The Perry Marshall Marketing Letter

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The Perry Marshall Marketing Letter Volume 3, Issue 1

“Nearly everything I know about marketing and advertising, I learned in the Audio Business”

Are you in a commodity business, looking for a way to differentiate yourself from others? Do you have a neat new technology or idea you’re trying to get customers to accept? Are you in need of a new twist on an old idea? Do you want to wrap an interesting, intriguing story around a new innovation? Look no further than the audio business for many superb case studies of what to do.

Did you read the article “Enthusiasts write the best ads” in my marketing system toolkit? You can learn a lot about clever marketing in the audio biz. Not long ago it struck me that most of my intuition about writing ads, advertorials, articles and persuasive documents, and much of my skill in creating hooks and advertising ideas, comes from the stereo magazines I was reading when I was a teenager. I just got done visiting the National Manufacturing Week trade show in Chicago. Dominant impression: These people are a bunch of marketing morons. Totally a-cluistic. Without clue. Hopeless, really. I’d take any one of my subscribers and pit you against almost any marketing manager at that show, and there would be no contest. And I would similarly characterize most vendors in the audio industry as vastly superior marketers to the B2B marketers I’ve seen. As you’ll read on the back page, my decision at the insecure age of 13 to build a pair of speakers was a pivotal decision that has shaped everything I’ve done since. Back when I was in junior high, every few weeks I’d get on the bus, go downtown and visit all the stereo shops and learn everything I possibly could. I must have been extremely annoying to some of the sales people, because I would appear once every month or so, occupy an hour of their time, pummeling them with questions about every possible aspect of speakers, amplifiers, tape decks, turntables and decibels – then depart without spending a single thin dime. I distinctly remember one guy, very helpful, who advised, “You should read everything you can get your hands on.” I took that quite literally. I have circled more numbers on readers service cards than anyone else on the planet. Two thirds of the drawers in my dresser in my bedroom were devoted to manufacturer’s literature, brochures and catalogs. In retrospect it’s no surprise whatsoever that I’m in the business of creating persuasive manufacturer’s literature today. And it’s no surprise

Cartoon by Rodriguez ©1986 Special thanks to Sound and Vision Magazine

The Perry Marshall Marketing Letter

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that I’m good at it. (I also shudder to think that most of what I thought I knew about acoustics at the time had been written by copywriters and marketing departments.) Well having marketers in charge of consumer education is tantamount to having the dogs guard the ham sandwiches. But since you are the marketer of your business and since nobody else is educating your customers, and because they are unable and/or unwilling to educate themselves, then you are the educator. And the ham sandwiches are in your care. So today I’m going to take you back to the mid-1980’s and show you some of the best examples of marketing and advertising in the audio industry. And I’m going to show you exactly how the ham sandwiches were guarded, or in some cases, rapaciously consumed by hungry dogs.

ra·pa·cious (r -p sh s) adj. 1. Taking by force; plundering. 2. Greedy; ravenous. See Synonyms at voracious. 3. Subsisting on live prey.

The Audio Business: Mostly Commodities, Very Cleverly Disguised Vendors in the audio industry are among the very best, of any industry out there, at disguising the fact that much of the things they sell sound exactly the same, and perform exactly the same as their competitors. Audio is an enthusiast’s sport. And being that it’s a medium for music, it has the ability to access people at a deep emotional level. Audiophiles are fanatics. People who love music, and the equipment that reproduces music, have an incurable attachment and fascination. I will go even further and say that the experience of listening to music crosses over into the spiritual realm. It touches peoples’ higher aspirations in ways that we cannot easily verbalize. We are very emotional about our music and our music systems. I’m in a somewhat unique position because I’ve pursued both the engineering disciplines and marketing disciplines as far as I could go. I know what’s smoke and mirrors in the audio business and what is not. And the truth is that most of it is smoke and mirrors. Perception, not reality. Some examples: (Sorry if this offends you – just the facts, ma’am):

• Expensive speaker cables, and really any kind of expensive audio cables or connectors – snake oil. They make virtually no difference. To put it another way, buying a “better” cable is the least effective place to invest your money.

• The differences between one amplifier and another, at least when they’re operating within their normal power capabilities, are miniscule. Vanishingly small. A $5000 amplifier is rarely better than a $500 amplifier, and as often as not is actually inferior.

• The same can be said of CD players, capacitors and many other passive components. • People religiously believe otherwise, though. They devoutly believe that they hear dramatic, night-

and-day differences between cables, amplifiers, CD players, digital-to-analog converters, etc etc. Fact: you can do scientific A/B comparisons and conclusively prove that they cannot hear these differences. But… when a salesman persuades them that they can hear a difference, the ear is fooled and the ego gets involved. The hottest running debates in audio magazines have always been about such issues.

• The world of high-end audio has produced an endless stream of bizarre, flim-flam products to scratch the enthusiast itch, in pursuit of audio nirvana: Tuning dots - little round stickers the size of a hole

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punch with adhesive on one side – you stick them on stuff and they magically make it sound better; Machined steel cones and mounts for components and speakers; “Tuning blocks” – special blocks of wood that make your components sound better when you put them on top; Compact Discs with pure gold substrate instead of aluminum (everyone knows that gold 1’s and 0’s sound better than silver 1’s and 0’s, right?); for a long time there was lore going around that if you smeared Bull Semen on your CD’s, it would make them sound better.

• People will get angry with you if you tell them that they could have used a $5 cable instead of a $500 cable, or that the Bull Semen improvement is just their imagination. They will curse you and call you the antichrist. They want to believe. After they’ve spent the money, they do not want to concede that they’ve been had.

• For the person who wishes to continue to believe the siren song of the snake oil salesman, a plethora of rationalizations are available. Choose the one you like and believe as you wish.

• If you take a close look at all of the above examples, they all involve making inexpensive, trivial modifications that make no improvement, and fooling people into thinking they do improve the sound. They involve no insight into deep problems, no knowledge, no science, no careful application of wisdom or experience – just the swiping of the credit card. Note that they’re all high-margin items.

• On the other hand, there are lots of things you can do to improve the sound of an audio system. But they all require some combination of money, and expertise and insight as to where to spend it and how to apply it. For example you can make enormous improvements by adjusting the draperies and furniture in the room, and the location of the speakers. It need not be expensive to do this, but you will need an experienced technician with some sophisticated measurement equipment. Not easy, not cookie cutter. You rarely see people spend their money on anything valid like this. The Bull Semen is easier to sell – and to buy.

With that in mind, here’s an example of a brilliant move on the part of Linn, a high-end audio

manufacturer in Scotland. Every stereo shop has a special room for the high end equipment. And the top lines carried by that

dealer compete fiercely for attention in that room. My friend Jim Heydt, the salesman who actually inspired me to build that first pair of speakers, once

mentioned that the biggest competition for any brand of equipment is everything else that’s being sold in the very same store - much more than the other brands across town. Somebody at Linn was apparently frustrated that their speakers had to compete with other brands, so they came up with “The Single Speaker Demonstration” for their dealers.

The shtick goes like this: The existence of any other speaker in a room corrupts the sound and the

listener experience. Even a telephone, by its very presence, will distort the sound and make the listener’s judgment suspect and unnatural. Therefore only one speaker can be demonstrated at any one time; if you switch speakers, you must lug the old ones out of the room before new ones are brought in.

So they went out to all their dealers and showed this to them. They would put a pair of speakers in the

room and play them – then they’d bring a telephone in and out of the room. “Mark, can you hear the difference the presence of this little telephone makes?” Mark thinks for a minute and says “Play that again, would you?” So they do another trial. “Yeah, Steve, now I hear exactly what you’re talking about. The midrange is muddier with the telephone in the room. Wow, that’s amazing!”

The factory guy has successfully done a bit of psycho-manipulation on the dealer, who will in turn do

this to many dozens of unsuspecting customers. The light has now dawned, and the true believer, now in possession of a great truth, goes forth to unleash this truth on the world.

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Now the factory guy pulls a sticker out of his notebook – it’s a “Single Speaker Demonstration” sticker – and affixes it to the front door of the retail store. Now this dealer is certified as a “Single Speaker Demonstration Room” dealer, and Linn’s speakers are, of course, always the default speakers in this special room. Right?

So Linn publishes a list of dealers who conform to this now-higher standard of demonstrating audio

equipment. And they run ads like the one you see here. Now… does having another

pair of speakers in the room change the sound? Yes, it theoretically does. However, the difference is microscopically small (especially compared to the rattling drywall, the air conditioner, and whatever else is going on).

Here’s what’s important

though: it is now literally impossible for the customer to make an accurate, honest, side-by-side comparison. Your hearing is extremely susceptible to suggestion. And the customers’ malleable perceptions are vastly more vulnerable to the salesman’s manipulation than they were before. The salesman can now tell customers what he wants them to hear, instead of flipping a switch from A to B and letting them hear it for themselves.

Remember: so long as Mark

believes he hears a difference, that’s all that matters to Linn. Linn has successfully shoved the competition, and the listener’s objective judgment, out of the way.

Nobody said this was going to

be a fair fight! Stay Tuned for Part 2:

“Carver turns high-end snobbery on its head”