In this monologue, Mike Michalowicz argues that most marketing goes unnoticed because consumers treat it like junk mail, discarding it subconsciously. He illustrates this with a case study of a photography association that traditionally used standard postcards to promote seasonal portrait services. To break the habituation, they mailed empty picture frames to members, accompanied by a brief message about cherished photos and contact information. The unexpected, empty-frame mailer captured attention, leading to a dramatic increase in demand for the photographer’s services. Michalowicz uses this example to emphasize that effective marketing must be different, leveraging surprise and reversal of expectations to stand out.
The best marketing, of course, is marketing that gets noticed. Yet how unnoticeable is most marketing? You already know this. Next time you go to your mailbox, see how quickly you just throw out the junk mail without even considering it. It's almost subconscious. Well, your customers are responding the same way to your marketing. If your marketing is like everyone else's, it's just junk mail. You got to do different. Here's one tip. I was working with the Photography association, and they have 5,000 members in their organization. I surveyed them to ask them how do they market. They effectively compete with each other. Collectively. I think there was four, maybe five ideas. We send out postcards. We do email campaigns. We put up our gallery on our window in our retail store. So. So my response is, okay, that's always not to market because the consumer has become habituated to it, subconsciously discarding it. So we decided to do something different. And one strategy to doing different is you take an established approach and you just flip it on its end. So postcards was the most common mailer of portraits. Hey, it's the season again. Graduations are coming. We'll do the portraits. It's the fall season or it's the holiday season. And they would mail out these postcards with portraits. So what did we do? We mailed out empty frames during the season. Literally an empty frame. Imagine that appearing in your mailbox. You get this little box with an empty frame, and you open it up, and there was not a single picture in it, but there were words. And it said, almost every picture goes into the cloud, but the ones you cherish, they go into frames. We create the ones you will cherish. And they had their contact information there. Well, guess what? That photographer's business skyrocketed in demand because they did marketing differently. Do the same for your business.
