Episode Description:
This episode is all about keeping your business relevant. By looking at case studies of people like Snoop Dogg, Jay Leno, or Carlos Santana we can learn how to apply their success in keeping relevant to YOUR business!
Action you can take right now:
- Start writing down a list of things you can do to BE and STAY relevant. Can you create relevant content? Can your partner with relative people or businesses in your field? Can you be a thought leader?
- Think about your top demographics of your business. For example, if you cater to an older audience, like retirees over 65 – is there anyway you can introduce a product or service to draw in a slightly younger audience that can help funnel people into your business as they grow into the perfect target?
Episode After-Thoughts:
I’m writing this after watching the Super Bowl. At the time of recording this episode I wasn’t aware Snoop Dogg would be a feature in the half-time show. It was instant concurrence of what I discussed in this episode about remaining relevant. Here are musical artists from the 90’s, now reviving a group for the sake of nostalgia, but still artists at the top of their game – leading the way for a future generation of musicians. Regardless if you are entertained by Snoop Dogg, and regardless if you like his music or not, you can’t underestimate the power of his brand (along with Dr. Dre!). Let’s not forget Dr. Dre isn’t just a musician, but was able to sell his headphone company for $1billion to Apple!
Episode 42 Transcript
How do you maintain relevancy in your business? Are you the most relevant that you’ve ever been at this very moment? That more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast?
Justin Varuzzo here from the marketing and service.com podcast the podcast to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships.
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So on today’s episode, I want to talk a little bit about marketing, business and relevancy, and it’ll be kind of funny.
What made me think of this but a few years ago I heard an interview with Snoop Dogg and he’s suggested in this interview that he was coming up with all these wild partnerships because he knew he was getting.
Older, but he wanted to maintain his relevancy in pop culture.
He knew that if he just kind of went away, he would quickly be forgotten and he strategically decided to partner with people you would never expect them to.
Partner with and he wanted to continue to connect with alternative audiences.
Maybe ones that were not his music fans at the time, and it’s obviously clearly paid off.
Snoop Dogg is still very relevant in today’s pop culture.
Another example of this is Carlos Santana.
He partnered with a ton of younger musicians.
And by doing this, it allowed him to maintain his relevancy to yet another generation. So what actually struck me was that I was listening to Mike Rowe’s podcast and he was interviewing Jay Leno.
Now, Jay Leno hasn’t been on The Tonight Show for almost 10 years now, and Jay shared the story on Mike podcast about how he feels that he has become irrelevant.
There’s an entire generation of people who watch The Tonight Show who have no idea who Jay Leno is, and his goal now is to go back to the comedy clubs and he proves himself.
Two young comedians that he is a funny, relevant person and he’s really been enjoying the challenge so it’s interesting to see Snoop Dogg, Carlos Santana and Jay Leno 3 very successful people in there.
Own right at an older age, still trying to maintain relevancy and I think to myself, how does this play in business?
How does this play in marketing and what these three people recognize is, regardless of their past success, financial comfort, or whatever they want to remain.
Relevant, I think businesses can.
Learn from this.
A perfect example of this is if you’ve ever gone into an old store and there’s dust on some products and nothing has changed there since your parents used to shop there 20 years ago.
There’s faded product in the window display from years of the sun beaming in on it.
This is a perfect example of a business that’s become irrelevant and.
I’m sure, as I said, that you could paint a picture in your head of one or more businesses that you are familiar.
That are in that situation, and one of the reasons they’re in that situation is because they fail to remain relevant.
And even though your parents may still enjoy shopping there and their comfort zone and what they’re used to you realize, hey this this is pretty lame.
Like I, I really want to, I really want to shop somewhere a little more hip so to understand.
All of this about, uh, relevancy.
I think the first thing you have to understand that there’s a refusal to accept change for a lot of people.
It’s very common.
I think it’s part of human basic psychology.
I mean, I’m I’m.
No psychiatrist, but I.
I think it’s pretty obvious that most people are pretty resistant to change.
And the reason is because it’s not easy.
It’s tough.
It’s difficult.
It goes against human psychology.
We look for comfort.
We look for consistency and change goes against that and justice know though that if you take that approach to business, you are incredibly likely to fail in the long term.
And if you want to ensure.
Long term success, it’s going to involve having to make some big changes.
I think COVID has been the most prime example of something that’s come about and has forced.
Tons and tons of businesses to make significant changes that maybe they thought about making in the past and they were too afraid to make or changes that they didn’t think they could afford to make.
But now they did it and they realize that maybe they’re better off for having done it.
And maybe they wish they had done it sooner, but it’s a very common thing right now.
So my first piece of advice here is challenge yourself to change something.
In your business.
Or challenge yourself to change something in how you do business or how you do your marketing or how you might do your advertising or promotion.
But just think about what’s one thing that maybe you’ve been doing and it feels like it’s been very successful.
So why do you want to mess with a formula that’s successful?
Well, how do you know there’s not another formula?
That will be more successful.
I recently had a guest on the show you may have heard the episode and we were discussing the sales process and I said, well maybe this person gets into this sales routine and they close one in 10 sales and they say hey, that’s great it works.
That’s my pitch.
I’m sticking with it because I know one in 10 I’m going to close every time.
But a better salesperson or the top performing salesperson?
They might be closing five out of 10 sales or six out of 10 sales, and they may even be willing to write out this success playbook for you.
I mean, this is something businesses do, big businesses.
They make playbooks what works and what doesn’t.
And if you’re stuck in your ways, you’re going to miss.
Out, and that’s why you’re not the top performing salesperson in your organization.
So think about what’s something that you can change.
Maybe you switch up a little bit of ad copy.
Maybe you just reorganize a single page on your website.
Maybe just take your front page and say what elements can I move around here and maybe bring something up.
But I think is less important, but let me put it at the top and see if it actually is relevant to my shoppers.
Try if you have a physical place, move some product around in the store.
It literally just shuffle the layout just to give a fresh look while you do it.
Make sure you dust things and if you have anything that’s faded because it’s been sitting in the sun, put that somewhere else and put some fresh product out there so it doesn’t look like an.
Old store, maybe try connecting with customers or prospects in a different way.
What is your typical way of closing sales?
Maybe you normally do zoom meetings.
Maybe you normally do conference calls.
Maybe you’re someone who’s doing in person sales.
Maybe you’re doing phone sales, maybe you do it through email.
I mean, there’s so many ways to do sales, but think about.
Is there a different way you can switch it up?
You don’t know if you don’t try, but you do have to know what is your current success rate because of course with everything in business you want to be data driven.
You want to make sure that the data is saying that what you do or what you change is having a positive impact on your bottom line.
I think a second biggest cause of business is becoming irrelevant.
Is stubbornness maybe you want to try, but you don’t want to learn or you’re scared to learn.
You might see something.
Say I want to give that a shot.
Maybe here’s something in.
This podcast says that sounds good.
I want I want to try that, but then you don’t really actually want to sit down and learn about that or you’re scared to learn it, or you think if you learn it, you might screw it up.
That’s a very common thing too, and this again comes down to this kind of basic human psychology.
You really have to get over this and not be stubborn about this.
Again, a comfort zone is perfectly normal.
It is really hard to overcome, especially if you are successful, but I will give you this one if you want to talk about incredibly successful.
Organizations that failed because they were stuck in the way you need look no further than BlackBerry.
I mean, I was a crackberry addict to the Mac.
And they were the biggest cell phone company on the planet.
I mean they had such a tremendous market share and they built it so quickly and they lost it almost as fast.
And when they tried to finally make change and finally adapt to the landscape of cell phones, it was just too little, too late they fell.
Too far behind and they just couldn’t catch up and we all know that now BlackBerry is out of business.
But to be that big of a company and be able to fall that quickly just because one other company was willing to go a little bit out of their way to make something a little bit out of the ordinary, which of course was the iPhone.
But it’s a great example of how a company that was stubborn who said no one’s going to use this iPhone. It’s stupid, it’s gimmicky. Half this stuff probably doesn’t work.
Well, they were wrong, and instead of looking at and saying wow, how can we make this better and do it faster and fail for?
They just failed it back and it was devastating for their organization.
Another thing we see, you probably have a really nice gas station in your neighborhood that opened 20 years ago and it was beautiful when it first opened and hasn’t changed one bit ever since.
And now there’s a new gas station in town.
It’s the new shiny one across the street, and you find yourself going to that one now because.
It’s clean and shiny, and the old one is dirty and faded, and the paint’s fallen off the.
That’s just another example.
That’s a business that had gotten comfortable and they just didn’t want to make the change, or they didn’t want to make the investment for that change.
But now, not only do they have a competitor directly across the street, but that competitor has a significantly better environment to shop in, so they’re not just competing apples to apples.
Now it’s apples to bananas, and they have to catch up.
Significantly now to compete, they basically have to renovate the entire store from top to bottom to be able to compete in this new market.
So that’s something to keep in mind if you make these little changes over time, it’s a lot easier than trying to make them all at once when thinking about these changes that you might want to make slowly, a great tool is to use a SWOT analysis, right?
You want to analyze the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats that are present in your business.
You really.
So in this case we want to focus on weaknesses and threats because this is where complacency will really come back to bite you.
So really list out all of the things that you think could be a threat to your business.
If a competitor opened across the street with a brand new beautiful building, would that be a threat to your business?
If a competitor put up a brand new website that had some really cool new tools on it, would that be a threat to your web business?
If you had a sales office open across the street selling exactly the same product you are selling, are you going to be threatened because of either the environment of your office or the way that you choose to do business?
Maybe is not the way that.
Customers are looking to do it anymore.
For example, maybe you refuse to.
Do texting but a lot of people, especially younger people.
They only want to text, so if you’re in sales and you say I’m not doing texts, I don’t want to deal with that, you’re probably in the long run going to become irrelevant because you’re not staying on top of the trends that are happening right now.
The goal here is to hedge yourself against these threats and to improve your weaknesses.
So they’re not weaknesses anymore.
The last one that I’m going to throw in here too.
This is going to be a shorter episode because I don’t want to get too much into the science behind a lot of this stuff because.
Quite frankly, there’s a lot of ways that you can approach this.
There’s a lot of threats.
There’s a lot of weaknesses, and there’s a lot of ways you can become irrelevant, and I can give examples and case studies all day long, but that’s not going to actually help you.
I’m just putting the idea out here so you can help yourself, but the third element here that I think is incredibly important and this has come up.
Over and over again in all sorts of different contexts, and this is yet another new context, but pay attention to your demo.
Traffic, who is your demographic right?
We always say how important this is for targeting and for your marketing efforts and for saving dollars and making the most out of what you spend.
But the reality is, who is your demographic can also indicate whether you’re becoming irrelevant or not, and it’s important for so many reasons and.
Without question we know it’s the most important element for any marketing or advertising, but is your demographic growing with you?
And I don’t mean growing isn’t getting bigger or wider.
I mean literally aging with you.
Are you serving the same demographic at 40 that you were serving at 30 or 20?
And now you’re serving people who are 30 and 40.
What that means is, again, you’re becoming irrelevant to a younger generation.
I know a lot of people are now working at the same company for 20 years.
But you get my point.
If you’re serving customers or if you have a business that’s serving a specific demographic, you really shouldn’t be aging.
That demographic.
That demographic should constant.
Be refreshing itself with a younger generation.
Otherwise what happens as a great case study, you become old spice right for a long time.
Certainly in the late 80s and 90s, and even probably early 2000s, Old Spice was what my father used to use. That was something I would never consider using.
In this case, old Spice obviously owned by P&G, they’re megacorporation.
And probably one of the most astute marketing firms on the planet when it comes to getting their message out and changing behavior.
But they realized this that their brand was dead, and that old Spice was associated with old people and old smells, and they wanted to make it young and fresh again, and they spent a lot of money.
On marketing to make that brand relevant again and it was incredibly successful.
Now they got lucky because they were part of a portfolio of many many, many brands in a similar space.
It wasn’t like BlackBerry where all their eggs were in one batch.
P&G could afford to take some time and really do it right and try to revive that brand.
And if it failed, it wasn’t the end of P&G, it just would have been the end of Old spice.
So that’s an example of a company that really became irrelevant.
And trust me, it was a mistake.
It was a demonstration that if management at Old Spice.
Realized they were becoming irrelevant and realized that the average age of their user was increasing year after year, decade after decade.
They could have probably taken a much more proactive approach to connect with younger audiences without having to spend the ridiculous amount of money that they’ve spent on marketing and trying to reboot that brand.
Now again, they’ve been very successful doing that, and I give them a lot of credit, but I think they would probably admit if we were interviewing them that.
They wish that they had done it sooner and that they had done it more often so they didn’t have to tackle such a huge project all at.
Collaboration is another thing that can really help become relevant, and that’s kind of what we started with.
I think the three artists that we talked about upfront most of their efforts in staying relevant involved collaboration and this is another theme we’ve discussed in the podcast quite a few times.
Is that you don’t necessarily have to be afraid of anyone in your space or.
Sara Lee competitors.
It might be a good time to embrace.
Is there a brand or is there a business that does something similar to you that maybe doesn’t directly compete with one another, but where you can reach out and do some type of brand partnership or mutual marketing promotion where you guys can enjoy each other?
Audiences, right?
So if you have a business that you are familiar with that serves a younger audience, but you both have a product.
That is comparable or equivalent, but don’t directly compete with one another.
Maybe it’s worth marketing with them and you can say hey, listen, we know you’ve got this young hip audience.
We can expand and offer you a little bit of our audience, and vice versa.
We want the opportunity to connect with some of your audience.
I mean, there’s again, there’s infinite ways this can happen, but.
Collaboration is exactly what Snoop Dogg did.
Collaboration is exactly what Carlos Santana did and it was.
Very very successful for both of them and it still is successful today for both of them, so keep that collaboration in mind when you are thinking about how you’re going to remain relevant over the next 10 or 20 years.
We briefly discussed competition when talking about collaboration, but really think and.
Analyze your competition.
Do you have competition that’s attracting a different audience?
You do look at them very carefully and try to figure out what they are doing to do so, and then do that same thing Now again, I used an aging audience as an example, but it doesn’t have to be that it can literally be any other competing demographic that is relevant to your business that you are missing out on.
Just because you were only focused on a particular.
Demographic that maybe you successfully acquire.
Weird, but you have failed to acquire or fail to recognize that there could be other demographics that your business could serve very well.
So just keep that in the back of your mind.
Another important thing is don’t forget about your current customers.
This happens so much we forget about current customers when we do email campaigns, you forget about current customers when you’re trying to.
Develop advertising and marketing strategies.
You’re always trying to bring in new customers so often.
And it’s easy to forget about your existing customers, but what’s very important to stay relevant is to be relevant to your customers.
So when you create campaigns, think of things that you can do to create value to your existing customers.
Think about things you can do to really prolong or refresh that sales funnel.
Or that product lifecycle for that customer.
So if you have existing customers you’ve helped before, think about what can you do to continue to foster those relationship.
And again, there’s a lot of possibilities here, and I can’t get into it without knowing what business you are in specifically, but just know that it is really important and it’s something you want to be thinking about all of the time is how can you deliver value to your existing customer database.
One last thing I’ll mention is it’s possible that you could.
Potentially utilize your own staff to reach an audience.
Survey your own staff.
If you’ve got young people on your staff and you’re looking to connect with a younger Audie.
Ask for some advice.
Ask for some thoughts.
Ask for some feedback, and assure them that you will not be offended, but keep that in mind.
That’s something you want to do.
You want to make sure that you understand the alternative audiences in which you are seeking.
And again, one way you can do that, especially the larger the staff you have there.
Easier, this is especially if you have a diverse group.
It will be very easy.
You can pick out different subsets and think how can I better connect with people similar to you?
Or do you see any opportunities here where you think we might be able to better connect with people of either?
Maybe your age group or your income bracket, whatever the demographic.
Maybe this is an exercise that is probably.
Worthwhile, worst case scenario, they say everything you’re doing is great, and that’s fine.
Then maybe it is you’re doing a great.
Job or best case, you get one really good idea that turns into something very special.
Listen, I appreciate you listening today.
My name is Justin varuzzo. This is the marketing and service.com podcast. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, follow, come.
Check out the marketing service.com Facebook page and you can send me an email Justin at marketing and service.
Com I do read them all.. Look forward to hearing about what challenges you are facing and what topics you might want to hear about.
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We’ll catch you on the next one.