that's a red flag, Jesse. I'm just saying, go ahead.
That is one red flag. Red flag number two is he insisted that every single member of my team sign their own NDA, even though my NDA covered. And on top of that, he wanted to pay everyone for their NDA $111.11. So we're all, you know, we're all rubbing, you know, our eyebrows are up, but we're getting paid. And then we sat there and I have this video of what this presentation is, and I'll likely share it for you and your readers, but it was a batshit presentation. And as I was looking around at my team members and their eyes are rolling in the back of their head, I realized that like we put our refined skill sets, our genius, we're wasting it on unappreciative people. The bump in the banking account felt great, but we got to this point where we're just doing bullshit for money and we kind of felt like sellouts, right? So that was, that was the point where I was like, no more. Like, we need to do something drastic to make sure we're never in this position again to just cater to crazy people, you know, use, use our highly refined skills for nonsense. So that was my, that was my, if you want to call it, you know, a financial realization, my one bad day. But that was, that was the day that, that took the cake.
I think that journey is pretty ubiquitous that, you know, business owners start out with, with some plan to, to help people and they realize that they can't and shouldn't help everyone. But, you know, it, it's, it's a tough lesson to learn. Fortunately, it doesn't sound like that was one that caused you financial problems. I think, you know, it's maybe quicker to learn when that bad experience comes along with a financial pain because you learn it quicker. But I, yeah, I think Knowing that you're not, and it kind of goes along with, with what you're saying with the decommoditized, is, you know, knowing who you can help and who you shouldn't help.
Absolutely. Learning to say no is the hardest lesson that I've had to learn. I know a lot of business owners, because as a service provider, you get endorphins by helping people. And if someone says, you know, I need help with this, and it's kind of something you could help with, it's so hard to say nope. I don't do that. Like you get that endorphin rush by saying like, you know what, I can't help you. Money's nice too.
Yeah. Yes. Saying no is the best skill that you can learn as a service provider. But for me, the way it flipped for me was I realized that I wasn't really helping them. I was really just enabling them. Maybe, you know, or like in your case, you're participating in their fantasy. You know, it's like, I don't want to go over into crazy world and be there with you.
Yeah, I mean, going back to brand, you're creating memories in people's brains. And if you're the guy that like, oh yeah, you know, Christian, he could probably fix it, right? That although it's good, it's taking away from the memory of what Christian is best in the world at, right? So it was like, oh, you have a computer virus? Call my guy Jesse, he works on computers, right? It's not what I do, but that was the memory. That was, you know, I was eroding away the brand that I cultivated as being like just the computer guy, right? Chances are if they heard someone that had, you know, problems becoming a commodity and needed to rebrand, my brand wouldn't come up in their brain because I'm like I'm the local guy that you call when your computer goes bad.
Yeah. And that reminds me of a speaker that we had at that Onward Summit where she talked about personal branding and she said, you know, we all have a guy. We have a, we have a plumbing guy, we have a roofing guy, you know, you know. And the question personally that we all need to answer is What are you remembered for? So like, what— you're the guy for what?
Yeah, I mean, Blair Enns of the Two Bobs Podcast says, you know, if you're having trouble figuring out what you want to be, imagine you're sitting backstage and the announcer goes, ladies and gentlemen, joining us today is the leading expert on blank. Please welcome Christian Brim. What was that blank?
Right. And for me, it's turning passion into profit. I haven't figured out if that completely resonates yet, but it's sticky and it's true. You know, I think one of the kind of going back to what we talked about earlier, one of the hardest problems is getting out of your own head and getting into your customer prospect's head. You know, is that a term that they would use? Is that something they would say? It doesn't always have to be something that they would say because, I mean, branding to me also is about novelty, and maybe you create something new. Uh, you know, it, it, you know, Windex, okay, that word did not exist. Coca-Cola, that word did not exist. All of those words were made up. Um, so maybe it is a made-up word, uh, instead of something that, that, you know, people say. But, you know, when I can say, oh yeah, Jesse's the guy that you want to go to get decommoditized— yeah, maybe they don't know what commoditized is, uh, commoditized is, or maybe they don't know what differentiation is. But, you know, I mean, it, it's, it's at least in my mind something that I know exactly what Jesse's good at.
Yeah. I mean, you take, you take some of the best in the world at boiling it down. You have Saab. They own the word safety. I'm sure there's a lot of shit that their salesmen can talk about their cars and the style and the design. Saab is safety. You want a safe vehicle? That's the first thing that comes to mind. So kind of boiling that down takes an incredible amount of discipline. And, you know, well, I do this and I also do that. I'm good at this too. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
Well, yeah, because everybody wants to not say no, you know? Right.
Yeah.
Our cars are good looking and they're fast and— well, that may be true, but that's not what you— that's what not— I guess that's the thing is, is it feels like limiting yourself when you say that this is the one thing. But it doesn't make those other things go away. Jesse, how do people find your book, one? And then two, you referenced it. I want to go find this graphical universe. I'm envisioning something. I hope it doesn't disappoint.
I think you'll like it. You can get the book anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes Noble. If you go to marketingforsupervillains.com, there is a, what I call the nuclear edition. Where you buy, you buy the book and you get to spend a weekend with me. This is real on a nuclear sub and we rebrand and decommoditize your brand over the weekend and there's only one available. So if you're curious, there's a video on marketingforsupervillains.com.
I love that idea. I've never been on a nuclear sub. That sounds fascinating. Jesse, I really appreciate your time, your insights. Listeners, if you like what you hear, uh, please follow the podcast, share the podcast. Uh, if you don't like what you hear, shoot us a message and, uh, I'll tell Jesse, uh, that we won't have him on the show anymore. Until then, ta-ta for now.
And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers, and don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon. Link below.
