Last week, I was walking by someone’s office here at work. They were in their office with a client and the door was open just a crack. As I walked by, I noticed that the client was sitting in my co-worker’s chair and she had just pulled up a not-nearly-as-comfortable stackable chair.
That was a powerful picture that I haven’t been able to shake.
It was powerful because of the subtlety. Something that I’d guess many of us would never think to do, or as a client, think to expect. But when someone does something like that, it turns the experience on it’s head.
I love that.
I love it in terms of being a person who wants to serve others well, but I also love it in terms of good advertising.
As you’ve probably heard me say before on this blog, I’m a big believer that the foundation of good advertising is that your product or your service is actually great; that it fills a need and does so in some unique and meaningful way. Presuming you have that, the next question I think that you need to ask yourself is, how do I give up my chair in terms of my product or service?
By that I mean, what are the presumptions about how my product or service are delivered that we can take and turn on their head in order to really cause people to stop in their tracks? It takes asking yourself these two questions:
- What are the things that we do or make that we simply presume should be done or made a specific way, but we’ve never challenged those preconceptions?
- How can we turn those things on their heads in order to serve our customers better and make a mark for ourselves?
Then, ‘give up your seat’. Do things differently. Stand up and stand out in a way that no one else will because they’re still caught up in ‘how they’ve always done it’.
