Donald Miller (27:02)
I am known for creating clear messages and I'm known that way because for seven or eight years now I've talked about it endlessly, Endlessly. It's almost all I'll talk about. If you put a camera on me, right? If I'm walking down the street and the news comes up says, man, what do you think of this snowstorm coming? Are you prepared? I'll say, yeah, I'm prepared for the snowstorm because I clarified my message and it's really important that you clarify your message. So call me. My name is Don Miller. I can help you clarify your message. Good luck with the snowstorm. I mean, I'm just like, I got my sound bites down and I repeat them over and over and I don't care who I'm talking to. And that's how you do it. Every good marketing effort is an exercise in memorization. And what I mean by that is once you have your sound bites down, you need to say them so clearly, so effectively and repeat them so often that everybody you talk to can memorize them and repeat them back to you. You don't need to use different kind of language. You know, I remember going and visiting a presidential candidate. Presidential candidate was the frontrunner in the presidential election. This is probably, oh gosh, eight years ago, more than eight years ago, frontrunner in the presidential election, in the primaries. And he was losing ground, he was losing ground to the other primary candidates. They were all starting to pass him up. He had $112 million in his super PAC. He had $14 million in the general campaign fund. And they called me and they said, why are we literally diving in the polls when we have all this money, we have all this brand awareness? And I said, you got to come up with sound bites and repeat them. And his team literally said to me, I, our candidate won't do that. He's a scholar, he wants to be in town hall answering questions honestly. He will not repeat soundbites. He's not a fake, inauthentic guy. And I said, well, you have to understand, if that's true, your candidate will never be president. Never. It will never, ever happen. Because not a single voter is sitting there pouring a glass of scotch, trying to study the nuance of your candidate. In fact, it's an incredibly arrogant thing for him to not serve the voter by simplifying his message. It's very narcissistic. I'm not going to simplify my message. I am so important that you need to sit down and spend hours trying to understand what I can do for you. How cocky and arrogant is that? You can't do that as a business owner. Don't expect people just to sit down and try. Let's come up with some beautiful, short sound bites that you can repeat and serve them by not making them think. It's the altruistic thing to do. It's the kind thing to do, and it's what you're going to do. And it's also going to be incredibly, incredibly effective for you. Okay? Don't be vague and don't be about too many things. If your brand is about too many things, that's great. Now listen, if your brand is about too many things, you need to come up with one umbrella thing that you're all about. My friend Dave Ramsey works down the street. He's known for financial peace. He's going to help you achieve financial peace. Let me just tell you what you already know about Dave Ramsey. He wants you to have financial peace. He's against debt. So now we know what he's for and what he's against. And we know that because he's on a radio show every day, we repeating it. And he's been repeating it for 25 years. And he never changes his message. And he makes about $300 million a year with that message. And you can do the same thing. What is the one thing that your brand offers? It doesn't mean you can only sell one product, but all the products that you sell need to help deliver on that one promise. Whether it's better sleep, more peace, better community, better health, better plunger to unclog your toilet. Quicker, better cat litter. You know, my wife and daughter, who I love more than any two people I've ever known in my entire life, lobbied me for close to a year to get a cat. And I thought, guys, we have a dog. We can't add a cat. But they, like some women are capable of doing, melted me down until I gave in. And now we have two cats and a dog. That's how much of a backbone I have against these ladies. I've actually just fallen in love with these cats. But what I noticed the other day is I was changing the cat litter. Listen to me. I never wanted a cat. Now I'm changing cat litter. That cat litter is really heavy. I mean, it's. I'm like, you got to be kidding me. It comes from Amazon, sits on my front porch. I lift it up like, this is like 40 pounds of cat litter. I take it into the laundry room. I change cat litter. I see an ad, and the ad says, tired of heavy cat litter. Our cat litter doesn't weigh very much. And I thought, brilliant. That is a brilliant ad. And it is aimed directly at me and directly at somebody who had experienced that problem. Does that make sense? They didn't lead with our cat litter name is this. And our brand colors are this. What they led with was, if you have experienced this problem, we have solved it. So buy our cat litter. And you know what we did? We bought their cat litter. I don't even know the name of the brand, but I know the problem that they solve. And because I had that problem, I bought their product. You have been hiding your marketing and messaging strategy. You've been hiding the gold. You've been hiding the hook that catches the fish. The hook that catches the fish is the problem. So now that we've identified what our customer wants and we're not being vague and we're not listing too many things, we've got to define a problem that they are struggling with. That's the next part of the framework.
