Marketing & Communications

Commodity pricing: When you are selling improvement, you are selling against dozens or hundreds of other improvement offers out there. You are stuck in the middle of a very red ocean, competing with everyone else who is selling similar options. This competition turns what you do into a commodity and pushes the pricing down. It quickly becomes a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

Dan Kennedy once told me, "If you can't be the number one lowest-price leader in your market, there is no strategic advantage of being the second lowest price leader in town, but there is a huge strategic advantage of being the most expensive." In other words, if you can't be the cheapest, then you need to become the most expensive. And you can't do that when you are fighting inside this red ocean. When you present a new opportunity, you are creating a blue ocean, and all price resistance goes out the window.

WHY PEOPLE DON'T WANT IMPROVEMENT OFFERS

Тут один дядечко сформулював, чому краще робити інше позиціонування/нову або напівнову нішу(new opportunity) ніж покращити те, що є на ринку на х%(improvement offer)

Improvement offers are much harder to sell for a lot of reasons.
Here are a few of the main reasons people tend to avoid improvement offers at all costs.

Improvement is hard: Most people have tried to improve in the past, and for some reason it didn't work. They've tried to lose weight. They've tried to make money. They've tried to make their relationships better. But if they're coming to you, then whatever they tried in the past didn't work for some reason. They know the difficulties they've had to go through, and there is pain associated with that.

With a new opportunity, they don't know what the process will be, so they don't have to go through the known pain to get the result.

Desire vs. ambition: All people have desire, but very few have ambition. My guess is that less than 2 percent of the population is actually ambitious. Improvement offers are selling to overachieving, ambitious people. If you do sell an improvement offer, you are automatically excluding 98 percent of the world. You will be fighting an uphill battle. A new opportunity, on the other hand. plays on people's desires for the change they want in their lives.

Memories of poor past decisions: If your followers are in need of improvement, they must first admit failure. In order for them to say yes to your offer, they have to admit that the choices they made in the past were wrong. No one wants to admit when they're wrong, yet an improvement offer forces them to admit they're failed. We want to justify their past failures. A new opportunity does that.