Joel: Let's start with Rick just blurting out a stream of consciousness view of the difference between talking to everyone versus talking to One.
Rick: I was raised as we all were on the idea of the hit being the goal. You're always trying to become the hit where you're filled to the maximum, where you grow your business as large as you can. That's the ultimate goal that's presented to us.
To do so you have to appeal to everyone. But to get there you have to sand off a lot of edges and make stuff rather average to appeal to so many people.
Talking to everyone was effective when I grew up because you could certainly buy enough air time or enough advertising. There's much more choice than there ever was and a huge number of places consumers can go to be distracted now. The challenge to anyone growing a business is, how do you talk to everyone?
What I've found in my own business is that you really can't effectively. We tried a number of campaigns in the past ten years and essentially none of them ever really worked.
My sample size is not just one. When you wow them and delight them, make them feel they are the only person in the universe at that point, they are much more liable to refer other people.
As a scientifically trained person I'm not going to reject the information that's staring me in the face. I see nearly every marketing campaign around me is expensive and failing, yet everything we do that involves very little money but is emotionally engaging is working.
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