This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

 CHAPTER SIX 
Beyond Commodities
Problem first
Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution, with the thing that makes
them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we
seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.
There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a
welcome change happen. Not a tactical change. Not a quarter-inch hole, or
even a quarter-inch drill bit. No, we can change someone on an emotional
level.
Our calling is to make a difference. A chance to make things better for
those we seek to serve.
Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way that they need (or
want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that,
not for your own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.
Does it work?
In 1906, the precursor of the FDA was formed to combat products that were
fundamentally dangerous. Anger about products like Berry’s Freckle
Ointment, a cosmetic that was quite likely to make you sick, or LashLure,
which caused more than a dozen forms of blindness, moved the government
to act.
As much as fifty years later, product quality was still a crapshoot. Who
knew when your car was going to break down?
Today we take it all for granted. FedEx actually does deliver more than
99 percent of its packages on time. Cars don’t spontaneously break.

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Makeup doesn’t often cause blindness. Your web browser rarely crashes,
the electricity almost never goes out, and air travel has never been safer.
And yet we still talk about being very good at our craft as if it’s some
sort of bizarre exception.
Plenty of people are good at what you do. Very good at it. Perhaps as
good at it as you are.
Full credit for the work you’ve done and the skill you possess. But it’s
not enough.
Quality, the quality of meeting specifications, is required but no longer
sufficient.
If you can’t deliver quality yet, this book isn’t much help to you. If you
can, great, congratulations. Now, let’s set that aside for a minute and
remember that nearly everyone else can too.