February 10th, 2010

30 Coffees Learning: Of Goats, Cows, and Dragons

While it’s only officially day 1 of our 30 coffees in 30 days extravaganza, we’ve already gained valuable insight that I thought were worth sharing.

While talking with Chris Robson and Scott Laing at Parametric Marketing, Scott mentioned that a hurdle that they faced (when working for a company that they both worked at before Parametric) was how to describe themselves to potential clients.

They thought of themselves as something new in the world (as does Fight), and so described themselves as “nots” compared to other companies that they might be compared to. They were “not company A” or “not company B”. They were, in fact, new and better than those companies.

The trouble was that few companies had budgets for “not” companies. They didn’t fit anywhere that people were familiar with, and people had trouble getting their heads around the company. Ultimately, they started talking about themselves as “like company A plus new, better things”.

The metaphor that occurred to me was an idea of goats versus dragons. Let’s say that a company wants to buy a goat; they’ve been buying goats for a long time. They know what a goat is, and what kinds of things a goat represents. They have annual budgets for goats because goats are understood organization wide.

Let’s say that you have something new in the market: a cow. But the idea of “cow” is brand new. No one knows what being a cow means. The word “cow” is something that your company made up (or is in use in the industry but not by many people). So to help people understand how new this thing is, you describe it like it’s a dragon. It’s not at all like a goat. It’s something new entirely.

You probably already get where I’m going here. People don’t know how to relate to the dragon. They don’t have budgets for dragons. They don’t have infrastructure that supports dragons. Many people are going to be scared by the radical concept that a dragon represents; it’s potentially dangerous. Others are going to feel pretty confident that your dragon doesn’t exist at all. It’s something that you made up just to sound new. Maybe, they’ll think, you have a goat dressed up like a dog, but it’s really a goat after all.

The challenge is to position yourself as a goat plus. Something that fits all of their needs, AND MORE. Something they understand, BUT BETTER. Something they have budget for, BUT MORE VALUABLE.

A cow is like a goat, but bigger. It’s like a goat, but produces more meat. It’s like a goat but easier to manage. It’s a goat plus.

So, this is one of our challenges. We think of Fight like a dragon, but we need to find a way to describe it as a goat plus. It’s something we’ll be noodling on and trying out in our 30 coffees. If you know something about Fight and how we could talk about ourselves in a more goat plus sort of way, let us know. If you’ve started your own thing and have tackled this issue, we’d love to hear it. And if you’re starting a new thing, and are having the same problem, we’d love to hear that too. Maybe we can help each other out.