Focus. Johns started out just doing cd rates and became the #1 term for it on google. Then he expanded to other banking categories. Relevance. There are 1,000s of personal finance sites. Most of the people just consume some information. You go to his site to find deals and sign up for them. That’s the point. Monetize. Just like what my old company Mint.com is doing, Johns picked a lucrative category where clicks will pay out $50+.
Frank Lowe did something similar. As CEO of Collett Dickenson Pearce, he asked Mike Yershon, the head of media, to buy every 48 sheet poster within a mile radius of the agency. Then he made sure that all CDP’s client’s posters ran on them. So that any new business client coming in to see CDP would have seen all their advertising before they even got to the agency. And when Frank Lowe showed them the agency’s work, they were impressed that everything seemed like famous campaigns. Because, without realising it, they’d just seen everything on posters, on the way there. Like Cassius Clay, Frank had won the game before it even started.
In his recent book, The Way We’ll Be, John Zogby of the research firm Zogby International, devotes a great deal of paper to a quantifiable cultural trend: a shift in priorities from “what I own” to “what I am.” “Materialism gave us ever-larger houses with imitation wrap-around Victorian porches where almost no one ever sits or visits. It’s filled our garages with cars that take us to workplaces where we stay longer and longer to earn the salary that meets the bills…There’s a longing, a deep-felt need to reconnect with the truth of our lives and to disconnect from the illusions that everyone from advertisers to politicians tries to make us believe are real…Even those with the resources to spend more are often choosing to spend less, and they’re adjust the motives for their spending.” I bring all this up because Transformation Design is a contrarian voice. In a world where government and corporations do less and less for people, Transformation Design drives them to do more and more. The discipline challenges companies to move beyond the product/cash transaction relationship and play a larger, more constructive, more valuable role in people’s lives to help them achieve the values and meaning they wish for their life. Transformation Design teaches companies that the most valuable economic offering is not a product, but a transformation.
— Maschmeyer
