Got superpowers?

As kids (and regardless of age), which of us didn’t at some point secretly want to be some kind of superhero?

Be honest, if you’d have been given superhuman powers such as the ability to fly and have bullets bounce off you, or to be able to run at 1,000 miles per hour while also having the strength of 50 elephants and the ability to see through mountains, would you have passed on the offer?

Probably not. What kid wouldn’t? We ALL have dreams, wants, and aspirations. When I was six, I wanted to be …

an astronaut, and a doctor, and a scientist, and an explorer. I also wanted to be Tarzan.

What about you? What did YOU want to be when you were six?

Yes, we all have dreams when we’re kids. Then, as we age, strange things begin to happen: our childhood dreams and fantasies begin to fade.

Our dreams and fantasies don’t fade because we let them fade (well, not always). No, they fade because we’re told to grow up.

They fade because we’re told to act our age.

They fade because we’re brainwashed into thinking that adults don’t have time for play, that it’s not in our best interests to be fanciful.

Those dreams fade because we should to knuckle down and do what everyone else does (should we? I don’t bloody think so!).

And they fade because we’ve got to be normal and average—devoid of ideas above our station. The cloak of originality is not ours, we’re told, to drape across the shoulders of our destiny that we might grow and blossom, and LIVE. No. We’re hoodwinked into thinking it’s not good to stand out.

So slowly, and whether we like it or not, we’re lured into the sleep of the mundane; we’re enticed into the false reality of proper, normal, everyday life.

We go to school, then perhaps we go to college. Or we join the navy or the army or the air force. We get a job, a home, car payments, marriage, and children. Not that these things are wrong mind you. It’s just that they often replace what might have been.

Before we know where we are, many of us have INDEED become fine upstanding members of society; we’ve become people who play by the rules—but at what cost to us and our hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations?

What many of us fail to recognize, and I think this is particularly true of people starting or running their own businesses, is that many of us do wind up possessing one of the qualities of the superheroes we once wanted to be.

We acquire the ability to become invisible. Unintentionally I’m sure.   But nevertheless, we all too often melt into the background.

Enter, the biggest sin.

The biggest sin of all in marketing is to be boring, to be dull, to fade into the background.

In society, conformity is often drummed or even beaten into us.   But conformity in marketing is death. It creates sameness, dullness, drabness: invisibility. When invisibility kicks in, all goods and services in a given category begin to look the same, sound the same, taste the same, smell the same.

There is nothing—NOTHING, to set them apart, to make them stand out, to make them worthy of note.

What business owners need to understand is that no matter WHAT business they are in, first and foremost, they are in the marketing business.

Their prize—their primary goal—NEEDS TO BE ONE THING: to allow their marketing to do its job; to allow their marketing to position what it is they’re offering and to condition the minds of the people receiving that message so that the whole combined message places users of their website or readers of their direct mail or of their ads in a unique position, a position from which they can easily find exactly the information they’re looking for and the precise solutions to their problems, needs, wants, and desires.

To do this the message cannot be boring. Read that again.

When this wall of drabness is crushed, the business owner is no longer invisible. When they topple that wall the business owner’s marketing becomes superhuman in its ability to leap tall buildings, gain the strength of 50 elephants, and have the bullets of “No!” and “Not interested!” bounce right off it.

Business owners need to grasp and understand the notion and the importance of using originality to gain attention.

When they do this, and when their voice of authority mixes with social proof and clearly explained expert knowledge, their prospect and customer begins to see the business owner not only as being different, but as being somehow significant.

Prospects and customers actually begin liking the “what” and the “who” that they find—they begin to see the business owner as the go to person, and as the expert in their field, positioning that will ultimately lead not only to customer satisfaction, but to the Holy Grail of marketing: customer loyalty.

As 2010 gears up, and as a new decade beckons, begin putting those objects and voices of originality in your marketing: screw invisibility! You? You’re heading for superhuman powers.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Let your marketing be a beacon in the darkness. Let your message be a shining example of excellence. Let your marketing break free.