✊ 5 Commodity signals that are devaluing your work
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Hi friends, This week, we’ve been exploring your podcast’s role in decommoditizing yourself in the eyes of your market. The goal: Instill the belief in your future buyers that your work is not only the best option for them, but worth standing in line and paying a premium for. The logic: If you can build a waitlist around premium prices, you unlock the ability to add significantly more time, profit, and creative margin into your business. But to do so, you need to demonstrate to the market what makes you and your work worth lining up and paying extra for. As a recap, to this point in the series, we’ve talked through:
Today we’re going to wrap things up by taking a closer look at a handful of Commodity Signals. Ie. Audience-facing touchpoints that unwittingly signal that your show and brand are generic, undifferentiated, and not worth paying a second look… much less a premium to engage with. We’ll break these Commodity Signals down in a minute, but first, let’s talk about why this matters. We all know first impressions carry enormous weight. A bad first impression digs us a hole we must now work long and hard to dig ourselves out of. A good first impression builds us a pedestal we must work to lose our place on. In other words, our first impression might be the most high-leverage touchpoint we will ever have with our audience, capable of swinging their opinion of us more widely than at any subsequent point in their experience with us. So of course, we want to get it right. But what exactly do we mean by “right”? Sure we want them to think of us as legitimate, professional, and knowledgeable. But these are table stakes, and there’s no reason our first impression should fail to communicate any of these. Beyond these pre-requisites, then, perhaps the most important impression we can give is that we are different than the alternatives. Here’s why. Most of your potential buyers have already been actively engaged in the market for anywhere from months to years. In that time, they’ve consumed anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of hours of content across podcasts, YouTube, newsletters, blogs, and social media. They’ve read books, bought courses, hired coaches and consultants, and maybe even hired people, services, and products to help them implement. And yet, they still haven’t found the solution. If they had, they wouldn’t still be in the market after all, and they wouldn’t be looking for a show or business like yours. So… If we assume that nearly every one of your future customers has already consumed all the standard commodity content and advice, and it hasn’t solved their core problem… Why would they be interested in engaging with another show or business that appears (on the outside) to be more or less the same as all the stuff they’ve already tried? They wouldn’t. Instead, what these people are looking (if not outright ravenous) for, is something different. A different perspective. A different approach. A different method. A different promise. In short, they—frustrated as they are with the other options on the market—are looking for someone who thinks differently. Which is where you (hopefully) come in. And assuming you do, in fact, have a contrarian POV, strong counter-positioning, a proprietary method, and a track record of results... The worst thing you can do is package your brand to be indistinguishable from the other (lesser) options on the market. Remember, the goal is to create a process, offer, and business that is non-interchangeable. Which is exactly what all of your audience-facing touchpoints should communicate. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the Commodity Signals your show may be unwittingly sending. Causing potential listeners and buyers to gloss over and devalue their work before they ever experience it. 1. Commodity Show Concept In podcasting, everything begins and ends with the strength and originality of your concept, so it’s no surprise that one of the clearest signals of a commodity business is a show structured around a commodity concept. The most common of these are undifferentiated expert interviews, buddy chatcasts, and solo thought-leadership shows. As discussed in Part III of this series, it’s not that interviews, chatcasts, and solo shows are inherently ineffective at differentiating you and attracting an audience. It’s just that they’re the absolute most basic foundation of a show that you must then layer with one or more differentiating wrinkles to make the show both more interesting, distinctive, and marketable. Without it, your show comes off as just another me-too show, hinting at a me-too business behind it. 2. Commodity Cover Art The two most important jobs of your cover art are to communicate relevance and legitimacy. Beyond that, however, your cover art plays a massive role in near-instantaneously communicating the tone, vibe, values… and a whole lot more about your show and brand. As with all touchpoints, your cover art should be designed to communicate and reinforce your counter-positioning against the generic, status quo shows and ideologies of your niche… Which means you need to do your research and think hard (or better, hire a good designer) about how to communicate a different message than listeners are getting from other shows they’re seeing. The test for your cover art is simple. Make a grid with the cover art of the 10-20 top competitors in your niche and place your cover art among them. Then, for each, choose 1-3 words to describe the feeling, vibe, or ideas each cover gives off. If your show overlaps with others in the collection, you’re almost certainly blending in, and have some work to do. 3. Commodity Title Along with your cover art, your title is one of the first and most important touchpoints your market has with your show, and it has the power to immediately attract or repel listeners. When it comes to the characteristics of commodity titles, the most common culprit is clichés, either within the industry or more broadly. For example, within the entrepreneur space, there are dozens if not hundreds of shows with titles along the lines of:
On their own, none of these titles are inherently bad… But when viewed together, it quickly appears as though the hosts have all copied and pasted the same podcast playbook… quickly placing them (and the businesses behind them) in the category of commodities in the minds of their target market. 4. Point of View We’ve already talked about the importance of possessing a distinct POV in Part I & Part II of the series, but we’ll revisit it briefly here. A distinctive and potent POV your business is built around might be the most important marketing asset in your toolbelt. Think of great companies like Patagonia, Nike, and Apple, and its clear that they all have a strong and well-defined POV that not only guides their decision-making around products, marketing, and content… but is in and of itself an attractive force to their core audience. In order to de-commoditize yourself, you’ll need to do the same. Your goal is to develop a strong, unique, and defensible POV describing what (real but non-obvious) core problem your audience is facing, the reason why their past attempts to solve it have failed, and what to do instead (ideally a novel approach that no one else is talking about). The trick is that this POV must be different from what other shows and brands are promising, which makes articulating it both devilishly difficult to dial in… and radically rewarding when you do. 5. Commodity Languaging We all hate “corporate-speak” for its bland ability to say a lot without saying much of anything… while also being entirely interchangeable with nearly any other company. And yet, we creatives tend to fall into our own set of generic communication tropes. Take those various “The _________ Entrepreneur” shows we mentioned before. Having spent many hours browsing and studying this genre of show in multiple niches, I can say with certainty that if you were to take a closer look at any of them, they would all sound nearly identical in the language they use in their show descriptions, on their websites, and across their social media. It might not be corporate jargon, it might even be fun, personal, and "authentic". But it’s still generic. There are additional Commodity Signals beyond the five we’ve discussed here. In fact, every touchpoint your market and audience can observe and interact with is an opportunity to communicate something about you, your work, and your brand—from your theme music to website to personal appearance, vocal delivery, and more. But the signals above are among the first and most prominent your market will encounter… and thus most worth thinking deeply about. Now, before we wrap this series up, a couple of final notes. First, you might have noted that throughout this series, I’ve regularly referred to “your market” as opposed to “your audience”. The reason is that your decisions around your show, brand, products, etc affect how people perceive you, even if they never engage directly with your work. There are shows (and the people behind them) that I’ve never listened to but have recommended broadly on the strength of their concept (and often the accompanying title and cover art). Similarly, there are countless shows that might be great… but I’ve written off (along with the person and business behind them) as uninspired and generic, again based on a small number of external touchpoints. Finally, it’s worth noting that nobody ends up with a commodity show or business because that's what they aspire to or is all they're capable of. Instead, they simply fall into them as they follow the path of least resistance. It’s easier to emulate what’s been done before, what you see every day, what you assume is successful for others… Than digging deep to discover and articulate where everyone else is wrong… Or misguided… Or taking the easy way out… And then doing the hard work of developing something original. And yet… Doing something hard but original is where the juice is. Where the audience is. The profit. And maybe most important, the fun. Because at the end of the day, developing a fresh take on a stale topic, genre, or medium is exactly what art, creativity, marketing, and business innovation are all about. In other words: Whether you’re a bleeding heart artist or a profit-at-all-cost capitalist, your job is the same: Do the hard work to do something notably different than what’s already been done. Finally, the artists and the capitalists (and all those of us stuck with a foot in both worlds) can agree upon. Most people don’t have businesses that afford them generous time, profit, and creative margins. And they're not on the path to ever achieving them. Which means if these margins matter to you, you’re going to need to do something different. Then, make that difference unmistakably obvious across all your market-facing touchpoints. If you're an expertise-based business owner (coach, consultant, educator) with a strong track record of client results but are struggling to charge what you want and get the attention you deserve, hit reply. I'll ask a couple questions about your situation and then share some information on how we can work together to install the systems and strategy to increase your time, profit, and creative margin. If your goal is more time and more money to do more and better creative work, hit reply with the word "Margin" and we'll map out the path to get there.
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