What do The Body Shop, Disneyland, and VisiCalc have in common?

Well, aside from their all being highly successful products and services, their stories also share a common theme...

Pain.

Each came into existence because their creator refused to put up with a frustrating or painful experience.

The Body Shop

The Body Shop grew out of Anita Roddick's frustration with the state of the art of the cosmetics industry. As Roddick said in her book "Body and Soul" (pp. 68-69)…

"It seemed ridiculous to me that you could go into a sweet shop and ask for an ounce of jelly babies and you could go into the grocer's and ask for two ounces of cheese, but when you wanted to buy body lotion you had to go into Boots and lay out five quid for a bloody great bottle of the stuff. Then, if you didn't like it, you were stuck with it…The other half of the equation was that I wanted to try to find products made from natural ingredients. At that time, no one was talking much about the advantages or potential of natural products - the green movement had yet to get started - but I knew that for centuries women in 'under-developed' areas of the world had been using organic potions to care for their skin with extraordinary success."

Disneyland

Disneyland grew out of Walt Disney's dissatisfaction with the family entertainment options of the day. As Disney told Bob Thomas in "Walt Disney" (p. 11)…

"It all started when my daughters were very young, and I took them to amusement parks on Sunday. I sat on a bench eating peanuts and looking all around me. I say to myself 'Dammit, why can't there be a better place to take your children, where you can have fun together?' Well, it took me about fifteen years to develop the idea."

VisiCalc

VisiCalc came out of the time that Dan Bricklin spent at the Harvard Business School. As Bricklin said in the September 2001 issue of the Harvard Business Review (p. 53)…

"In the midst of my studies at Harvard Business School, I had grown more than a little frustrated by having to manually calculate and recalculate every single change on a spreadsheet as I worked through a case study. There had to be a better way, I figured, so I started designing a computer program to address those inefficiencies. I described my idea to Bob Frankston, whom I had met as an undergraduate at MIT, and he agreed to try to turn my primitive prototype into a working program."

Implications

Why, you may ask, are these case studies relevant to you as a salesperson, marketer, or entrepreneur?

Well, I've found that not understanding the importance of pain, and its role on the creation of an authentic and compelling story, is at the root of what many people falsely label as marketing problems.

I spend a significant amount of time working with entrepreneurs, looking for ways to help them improve the sales of their products. While in some cases I am able to help, in many cases there is nothing I can do.

The thing is that often these entrepreneurs have little to say and thus nothing that I can leverage as a marketer. They don't solve any problem or alleviate any source of pain. There is nothing driving them as entrepreneurs (other than the desire to get rich and/or work for themselves). There is nothing to tap into, no angle to find. No story.

This is NOT a marketing problem.

This is a more fundamental problem with the conception of their business.

Companies in this position are not having sales problems because they are doing a poor job of communicating their message. Usually they are doing a good enough job. Instead, they are having sales problems because the market has evaluated their product or service and has determined that it doesn't care.

I find that entrepreneurs get into this predicament because most have adopted a reactive approach to sales and marketing. They think of sales and marketing only after their product or service is designed. They assume that the role of sales is to sell and the role of marketing is to advertise what has already been built.

Unfortunately, waiting to think about sales and marketing until this point in the process is too late. You cannot make a significant impact on the product or service. You cannot dramatically alter the value that it delivers. You cannot influence its story.

About all that you can do, if you are stuck with a product that has no authentic or compelling story, is to coat it with some hype, but it's unlikely to stick or last.

Instead, what is required is a proactive approach to marketing in which the story, and thus the basis for the product's marketing, is built into the product itself. This story can then be tapped at a later date.

That's where the case studies come into play.

I use these and other case studies to show entrepreneurs what an authentic and compelling story looks like. I show them how others have used a frustrating or painful experience as the basis for their stories and then built both their products and their marketing around these stories.

I show them how Anita Roddick used her story to drive her merchandising and product development strategy. I show them how Walt Disney used his story to develop the design and maintenance strategy of Disneyland. I show them how Dan Bricklin used his story to define the feature set of what became VisiCalc.

Most importantly, I point out that neither The Body Shop, nor Disneyland, nor VisiCalc succeeded because of a brilliant marketing plan that was conceived and pasted on after the fact. Instead, each succeeded because at their core was a story of frustration or pain that formed the vision that these entrepreneurs used to guide and judge their every action.