The High Cost of Irrelevant Messaging

Are your company’s highlighted selling points showcasing what your customers truly care about—and not just points you think they care about?

As CEO of marketing/management consultancy Smart Advantage, Jaynie Smith has worked with CEOs of companies in more than 400 industries to uncover their company’s true competitive advantage over others, and then effectively use that message in their marketing. Her valuable findings and insights from this process have resulted in her best-selling book Creating Competitive Advantage, and in engagements all over the world as a keynote speaker and expert on television and radio programs.

In her April 8^th “Fridays With Vistage” webinar, Jaynie shared eye-opening insights and case studies with the Vistage audience about what really makes marketing messaging relevant to specific customers and prospects—and how once a company has (and effectively uses) that information, it will result in dramatic growth.

Here are the biggest takeaways from Jaynie’s webinar:

• The vast majority (more than 90%!) of companies are marketing aspects they feel their customers will most value, as opposed to what their customers actually value. In almost every instance, the market is so saturated that customers can easily find a similar quality product or service elsewhere. That’s why it’s not WHAT you sell, but HOW you sell it, that’s so important today. For example:

• A case study of a web design company showed its marketing messaging was originally touting their awards, the size of the company, and the fact they had worked with Fortune 500 companies. After double blind polling showed that customers actually cared least about those very aspects, and most about their own ability to maintain ownership of the work produced and quickness of company response, the company changed their marketing messaging, and soon landed a sought-after client.


• The attributes most commonly assumed by companies to be relevant to their customers—that Jaynie’s findings show to usually be irrelevant—are: equity ownership, family ownership, green/sustainability, longevity, amount of awards, and… price!


• The only way to discover what your targeted customers really want and need from your company is by getting the voice of the customers via unbiased, confidential double-blind polling (not customer satisfaction surveys).

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Jaynie Smith’s new book, Relevant Selling, will be released in early summer 2011. She can be reached at 954-763-575 or jsmith@smartadvantage.com. Jaynie is user @smartadvantage on Twitter, where this webinar can be discussed using the hashtag #JLSweb.

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