Mark Levy – LEVY INNOVATION

Look At Your Business As If It Were a Book

Coming up with a persuasive marketplace differentiator for your business can be difficult.

One reason why: Since your business is your livelihood, creating its differentiator seems like a life-or-death decision. You tense up, thinking: “This differentiator of mine has got to be a one-of-a-kind, revenue-generating winner. Otherwise, I’m sunk.”

Trying to complete such an overwhelming exercise naturally shuts you down. The differentiator you come up with is weak. Or, you leave the exercise with no differentiator at all. What to do?

In the past decade and a half, I’ve created differentiators by the hundreds. One of my secrets: I play with how I see a client’s business. I look at it in different ways.

I even pretend that my client’s business isn’t a business at all. Instead, I pretend it’s a book.

Whether you realize it or not, your business is indeed a lot like a book.

Like a book, it has a main idea. It’s “about” something. That main idea may be sharp and distinct, or it may be broad and commoditized. It may be easy for people to talk about, or it may be fighting with other ideas, so talking about it is hard.

As I study a business, I think, “Right now, what’s the main idea here, and what are all the pieces of philosophy, facts, and stories substantiating that idea? If this business had a table of contents, what would the chapters be called and in what order would they fall?”

While I’m examining things, I look for storylines that are buried, or that hadn’t been thought of before. I ask myself, “If this new storyline were brought to the fore, how would that change everything? Who would be the readers for this new ‘book’? What would they be buying? How would they talk about it to friends?”

Consider trying this exercise for yourself.

Pretend your business is a book. Into which category would it fit? What would be its title? What about its main idea? Could you tweak that idea to make it stronger? Could you change the book’s meaning by moving a subordinate idea up front? Could you combine a series of subordinate ideas into something new and valuable? What would its cover look like?

Keep playing with the “book of your business” until you have a much stronger book than when you began.

Consider, then, how you could incorporate these rewrites into real life.

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Is Your Brand Intentional or Unintentional?

In my last post, “Make Your Elevator Speech Distinctive,” I said I’ve become known as “the guy who helps his clients raise their fees by up to 2,000%.” That’s true. People refer to me as the 2,000% guy all the time.

It’s important to note, though, that my 2,000% “brand” or “promise” had to be invented. That is, I had to dig through my projects and study the facts, after which I discovered this result I’d been producing but hadn’t been advertising. If I hadn’t dug, the market wasn’t going to come up with that fee-raising benefit on its own.

You could call my 2,000% moniker a feat of intentional branding. I manufactured it, and pushed it out there through my materials, networking, workshops, and speeches.

At times, though, I’m not sure we have to work so hard coming up with a brand. Sometimes a brand finds us. Call it unintentional branding. I have a story about that kind of branding, too.

I wrote the first edition of my problem-solving book, “Accidental Genius,” ten years ago. At the time, I was 37 years old, and let me tell you: For the first 37 years of my life, no one ever called me a genius. Not once. Enthusiastic, yes. Creative, yes. Funny, yes. A genius? No.

When “Accidental Genius” was released, that changed. Suddenly, people were calling me a genius right and left. Since the book came out, I must have been called by that name five hundred times.

Understand, I’m not knocking it. Every time I’m called a genius, I’m grateful. But here’s the thing: In the ten years since that book came out, I’m no smarter than I was the previous 37. If anything, I’m not as bright as I once was.

The word, though, became associated with me through repetition. 25,000 copies of my book were sold with my name and the word genius on the cover. I gave speeches where I talked about ways of accessing your genius. I did dozens of interviews where I talked about how people could have “a genius moment.” The association was unintentional, but it stuck.

My questions to you, then are these:

What happy branding accidents have happened in your career?
How have you been tagged by your audience in ways you didn’t expect?
Is there a brand growing around you that you’ve been ignoring or resisting?