I remember seeing the famous Dollar Shave Club business “Our Blades are F***ing Great” for the primary time. Someone walked up to my desk and said, “You have gotten to see this.” It’s actually absurd, but that was the purpose. It got the purpose across — “Dollar Shave Club’s razors are higher, cheaper and easier to get than competitors.”
Within two days, Dollar Shave Club had 12,000 orders and crashed their servers. Within three years, they hit $152 million in revenue. In 2016, Unilever bought them for $1 billion.
I didn’t realize it on the time, but I used to be watching the birth of something latest and misunderstood: the eye economy.
Learning the fallacious lesson
After the ad went viral, I saw lots of of copycats. None worked.
To quote Basher from “Ocean’s 13,” “You don’t run the identical gag twice. You do the following gag.” Marketers tried and failed because they learned the fallacious lesson.
Dollar Shave Club’s ad worked because it used novelty to cut through the noise, letting a single, concrete claim hit the viewer. The comedy was only a delivery mechanism.
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Marketing, nevertheless, got a less complicated takeaway — grab attention in any respect costs. Over the following decade, all of the training, tools and incentives tried to do just that, and mostly failed. They lost the second half of the equation — having something credible and beneficial to say once you bought attention. Clearly, that matters greater than most teams realize.
The credibility gap
In the past three months, dozens of individuals have pitched me on writing a book. They use the identical stat of their pitch — that when you’ve “creator” next to your name, it’s easier to get attention out of your audience since the creator title gives you credibility. That scares me.
People hire ghostwriters to buy credibility with their good writing and clear pondering. The existence of so many ghostwriting corporations shows that many individuals and firms recognize that an absence of credibility is an issue. It shows that customers not respond to attention-grabber ads like they used to. It also shows that marketers must prepare for the following “economy” — the trust economy.
You can’t buy credibility
When too many individuals fight for customer attention, and too few have something beneficial to say, marketers double down on buying credibility. But when everyone has “creator,” or some other manufactured title, next to their name, the title becomes meaningless.
You can’t buy credibility. And borrowed credibility doesn’t store well. It expires quickly under scrutiny.
Credibility should be earned through experience. There’s a difference between 10 years of selling experience and one 12 months repeated 10 times.
Attention still matters. Novelty and humor still matter. But the following phase of selling won’t reward eyeballs as much as it will reward those that are still trustworthy once attention is won. That’s a shift most of the marketing teams I’ve worked with aren’t preparing for.
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Here are three rules that marketing teams can use to begin constructing credibility today.
1: Use novelty to make usefulness unmistakable
In 2006, Microsoft partnered with comedian Demetri Martin for the rollout of Windows Vista, its next operating system. The campaign was clever, funny and well-funded. It got great numbers and won awards. It also failed to drive Windows Vista sales, and lots of users opted to stick with Windows XP.
When asked concerning the campaign, people remembered Demetri Martin, but not why Vista was higher than XP. Dollar Shave Club used absurdity to get attention while making a very important point. Novelty was a tool, not the purpose. Microsoft made novelty the goal and forgot that spotlight isn’t the identical as trust. They forgot that sales is the art of getting someone to trust you to solve their painful problems.
2: Never ship a claim you may’t defend in a hostile room
A couple of minutes right into a sales call, a founder said, “Our customer retention is 90%.” I knew it wasn’t true. I’ve reviewed retention data for sub-$10M corporations for years. Numbers like that don’t exist at that stage.
So, I asked how they measured it. There was a pause, then a clarification, then the reality spilled out. Retention was closer to 20%. At that time, the meeting was effectively over. I doubt I used to be the one prospect who walked away that week.
Not since the number was bad. Early-stage SaaS retention is ugly. It’s because their claim couldn’t get up to basic examination. If they’d tried to hide something this fundamental, then what else were they hiding?
That’s how credibility works. You can’t fake it. It’s earned by knowing why something is true, since you’ve stress-tested it against reality. In the credibility economy, every claim gets examined. And those that may’t be defended disqualify you entirely.
3: Don’t pretend certainty you haven’t earned
Last month, I got a LinkedIn message from a child who wasn’t sufficiently old to drink, who promised in no uncertain terms “5 conversations with qualified leads per week with your exact audience.” No context or conditions. Pure bravado. I ignored it.
Regardless of age, anyone who’s tried to book buyer conversations knows how many variables can blow that promise up. Those limits are learned by failing. He hadn’t failed enough yet. Markets are excellent at spotting that mismatch.
He’s removed from alone. Plenty of individuals think that out-promising the competition will construct confidence of their services or products. It does the other. It reduces trust.
The alternative to daring claims isn’t timid ones, it’s credible ones. Credible operators don’t make grand guarantees. They make precise ones. They know precisely what they’ll and may’t do, they usually’re not afraid to share each.
The coming correction
This is an uncomfortable time for marketing. I see teams who’re excellent at getting seen, but increasingly bad at being believed. They’re optimized for attention while ignoring the credibility they’ll need when people stop believing every claim they hear. That shift is already happening.
Buyers are making fewer impulsive decisions. Sales cycles are longer and more thorough. Messaging that used to convert doesn’t because it isn’t credible.
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When markets tighten up and capital gets cautious, the margin for error disappears. Every purchase decision is vetted as if someone’s profession is at stake, because it probably is. Brands that may’t explain where, when and why they’re right are quietly and immediately disqualified.
The teams that win in the long run won’t do it by being louder than everyone else. They’ll do it because their claims survive under a microscope. Because they know attention will be rented, but credibility should be earned.
When the market moves from rewarding attention to demanding credibility, will how to construct it? Or have you ever been focused on attention for therefore long that you simply’re not even sure where to start?
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