Dan Kennedy explains why businesses need to pick one marketing focus: product, market, or customer. Product-focused companies like Invisalign and Pocket Hose tend to fade fast. Kennedy argues for organized effort and accurate thinking as the real foundation of sustainable strategy.
And so product focus sometimes makes sense, but it is almost always a short lived money making phenomenon because patents are easily circumvented, copyrights are easily circumvented. As soon as there's a big success with the smart hose that is this big and when you turn the water on, it uncoils itself, and when you turn water off, it coils itself back up. Well, that's pretty cool. And you can understand being product focused, but how many of them are there now? Five? Yeah, right. And they're eating away at each other and they're forcing more bonuses and price discounting. And you can find it on the shelf now because enough direct response advertising has caused people to actually look for one. And so the original pocket hose is nowhere near the asset it was in its third year that it was in its first year. This is so it's a very vulnerable way to operate.
Hello and welcome to this month's masterclass. My name's Darcy Waresk and I am here with Dan Kennedy. And this class is going to be interesting to people who are relatively new to our world and to our seasoned pros because we're going to be looking at marketing from a different perspective than we usually do. We're going to look at its focus. And a definition of focus is center of interest. So this is really about the center of a business, of the business's marketing and everything that it hooks to.
So most businesses marketing actually doesn't even have one. Right. It's unfocused to the point of random and erratic, which tends to get random and erratic results, as it should. So good marketing has a center, a focus and anchor, and it gets there by a sequence of decisions. So I often tell people that if you were pressed and you could only have one thing to pay attention to to grow your business and to succeed, you could stop listening to us, really, anybody else, and keep returning to the seventeen laws in Napoleon Hill's Laws of Success because they can be applied to advertising, to marketing, to selling, to management. And probably the most important one is accurate thinking. But then the second most important one is organized effort and the emphasis on organized. Because there's a lot of people who are poor and a lot of people who struggle, who put in a lot of effort. Right. And there's a lot of businesses that have a lot of advertising and marketing, but it's disorganized. So there's a sequence of decisions to go through to kind of get organized. Right. And it starts with deciding which focus you are going to use as the Primary focus of all of your marketing, what is it going to be? Okay, what is it going to be about? There are, there are three ways you can go. You can have a product focused business, so everything revolves around the product or service that you sell. Or you can have a market focused business, so everything revolves around the target audience to whom it is being sold. Or third, you can have a customer focused business which everything revolves around the person, the avatar person, who is your customer. The most commonly used and defaulted to one is product focused. And. People just naturally want to focus on the thing they have to sell, right? If you think about the dental world, when it became available and Invisalign became a thing, every orthodontist wanted to talk about. Invisalign and it's virtues. And so it's natural to fall into this trap, right? Uh, but the, the first of all, the very fact that that's the most commonly used approach tells you it probably shouldn't be yours, right? Secondly, it tends to be price commoditizing. The more you're focused on the product, the more you're vulnerable to what may happen to that product. Invisalign, what happened to it? It started where only orthodontists could do it. Then they let Dennis do it, and then various versions of it went direct to consumer. And what happened to its price? You cut a zero off of it, right? It was a $5,000 product, now it's a $500 product, right? Same thing happened with, with other dentists, healthcare examples, Botox even. And that will happen. So unless you're in the like the toilet paper business, you gotta think long and hard about whether you want to be product focused. You can't you see it better used when there is genuinely an incredibly different version of a commodity. And so product focus sometimes makes sense, but it is almost always a short lived money making phenomena because patents are easily circumvented, copyrights are easily circumvented. And so as soon as there's a big success with the smart hose, right, that is this big. And when you turn the water on, it uncoils itself. And when you turn the water off, it coils itself back up. Well, that's pretty cool. And you can understand being product focused, but how many of them are there now? 5. And they're eating away at each other and they're forcing more bonuses and price discounting. And you can find it on the shelf now because enough direct response advertising has caused people to actually look for one, right? And so the original pocket hose is nowhere near the asset it was in its third year that it was in its first year. This is so it's a very vulnerable way to operate. And in a tight economy, it has the further disadvantage of being price commoditized in a big giant race to the bottom.
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