This is understandable. As businesspeople, we work hard to capture our message; it’s valuable work that can only be done by internal employees who know our culture, our co-workers and our CEO. But the very insider nature of our mission statements and corporate copy can sound exclusive and clique-y to our customers.
They often don’t get the inside jokes, the clever language, the puns, metaphors or similes that we worked so hard on – for so long. If customers don’t get your copy, if it doesn’t speak in their language, you might as well not write it. And copy that only works for you simply doesn’t work!

The trick is to seek comfort where you’re not comfortable, which is usually in your target audience’s shoes. Let’s say you’ve never knitted a day in your life, secretly make fun of knitters behind their backs, talk down to them in their presence and generally just “don’t get this whole knitting thing,” but are suddenly put in charge of producing a new line of do-it-yourself manuals for, of all things, knitters.

Well, unless you get out of your knitter-doubting comfort zone but quick, your future customers will pick up on your thin knitter knowledge – but quick. The best way to do this is to switch off the comfort and welcome the uncomfortable. Immerse yourself in the world of knitting to the point that you are absolutely obnoxious about it. But you can’t just fake it; you have to open yourself up to it.

This is literally the biggest step one can take in measuring the distance between you and your audience. This is your straight line to the audience you’re targeting – and if you can’t feel comfortable in this niche, they’ll never feel comfortable buying it.

There is no doubt that we all yearn for more “stickiness” in our messages. But sticky to whom? Our audience? Or ourselves? In the last section we talked about speaking our audience’s language, so that should be a good indicator; what sticks to us may not necessarily stick to them.

Companies frequently get so internal that they forget the external. We get so excited about our ad copy, our product design, our packaging, our message, our website, our concept and our ideas that we forget what others think of us is what matters most when it comes to actually clicking on our site and making a purchase.

Part of that struggle for stickiness is in speaking the language of our audience; another part is in predicting what our audience will want before they even know it. This is where trends come in – and if there’s anything stickier on this planet than a hardcore trend, I’d like to know about it.

But, too often, we are content to sit back and spot a trend rather than digging more deeply to predict a trend. Following a trend is a guaranteed way NOT to hit the bull’s eye; at best, you might get lucky and land on one of the peripheral spots on the dartboard – at worst, you will miss the board, and your opportunity, altogether.

I’ll never forget the year John Grisham first published his breakthrough bestseller, The Firm. That’s because a friend of mine worked in a bookstore at the time and would report back – daily, ad nauseam, at a high pitch – about the book’s seemingly inexhaustible success. It wasn’t so much admiration that inspired these daily updates, but rather wonder and awe; he’d never quite seen anything like it.

Customer after customer, browser after browser, rushed into the store looking for The Firm. More often than not, the book would be completely sold out and my friend would recommend an equally strong substitute. For instance, Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow had been published several years earlier and was available in paperback – a substantial savings off The Firm’s current hardback edition.

No dice. Customers wanted The Firm and would accept no substitutions. But John Grisham had done more than start a trend; he single-handedly primed the pump for a whole new literary genre: the legal thriller. My friend often commented, “If only we’d seen this trend coming, we could have really cashed in.”

I would often comment to my friend, with a wry kind of smile and a knowing wink, that he should have spotted the need for such a trend long before Grisham did. After all, he worked in the ultimate reference section: a bookstore.

He could have simply wandered up and down the aisles during any one of his shifts and spotted the gaps where legal thrillers would one day dominate. But like so many of us, my Firm-envious friend was content to follow trends rather than predict them.

See the opportunities before they become a trend. Don’t sit back and wait; follow up and act. Stay on the cusp; do not sit back and follow – get out there and lead. Tweak trends, try new things, research effectively and get to know what your audience knows before they even know it.

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