Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Niche ideas. Niche products. Niche market. They're everywhere you look in the business world today. Marketers have discovered that it's easier to target a small, specific group of consumers with a product or service that appeals directly to them rather than trying to sell a one-size-fits-all solution to everyone. This focus on narrow markets is called "niche marketing." It can be an extremely effective way to grow your business.

What is niche marketing, exactly, and how can you tell if it's right for your company?

The meaning of niche marketing refers to the process of targeting a specific group of people with services or products to sell that meet their specific niche or unique needs. To be successful, you need to have a deep understanding of the needs and wants of your target market and then create a product or service that meets those needs. There are a few key factors to consider when deciding if niche marketing is right for your business:

1. The size of your target market: Niche markets are usually small, specific groups of people. If your target market is too large, you may have trouble reaching everyone with your message.
2. The competition: Niche markets often have less competition than broader markets. It can give you a competitive advantage and make it easier to get noticed by your target audience.
3. Your resources: The niche industry can be resource-intensive, as you'll need to create custom content and build relationships with influencers in your target market. Make sure you have the time and resources to commit to a niche marketing strategy before you start.

Not all Niches are Created Equal

"Think too deeply about customer profiling, and you'll soon fall into niche marketing. And the problem with niches is they're not created equal." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

When it comes to niches, there are many different ways to slice and dice them. And not all niches are created equal. Some niches are more profitable than others, while some are more competitive than others. Some niches require more resources to get started than others, too. Before you dive into niche marketing, it's crucial to do your research and make sure you're targeting a profitable, competitive, and resource-friendly niche. Otherwise, you could find yourself spinning your wheels without seeing any results. Are you in the home services industry? Do you know how to find your niche? Do you need help with developing or maintaining your niche marketing strategy? Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services has the answers you're seeking. Book a call with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

The Book of Reis and Trout

Niches were popularized in the 1981 book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Reis and Trout. According to the book, we should consider our competitors' strengths and branding before deciding how we want to be seen by customers. Though some only read it as such, the book is much more than a marketing guidebook. It's not about marketing at all. It is about positioning your product, service, or company in the customer's mind so they will think of you first when they need what you sell. Niche marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on a specific target market or demographic. Niches are often small but can also be significant. They can be defined by geographic location, demographics, type of product, and many other factors. The key to successful niche marketing is to find a group of people who are underserved by the current market and create a unique offering that meets their needs. You can do this by catering to a specific demographic, developing a new product or service, or creating a new brand image.

The Seductive Logic of Niche Marketing

"Tragically, the seductive logic of niche marketing makes perfect sense even when it does not apply." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

Niche marketing is all the rage these days – with good reason. When done correctly, niche marketing can be effective in reaching a specific target market and building a loyal customer following. However, there is a downside to niche marketing– and that is, it can be effortless to fall into the trap of only catering to a small group of people and ignoring the needs of the larger market. Roy H. Williams, the founder of The Wizard of Ads™, calls this "the seductive logic of niche marketing. "The seductive logic of niche marketing is that it makes perfect sense when you are first starting. After all, when you are just starting a business, you can't possibly be all things to all people. It is much easier (and cheaper) to focus your efforts on a small group of people with specific needs that you can fill. The problem with this approach is that it can be very easy to get comfortable in your niche and forget about the larger market. It is especially true if you are successful in your niche. Why bother reaching out to the larger market when you already have a loyal following of customers? The answer is that catering only to a small group of people is not sustainable in the long run. Eventually, you will reach a point where your niche market becomes saturated, and you will need to look for new customers outside your niche. That's why it's essential to keep an eye on the larger market and ensure you are still appealing to a broader audience. It may seem like more work in the short term, but it will pay off in the long run.

A Classic Example

Here's a classic example of this seductive logic from Roy: A dentist from a small town reached out to Roy for help. He was tired of seeing six or seven patients daily who only required thousand-dollar dental work. Instead, he wanted to focus on one or two patients daily who would require significantly more expensive treatments, between 10 and 30 thousand dollars each. "And make sure all of them have the money. Many people need that much dental work, but most don't have the money," the dentist said. Roy feared for the dentist. To pursue this would leave him very disappointed in the results. People in wealthy towns with good dental hygiene will not be his primary customers. He chose a target market that was much too small.

2 Known Strategies for a Smaller Target Market

"Considering a niche? Do the math. Be detached and objective. This isn't a time for wishful thinking." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

If your market isn't big enough for niche marketing, here are two known strategies for a smaller target market:

1. Positioning: Positioning is about creating a unique selling proposition (USP) for your product or service. It sets you apart from the competition and makes you the only logical choice for your target market. For example, say you're in the HVAC industry. You could position yourself as the only company that offers green solutions or the only company that offers 24/7 services.

• It thwarts your competitor's advantages.
• Being unaware of what your competitors are doing is like driving with your eyes closed. To succeed, you need to understand the realities of the marketplace and recognize the position that your competitors occupy in your customers' minds.

2. Persona-Based Ad Writing: This writing style taps into personality type and hooks a larger-than-average portion of readers, even when those readers are selected at random.

• It's designed around the customer's preferred approach to purchasing.
• Persona-based ad writing focuses on your consumer's personality rather than their demographic profile. What personalities are your advertisements currently intended for?

Have You Found Your Niche?

Niche marketing can be quite valuable for some small businesses. It allows you to focus your resources on a specific group of consumers more likely to purchase your product or services. When done correctly, it can be an extremely effective way to grow your business. If you're thinking about starting a niche marketing campaign, the first step is to identify your target market and determine if it will be lucrative. Once you've done that, you can develop a marketing strategy that will appeal to them. If you're a home services business owner in need of niche marketing, you could always book a call with Wizard Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services . We know how to market a product. We can help you slide into the niche marketing strategy you've been pining for.

Let’s be honest, rebrands aren’t acts of courage. Most of the time, they’re acts of panic. Or worse… vanity projects dressed up as strategy.

In Episode 24 of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Chris Torbay, and Mick Torbay take a hard look at rebranding, why it’s so often suggested, why it’s so frequently wrong, and how it quietly destroys the trust brands spend years building.

They unpack the uncomfortable truth that companies don’t own their brands, the customers do. That logos don’t carry meaning, memories do. And that changing everything because “it feels stale” is usually a sign the leadership has lost touch with the story that made the business matter in the first place.

From famous rebrand failures to everyday service businesses flirting with identity loss, this episode draws a bright line between evolution and erasure and explains why most agencies are financially rewarded for recommending the latter.

Because when you rebrand without clarity, you don’t look bold.

You look unfamiliar.

And unfamiliar brands don’t get chosen.

Episode Highlights

• Why customers (not companies) decide what your brand is
• The critical difference between a rebrand, a refresh, and an ego project
• How rebrands erase trust faster than they create attention
• Why “new” is not a strategy and often a warning sign
• The hidden incentives that push agencies to recommend rebrands
• How to evolve your brand without killing what already works

🎧 Hit play and make sure the next change you make strengthens your brand instead of starting it over.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💬  Are you fixing what’s broken or just bored with what’s familiar?

👉 And if you changed everything tomorrow… would customers still recognize you?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

On today's episode of Advertising in America, we can look at brands that done messed up bad. Should you rebrand your company or stand by what's been working? 

Here's the thing about rebrands. They're exciting. You hire a new agency because, for whatever reason, you weren't happy with the last one. What does that new agency want to do? Bill you for stuff.

Just like the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When you're a branding agency, every client with a problem starts to look like they could benefit from a full rebrand.

Change things because they're bad, they're wrong, or they're inconsistent with your future plans. Going to a clean slate might be throwing out perfectly good material. Might even be something that consumers relate to. You actually don't get to decide what people call your company, the consumer does. Nobody calls it Federal Express, they call it FedEx. 

Over time, great brands start to belong to all of us, and it's your job to understand what they mean to us and not. 

Ryan Chute: Should you rebrand your company or stand by what's been working? Do you need a little tweak or a total overhaul? It's like renovating a home. Where do you start and where do you stop? Mick, how do you not screw up a rebrand? 

Mick Torbay: My first step would be to ask, why are you rebranding at all? Are you sure you need to? Because it's easy to not screw it up if you don't do it in the first place. Here's the thing about Rebrands. They're exciting. You hire a new agency because, for whatever reason, you weren't happy with the last one. And what does that new agency want to do? Bill you for stuff. You see the standard agency model bills differently from how the Wizard of Ads people do. Agencies bill based on hours worked, which gives them the incentive to increase billable hours. How best to do that? Change fucking everything. And that's fun. New name, new logo, new colors, new designs, new messaging, new everything. Man, that's going to take some time. going to have to do research. Many, many working lunches to get all that taken care of. And wow, is that going to be a huge bill at the end of the year? But hey, at least we're excited about stuff. 

Now, here at the Wizard of Ads organization, we are not paid on billable hours. Our clients pay us based on results. That's it. No more, no less. You make more dollars, we earn more pennies, which means we are not incentivized at all to change something that's working.

We're not paid to change stuff. We're paid to get you paid, and not everything you're doing right now is wrong. So why would we change it just to change it? We only change stuff if it's holding you back from growing to your full potential. And here's an example. I had a client in the plumbing business called All Drain, not great, but not bad either. When we met them, I asked if they had any plans to expand into other trades. “Yes,” they said, “we're going to add HVAC and a year or two.” Okay, then, All Drain is going to be a problem, so let's change your name now so that the marketing plan we come up with will be ready for another trade that's not freaking drains. 

That's a reason to do a rebrand. Change things because they're bad, they're wrong, or they're inconsistent with your future plans. But look at every marketing element on its own merits. Going to a clean slate might be throwing out perfectly good material, might even be something that consumers relate to, and you're just going to arbitrarily throw it all away because “new”.

If you're looking for a change, it might be a pivot that you need rather than a rebrand. Maybe point the spotlight at something that's already there, but maybe hasn't been given the attention it deserves. Oftentimes, a rebrand happens because of ego, and that's not a good reason to change stuff. Remember, it's not about you, or the marketing director, or the agency, it's about the consumer. Never lose sight of that. And above all, if someone tells you everything needs to change, double-check that it's good for you and not good for that person's billable hours.

Ryan Chute:  If you don't believe a rebrand works, just search what Mick looked like when he was in a Canadian boy band. That's right. Ever see a grown man in spandex singing to teenage girls? It's unsettling. Up next, Chris will tell us more about how to redo the do, Chris? 

Chris Torbay: Okay. Full disclosure, I am totally culpable on this topic. My last corporate job before joining Wizard of Ads was the Executive Creative Director of a branding agency. An ad agency that specializes in helping you rebrand if your brand has evolved or become dated, or somehow become disconnected from its previous self.

But just like the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When you're a branding agency, every client with a problem starts to look like they could benefit from a full rebrand. Why? Maybe they needed one, but also maybe because we could charge $100,000 for it, and so agencies created something called The Brand Refresh. This is a perfect little term that suggests you'll spend a bunch of hours perking up the brand, but don't worry, we won't fuck up anything that'll get you in trouble with the boss. Not a revolution, an evolution. Ooh, that sounds good. Pay me for a bunch of work, and it'll still be like, it was only better, and you can look like you did something. And to be fair, brands do this all the time. You can probably find a graphic online of the Coca-Cola logo or the Campbell Soup Label design over the past hundred years, and while they retain their brand essence all the way through, they really do progress with the times.

If you think the Coca-Cola script that you see today is still their classic, original script, look it up, and you'll go, “Oh yeah, it really did look old-fashioned back then.” When you do a brand refresh though, you need to determine what you keep from the past and what you change. Campbell's needs to keep the red and white can. Ferrari needs to keep the prancing horse. NBC needs to keep the peacock. You ask yourself, what are the elements of our brand that have embedded themselves in consumers' minds, and how can we build on that? 

A brand refresh needs to please your target, not your graphic designer. 

And this is where things go famously wrong. See, graphic designers are young kids straight out of art school, and they want to do art, and they want to move fast and break things like some .com startup. So without an attentive babysitter, they'll suggest all kinds of crazy new ideas that will “appeal to a younger audience.” Which always sounds good to a brand manager.

The recent Cracker Barrel fiasco was a good case in point. I suspect they asked a bunch of focus groups what they thought, and decided that the oldie style illustration and typeface didn't appeal to Gen Z as much as it did their grandparents. So they modernized the typeface a little and got rid of the barrel and got rid of the cracker.

Jaguar made the same mistake when they changed their look from an old, rich British man's car to soft, gentle, feminine protection product. Lost the traditional serif typeface for some rounded sans-serif that you might choose to make a suppository brand seem a little less intrusive. In both cases, the design team, and I'm not blaming the young here by the way, this was a young-focused perspective that had to get approved all the way up the chain, they didn't focus on the consumer and what the consumer expected from the brand. 

Musicians, screenwriters, and directors will tell you when you're making art, you make the thing you want for a long time, but at some point you release it out into the world, and then it belongs to all of us. Musicians hear all the time what their songs mean to people, and sometimes it's not nearly what they intended. Every Breath You Take isn't about love. It's about a stalker. The same is true for a brand. Over time, great brands start to belong to all of us, and it's your job to understand what they mean to us and not fuck that up. Make the strong parts stronger when you can, remove the things that are dated or less and less relevant, but know what your brand is in people's hearts and minds. Don't mess with that. 

Ryan Chute: To brand or not to brand. That is the question. After the break, we'll get into some of the crazy messes we've seen and how to clean them up. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Ryan Chute: If the decision is made, then it's time to rebrand. Let's discuss the mistakes to avoid and the best practices to follow.

For me, as you guys were talking, what I was really thinking about was, we have to choose what to keep. We have to choose what to lose, but we also have to choose when to introduce the brand elements that are both operationally possible and right for the timing of the campaigns that they're around.

For example, Call Dad was always intended to have the “I'm on my way” tagline, but we couldn't do it in the first year. That didn't happen until year two, when operations and capacity allowed us to be able to say that, and it's a true statement. I see that consistently in some of the same things that you spoke about early on in this episode.

Mick Torbay: And every time you do a rebrand, it's usually about adding something, and we sometimes lose focus on, if you add something by definition, you have to take something out. And I think, very often, businesses are not 100% aware of what it is about their brand that was so appealing to people before. And sometimes, believe it or not, I think the consumers are not aware of what it is about that brand that they like.

Another famous rebrand screw up story is Tropicana Brands Group.

They did this, I think it was about five years ago, where they completely did a rebrand, and they lost the orange with the straw, with a straw sticking into it. I'm sure it was a focus group. It's a huge company. I'm sure they focus-grouped the living heck out of it.

Chris Torbay: We've been seeing that for years.

Mick Torbay: And I'm sure people said, “What do you think of this new Tropicana thing?” And I'm sure they said, “Yeah, it's great.” And it is. It was an excellent design. But what the consumers didn't realize is that without that orange with the straw in it, they didn't actually know where the Tropicana was. People would literally come up to the staff in the store and say, “Where's the Tropicana? I want to buy Tropicana, and you guys don't have any.” And it's no, it's right there. It says fucking Tropicana on it in giant block letters. But they weren't looking for that. They were looking for the orange with the straw. So sometimes, even the consumers, I don't think, aren’t a hundred percent aware of what is integral to the brand, but it might not have come up at a focus group.

Ryan Chute: And there's a lot of programming that goes into this. It's not a matter of plopping up a truck wrap, a mascot or even a typeface. All of the things that we are creating and manifesting, through the auditory channels, and then the visual channels to reinforce it, are all things that are embedding into the brain and getting past that short-term memory, the forgettable memory, into the long-term chemistry.

When you paint the house of the real estate that you're building, you may not recognize the house anymore for what it was because you remembered it to be that other thing, that orange Tropicana logo, that symbol, that thing that was an easy landmark in the mind to refer to when they went looking for the thing that you sell. So you have to be conscious of the branding you have done before. Now, can you rebrand an old company that's 38 years old? Sure.

Chris Torbay: Absolutely. I wonder if some of it is also starting with one of the channels, rather than starting with a strategy. Ask yourself, “Hey, our brand is too dated. What shall we do?”

And do that rather than say, “You know what, let's change the packaging.” What is it that you were trying to solve by changing the package? You've just started doing that, and you touched on this in the introduction. Do you just start with a truck wrap and then try and see if you can make all the rest of your marketing go around your new wrap? What you've done there is you've painted yourself into a corner because you brief your truck wrap guy, he comes up with an idea based on just doing truck wraps, because that's the only thing they do. And then you call us, and we go, “Okay, now we have to create a campaign that works with this new visual that you've set up on your truck wrap. What was the original idea like?”

Can we go back and we have to rebuild a strategy around that, as to what the new brand is trying to achieve? Rather than starting there, saying “Okay, our brand is looking dated. Our brand is not identified with consumers. What shall we do? We could change the marketing.” What is it that's wrong with it? And decide if, and how any or all of those things should be changed.

Ryan Chute: And I think that's where we've seen so many brand fails, even from allegedly “good, high-quality, very high-end branding” agencies, certainly in the home service space, where some of the time they get it right and a whole bunch of the times they get it wrong.

Chris Torbay: And it's mostly because they're just playing. We've had this happen with brands that we've worked on, where somebody changed something about the visual, look at it, and it's okay. If your assignment was just to change the visuals, these visuals are fine. My job is to build a larger story for this entire brand, and I got nothing from this visual. Now, if you had changed it to this, don't you see that I could have taken this and told a larger story,

Ryan Chute: And a comparable story, not just a cute and clever story.

Chris Torbay: And it's half their fault and half not their fault. Their job was just to come up with another logo design.

That's fine if somebody says, “Fix the logo design for Cracker Barrel,” somebody could just try a bunch of things, but what are you trying to achieve, and what do you think you're going to achieve? Are you really trying to get rid of all the people who like the old-style design? Are you really changing your brand from what it was to something that's going to appeal to Gen Z? Because if you are, there's a lot of things you need to change, and are you sure you want to throw out so much of the old in order to get so much of the new?

Mick Torbay: Now you're talking about a brand that's been around for decades and is super powerful. A national brand. Everybody's heard of it. And when you're doing that, I think you have to consider the head and the heart. And when you're doing a rebrand or even a refresh by definition, you're using your head, you're saying what strategic decisions can we make to make some nuts and bolts presumably improvements to make it more effective, to make it more whatever, to make it newer or more contemporary or appeal to a new demographic. But the heart is very different, and the heart doesn't necessarily react in a rational way. And a very famous example of this, and this is not an example of a refresh, but it proves the point about the head and the heart, when back in the 1980s, Pepsi Cola was doing an incredibly good job of scaring the hell out of Coca-Cola.

And that's because Pepsi was running this thing called the Pepsi Challenge. They would give people a blind test, taste test, and they put it on TV. But they also would do these at events, they would do the Pepsi Challenge, and they would cover the two things and have say, “try this now, try that. Which one do you like more?” And 8/10 times people would choose Pepsi. And it's like there, see, in a blind taste test, people actually prefer Pepsi, even though it's not the leading brand, and this scared Coca-Cola so much. And they even did their own tests, and they were like, “Goddammit. It's true. If people don't know any better, they actually prefer the taste of Pepsi.” And so it scared them so much. They actually changed the formula of Coca-Cola. They called it the New Taste of Coke, and they researched the living shit out of that. They spent years coming up with a formula that in blind taste tests, people preferred over Pepsi. It was sweeter, and they made a bunch of other decisions, but the point i,s they solved the problem. The Pepsi Challenge would no longer work because this new taste of Coke, in fact, in a blind taste test, would beat Pepsi.

Thank goodness, everything's going to be fine. Right? Wrong.

The head, in a blind taste test, makes the decision. In, but the heart says, “I like, I just, Coke. It's Coke.” You fucked with Coke.

Chris Torbay: How dare you?

Mick Torbay: You can't fuck with Coke. How dare you? It's always tasted like this. It tasted like this 50 years ago. It tasted like this a week ago, and now you changed it, and you took it away. But you like the other one. But my heart says that I’ve lost something.

But you don’t even like it as much as Pepsi.

Chris Torbay: And it's not your brand anymore. It's my brand. I'm the consumer. Stop messing with my thing. You don't have the right to do that.

Mick Torbay: You can't take that away from me.

Chris Torbay: That happens all the time in naming things, too. And I'm trying to think of some good national examples, but where people will change their name because their name is no longer accurate. But there are plenty of companies where even though the name's not strictly accurate now to what it is that the company sells, people still like it.

Mick Torbay: Knott's Berry Farm. It falls into that.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. I mean there was a very famous, in Toronto, there was a very famous record store called Sam The Record Man, and he'd been around for generations. And eventually they were selling CDs and DVDs and all kinds of stuff. They were making much more money. They weren't selling records. But you don't change the name of Sam The Record Man, that just stuck in people's minds. There's lots of brands where if you focus grouped it and said, “Is there a better name than Piggly Wiggly for a supermarket?” Of course there is, there's a much more strategic name out there. There's much more to say, but you know what? Piggly Wiggly. It's goofy. It's weird. Does it make sense? No, but don't take that away.

Mick Torbay: I don't even think the Grand Ole Opry is true to its original name.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. It's where it has just worked its way into people's hearts and minds, and it belongs to them now, and it's their thing, and they identify with it. And it's not yours to mess with because you've decided you want to be more strategic and try to accomplish something scientific.

Mick Torbay: Now you're talking, we're these last few examples have been big national brands at everybody has heard of. In our world, we're generally dealing with smaller companies, smaller brands, and we have to be honest about the fact that in a lot of cases, the brands either have no significant public presence or a very small one. Which means that it is less dangerous to do the things we're talking about. But it doesn't make it any less important to make these strategic decisions.

I'll give you an example of something there. I had a client up here in Canada called Pefferlaw Peat, PEAT, and they sold organic soil. And we ended up doing a rebrand and mostly changing their packaging. Why? Because the packaging said Pefferlaw Peat, and then it would say, “this is three-in-one mix”, or “this is house plant mix”, or “this is garden soil”, or “this is Peat Moss”, or whatever it is.

And we were looking at this thing. The most important thing about this is that it's organic. Organic soil. There are incredible amounts of work that you have to do to actually sell your soil, as organic. You can't add this, you can't add that. It can't be anywhere near this, it has to be tested. It has to be approved, it has to go through all to jump all through all these hoops, and it said organic soil in the tiniest typeface on the thing, and we were like, no. It needs to say organic in huge letters along the top, white on black, so that from across the store you can see organic on the top.

And then we changed the name from Pefferlaw Peat. It was made in the town of Pefferlaw, which no one's ever heard of, and we changed the name to Delicious Dirt. Which has alliteration, and also it forces you to rethink something because delicious and dirt do not go together well.

Chris Torbay:  And interestingly, the opposite of Sam The Record Man, but crucially, because it didn't have a huge brand. They originally called Peat, and it sounds like they were all kinds of soils. So dirt is more true to what they're offering has evolved into. And to give credit to the branding that we used to do, when you find that your business has actually changed from where you were, you've got to ask yourself, “Am I steering people the wrong way with my old identity?”

And this is what happened with All Drain, which is, if you just stuck with that, it's going to be very hard to sell air conditioners because now you're steering people the wrong way. So that's when you make a conscious decision.

Mick Torbay: But yeah, you do it when you have to.

Chris Torbay: When you're going to find yourself handicapping yourself by some brand elements that are holdovers from the past.

Ryan Chute: Another company that we saw that transition in was Morro Mechanical. Now, Mechanical is a pretty confusing name.

Mick Torbay: That's industry jargon for HVAC.

Ryan Chute: HVAC. Yeah. And it felt commercial. Is it cars? Is it home? Is it like, who knew? And ultimately, we ran a campaign using their name for an entire year. It was almost a year and a half, and they came to us and said, “We are getting so many people calling us Amazing Morrow,” because that was the core brandable chunk in our advertising, that we changed the name to Amazing Morrow. We did a brand refresh using the same logo, using the same mascot, and then refreshing that brand to a little bit more modernized colorings, keeping the same color scheme in general. And then Amazing Morrow instead of Moro Mechanical.

Chris Torbay: So you're keeping elements, Morrow is going to be a holdover from people who've used you for the last couple of decades, or whose dad used this client or whatever.

Mick Torbay: But that just goes to show another thing that I've ranted about several times, which is you actually don't get to decide what people call your company. The consumer does. Yes.

Ryan Chute: Nobody calls it Federal Express. They call it FedEx.

Mick Torbay: They were calling it FedEx before they finally gave in. FedEx changed their name.

Chris Torbay: FedEx finally said, “You know what? Let's stop getting around it. I guess we're FedEx.”

Mick Torbay: Yes. It's like you don't get to choose your own nickname. Your buddies choose your nickname. It's exactly the same with consumers. And so when you've got yourself a company called Galling in Henderson and Worthington and Armstrong, and it's like nobody says that. They just say Galling. It's just give up. Just call it Galling. Just embrace what the consumers need.

Chris Torbay: It's funny, and every law firm has done that. Now, all these law firms that used to be “Somebody, Somebody and Somebody.” Everyone's just naming themselves that first name because that's what everybody in the business was doing.  

Mick Torbay: You can fight it, but you can fight it at your peril. The consumer ultimately makes that decision, and consumers will always shorten it and make it easier.

Ryan Chute: And in a recent conversation with a law firm, they chose to just put the three initials of the owners. As the law firm, and I said that's infinitely worse than just using one of the names.

Mick Torbay: GHP is not a good name either.

Chris Torbay: Again, there's a few of those that work. It works for KFC because of the millions of dollars they put behind it, and they also did it because Kentucky Fried Chicken decided that perhaps they'd like to be known for being more than just from Kentucky, and fried is a kind of a bad word in food, and they wanted to make more than just chicken.

So all three words were bad, so let's call ourselves KFC.  But they also put millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising where they call themselves K-F-C, K-F-C, K-F-C. Then that can become a handle that sticks in people's minds. For a small firm, becoming yet another three-letter something in the world. Boy, that's tough sailing.

Ryan Chute: Other failures that I've seen, we had a client that had three letters as the initials of the owner, and the three letters meant absolutely nothing to anybody. So we made fun of that for the very, very strategic intent of being able to have the people remember these three unrelated random letters. That worked famously well for getting attention and having people pay attention to the brand. They chose to part ways with us and recognize that about seven months later, that was a crazy bad mistake because they made the letters mean something, and it was astoundingly boring, astoundingly superficial that anybody could have said. And on top of that, their agency of choice decided to completely steal a logo, a trademarked logo, and repurpose it to their vehicles, which puts them into a massive risk of getting sued. So it's not just about taking the easy path, the obvious path, the path that seems like everyone would get it.

The fact that we had three random letters that we could randomly say anything about that added humor, levity, and like ability to the mix, was actually an infinitely more powerful strategy than making it a generic blob and then having an allegedly legitimate agency rip off logos from trademark companies.

Mick Torbay: It's frightfully easy to get this wrong, and the fact that they came to one group and said fix this problem. Then soon after tried it again. It's if there's one thing that's worse than a rebrand, it's rebranding and then rebranding again immediately. Oh my God, no one's going to know who you are and what you stand for and why you matter if you're constantly changing your mind, what that is.

Ryan Chute: And it is a self-inflicted wound, and there's an important lesson to be learned, and not constantly changing. If you have to change marketing agencies that have a track record of success over and over again, tt's not the agency, it's you. Figure yourself out, and you're going to have more success because there's something that's stopping you from having that move forward.

Mick Torbay: And make sure that when you do this, the people you're working for make a change that is authentically you. Because then in a sense, it doesn't really matter what agency you're with. If the brand idea is authentically you, then it should survive an agency change. If it's just the whim of the agency, then that's not a good plan, frankly.

Chris Torbay: And I think you made a good point earlier, which is it's not that you should never do it. If your brand, large or small, does not have much that is out in the zeitgeist, it is not a household name, it is not a thing that people have grown up with or whatever, and it’s just really failing on all cylinders. By all means, try a revolutionary thing.

On the big brand side, Old Spice was an interesting example. It's a brand that had been around forever. And it just had completely fallen off the radar. Nobody was buying it. Even old people weren't buying it anymore. Like, it had really, really declined. So you go crazy, you do the man, Your Man Could Smell Like, you do a comedy where they'd always done hail and hearty old people and the little. exactly. They threw all of that out when a completely different direction.

Why? Because what they had was not hugely valuable. So yes, You take her back to the studs. And so not to tell people to always be afraid of it. Never take it back to the studs.

Mick Torbay: Do it when it’s right.

Chris Torbay: There are times do it when it's right. Honestly, look at yourself and say, “Am I keeping this old thing because I just kinda like it?” If no one in the market really knows, then start with something that's going to be more helpful for you.

Mick Torbay: When we changed Delicious Dirt, nobody said, “Oh, where's Pefferlaw Peat?” Nobody said that. They were like, “Oh, look. Organic soil, you can buy organic soil. If you want an organic garden, you're going to need organic soil. I'm going to buy that soil.”

There's a bag that says organic, and it was bigger than Delicious Dirt. Like it was more important.

Ryan Chute: And that goes back to my original question of can you rebrand a 38-year-old company? When you have no brand, when you have a company, when you have name recognition from the people that you've served, and fundamentally your marketplace

Mick Torbay: And a following, and people who are passionate about following you.

Ryan Chute: So ultimately, I think about our garage door friends in Florida, and they had a super legacy brand, like four and a half for decades. $5 million a year in revenue. They'd never broken that in revenue. They were partially commercial, partially residential and commercial in garage door, and they thought that they had a brand that was worth it.

Everyone thought it was worth keeping. That it was worth it too. They had their phone number and email address too, and their mailing address, so we could tell them, guess what? We have a new name. So that solves that problem. The rest of the city had no idea that they mattered or existed.

Because they never, ever did any marketing. Aside from showing up on Google pay per click or map pack. They were invisible. Why does that matter? Because there's no story to be told with their old name. There's a huge story to be told with a very strategic name that allows them to take a national play if they so choose.

Now they're a +$30 million company, and this was never even in the cards.

Mick Torbay: And they're in several states now too.

Ryan Chute: Because they had the wherewithal of an extraordinary operator in conjunction with a memorable brand that stands you out against all of the noise.

Chris Tobay: That you could build a good story around committed going, they not paying change it next year.

Mick Torbay: They're going to commit to it.

Chris Tobay: And they're not going to try another thing 18 months from now.

Ryan Chute: That's exactly, but that, that, that really does lean into kind of the other part of rebranding. If you plan on putting a truck wrap together and a new type face and some colors, and a mascot and just call it a day. You've done nothing.

Mick Torbay: You’re not changing it for the sake of changing it.

Chris Torbay: You've done a third of the work and you've made the other two thirds a little harder now because it may or may not set you up as well as you think to do the other two thirds.

Ryan Chute: Well, the other two-thirds. It pulls two points for me. And one is, do you create the cover of your book and name the book before you've written the story? Do you write the story and then name it appropriately from the story, and then put pictures that support that story appropriately to that? And are you telling a true story or a false story?

If you're telling a true story about yourself, you're going to be far more compelling in your own unique, entertaining way, but it still holds true. The second is that the people who absolutely obsess about their brand are driving it into their culture because your brand is your culture, and your culture is your brand, for the most successful.

Anyone who's not playing that game is not winning the game at the same level. They just aren't every single one that I've seen that kind of treats their brand like a, just a piece of the puzzle and not the fabric of their soul. These are the people that are not seeing the same.

Call Dad is a perfect example of how they live, breathe, eat, sleep, drink, smell, taste, everything is brand. Everything right down to their salmon shirts. Why? Because when you call Dad, and you go, “Dad, hey, nice pink shirt.” What does he say? “It's salmon.” They bought their shirts just so that they could make the classic dad joke that you would get because it's Call Dad. That is branding. That is an obsession in the culture that is unwavering, but it also entertains people until the time that they need what they sell.

What we discovered from that exercise was something bigger than even we anticipated. We knew that people who had that feeling about Dad were going to be very compelled to call Dad because the very first phone call you make when you get, taken to prison is dad. So the same holds true when the water's leaking or the air conditioning goes out. You call the person you trust the most to be able to do the thing that needs to be done. But we started to attract people who had bad relationships with their dad and wished they had somebody like that.

Chris Torbay: This is an opportunity for a good one, right?

Ryan Chute: So the double whammy that we got from this was extraordinary, incredibly touching, but that feeling is what moved this thing forward. And that really comes full circle, too. A brand isn't just a name, but the name has such force, it's so representative of what it is that you're trying to stand for or stand against. And to your point Chris, many times you've told us about the tennis ball story where you take a bucket of tennis balls and chuck them at somebody, they're probably not going to catch any. But if you just took one ball and threw it to them, there's a pretty good chance you're going to catch that ball. And having one big thing is almost counterintuitive to a lot of people in branding.

Mick Torbay: Except that if you want to be remembered by consumers, it's the only way to do it. So I think if you're talking about how to not screw up a rebrand, try and move towards something. Like in my Delicious Dirt example, we went from Pefferlaw Peat, which didn't really stand for much, Delicious Dirt stood for something. It stood for being organic and different. And in Chris's example with KFC, it was absolutely a move away from something and towards nothing at all. What does KFC stand for? It stands for nothing. It was a move away, but not a move towards. Whereas when we changed our client's AC company to Mo Better Garage, that was towards something that mattered and had an attitude, and that was memorable, and it was away from something that could have been confused with another big company that had a similar name. It was a move towards, so if you're going to do this, make sure you're moving towards something. And that going that direction is a smart thing to do.  

Ryan Chute: It's multi-strategic. It's the visuals, it's the editorials. It is the campaign able strategy, not just the cute and clever. No one cares about the toucan on the side of your truck. But when you now, instead of having a ridiculous toucan, which isn't even local to the area, turn it into Captain Kool and Captain Kool is the guy who's coming to get you cool. And we are able to capture a brand name that is one of the most prolific, familiar names from our past, well we're winning on multiple fronts here in getting the brand right. And all of these things have to be taken into consideration at once and put in the right order.

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Ryan Chute: A rebrand isn't a magic wand, it's a scalpel. Wield it carefully, and you can carve out something sharper, stronger, and more aligned with your future. Wield it recklessly, and you'll bleed out what little goodwill you had left. Don't start with logos, colors, mascots, or clever taglines, and certainly don't start out with a name.

Start with clarity. Ask, what do I stand for? What do I stand against, and how can I say something that no one else could possibly claim? If your current brand is still serving those answers, don't touch it. If it doesn't, just fix what's broken, not what's actually still working. The strongest brands are adaptable.

They evolve without losing their core. Their job is to nurture the essence, not smother it under some new truck wrap. As the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, clearly states, don't panic and don't forget to bring a towel. In short, don't cock it up. Your true story is your brand. The pictures you use to help tell your story and the title you give the book always follows the story. 

Focus on making your brand truer instead of newer. Consumers are smarter than and more forgiving than you fear, as long as you honor what they already love about you. Your brand is about people you serve. Keep them at the center, and you'll never go wrong. Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Want to spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

Let’s be honest—marketing myths aren’t harmless little white lies. They’re stealthy budget-eaters, reputation-robbers, and strategy-warpers that make good brands do dumb things.

In Episode 23 of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Chris Torbay, and Mick Torbay pull back the curtain on the most expensive misconceptions in marketing—from chasing perfect attribution to thinking cheap production is a shortcut to success—and lay bare the truth about what actually drives results.

They dismantle the dangerous belief that reach beats frequency, expose why DIY media buying rarely works, and explain why excellence isn’t a luxury—it’s a competitive weapon. Plus, they remind you that marketing and sales are two very different beasts, and that customers rarely buy “the best”—they buy “better enough.”

Because if your campaigns are smart but your strategy is broken… you’ve just spent money entertaining your audience, not converting them.

Episode Highlights

• The costly trap of perfect attribution
• Why cheap production often costs more than premium
• The false confidence of DIY media buying
• Why frequency beats reach every time
• How excellence becomes a competitive advantage
• The subtle but critical difference between marketing and sales
• Why “better enough” wins more often than “the best”

🎧 Hit play—and finally make your marketing work like you always hoped.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

👉 Two Questions:

1. Are your campaigns driving results—or just looks good on paper?
2. And when people notice your brand… do they actually act?
   

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In this episode of Advertising in America, we're talking about marketing myths that just don't measure up.

Which advertising message brought about a particular sale? I saw this ad. I bought a product. That's what the business owner wants.

Pay enough to make it awesome and nothing fancy after that. Hire smart people to solve your strategy problems, write your campaigns, and buy your media. Don't do that yourself. You'll get electrocuted.

Format doesn't fucking matter. The only thing that matters is how many people are you reaching? How often and for how many dollars?

That one time and he sold a $50,000 roof, and then nothing for a month and a half because that's not how it fucking works. That's not how it works.

But if you want me to think that you're smart, skilled, meticulous, and committed to excellence, make ads that reflect that. Yeah, your nephew's got a Mac, an iMovie, and you'll probably do it all for just weed money, but it's not worth the money you'll save, and it's not worth the money you'll spend.

Ryan Chute: Henry Ford once said,

“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time.”

In this episode of Advertising in America, we're talking about marketing myths that just don't measure up. In a marketplace filled with alternative facts, here's Chris to check some facts. Chris?

Chris Torbay: Hire actors who will make your ideas great on the radio and on TV. Hire photographers and musicians, and directors with talent whose talent will reflect positively on your brand. If your positioning is the bargain basement, cheapest, low-cost provider in the world, by all means make your ads look super cheap too, and you can be damn sure I'm gonna believe you. But if you want me to think that you're smart, skilled, meticulous, and committed to excellence, make ads that reflect that, yeah, your nephew's got a Mac, an iMovie, and he'll probably do it all for just weed money, but it's not worth the money you'll save and it's not worth the money you'll spend.

Ryan Chute: I love that you pretend like you're not working for weed money also. Between Mick and his wife, they have two doctorates. Be sure to ask him about that sometime. Now, here's Mick to talk about more marketing myths that don't measure up. Mick.

Mick Torbay: Okay. My myth is, measurement is everything. I love it when a client asks us how we're gonna measure success because we have a really solid answer for that. We are going to measure success by how much money you're making, but then sometimes that seems like it's not enough for them. They want to measure really closely. They want to connect the dots precisely. They want to know which advertising message brought about a particular sale. I saw this ad. I bought a product. That's what the business owner wants. Sadly, that's not a thing, and it makes them really mad when I tell them that. Still true though. And just because you want to be able to connect every dot doesn't mean you can actually do that or even that they're connected the way you think they should be.

But it does raise an interesting point. Where did this obsession with measurement come from? “I wanna have a different phone number on the radio ads and another number on the TV ads, and another one on the trucks, another one on the digital ads so we can see which one is working.” You think that's crazy? Sometimes they have a different web address for different radio stations. They're not wondering if radio works. They're wondering if sports-talk works. or if it's new country that brings in the sale?

It's all nonsense. It's a myth. Radio works. TV works, digital works, social stuff works, direct-mail works. When did you all become research scientists, trying to ask, answer the grand question of “What advertising works?” And remember, if you actually do think you're a scientist, and you're not, by the way, your research is completely worthless unless you have a control. Do you have a control? Do you even know what I'm talking about? If you don't, then stop asking for measurements. If you want to know if country music works, you have to run a campaign, reaching a fixed number of people, a fixed number of times a week, and you have to run that for about a year, and then the following year, you have to run commercials in a different market, this time on a sports talk station. Again, for a year, being sure to reach the exact same number of people the same number of times.

Oh, and you have to have the same message, two identical commercials. This is a control. Remember, at the end of the second year, you can compare your results and consider the data. I don't know about you, but my clients don't have time to do a study like that. And luckily, this shit has already been studied over and over again, and the results are, format doesn't fucking matter.

The only thing that matters is how many people you are reaching, how often, and for how many dollars. Ditto for TV, ditto for digital. When you wrapped your trucks, did you measure the results of that? When you changed your uniforms, did you measure the results of that with a control, of course? Send 50% of your staff out with the old uniform and the other half with the new ones, and track the productivity of the two groups. No, because that would be stupid, crazy, and a waste of time and money. Ditto for marketing.

Trust the big data advertising works. Do it well. Do it often and stop pretending that one commercial makes anyone do anything. It all works together. The marketing, the truck wrap, the uniform, the staff training, measure it all together. How much money are you making? That's how you measure success.

Ryan Chute: And then there's the facts, Jack. When we get back, we'll debunk more marketing junk. But first a word from our sponsor.

Ryan Chute: Chris is taking swings at cheap thinking and Mick smackdown measurement madness. So let's keep busting, because the myths don't stop there. Some of the most dangerous ones are the sweet little lies business owners tell themselves every day. Let's walk through a few more of our faves. We've talked about the myth of production, and we've talked about the myth of measurement. What are some of the thoughts that you have countering each other on each one of these myths?

Mick Torbay: I’m not sure I want to counter him necessarily, but there's an aspect of that myth that I think is interesting. When you look at things in terms of line items, then obviously any reasonable person is gonna say, “How do I make that line item less?” Because anytime you can reduce a line item that goes straight to the bottom line, that makes everybody happy.

But I put that in the context of what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to get a job done, or are you trying to win a game? Here's what I mean. The three of us are very familiar with private equity. And private equity is known for coming in, buying a company. And the first thing they wanna do is reduce efficiencies, right? That's how they make their money, is they reduce efficiencies. Can we buy toilet paper for less? Can we find ways of reducing costs and laying off staff, and downsizing things? And one of the first things that private equity companies generally do is fire us. And it seems very self-serving to say, I think that's a mistake.

I know why they do it. And that's because they can absolutely find somebody who can write their ads, who will charge less than me. And I think that's the conversation that goes on at these companies, “Can we find someone who can write commercials for less than these guys?” And the answer is, “Oh yes, absolutely. Unequivocally yes.”

But you are thinking in terms of how much does it cost to get this job done? And if you think of it in terms of getting the job done, then if you can get it done for a lower amount, then you do that. If you change the thought to how do I win? All of that goes away because if you talk to the New York Yankees and say, “Can we find somebody who can go out there and play baseball for less than that guy?”

Oh, yes. You could find people to play baseball for a lot less.

Chris Torbay: He wants millions of dollars, apparently.

Mick Torbay: You can find a guy who's who will give up his hundred thousand dollars a year job to do it. Will he win games? No, but he can swing, he can hit, he can pitch, he can run around the bases, he can do all of the, ostensibly, all of the things that those players can do. The only thing he can't do is beat the other team. The only thing they can't do is win the game. So ask yourself, when you're making these decisions about, for example, production, are you saying to yourself, “How much does it cost to do this job? Or how much does it cost to win the game?” Because when you're making a commercial, you're trying to fucking beat somebody. You're trying to beat the other guy. You're trying to win. You're not trying to tick a box. You're trying to win.

Chris Torbay: Oh, good. We got a commercial made. Done.

Mick Torbay: And I think that mental mistake that people are making when they just think of things as a line item and say, “Can I do this cheaper? Can my nephew with a camera do this?” Yeah, sure. But can he win? Can he beat somebody else? We have to beat people, right? Our job as the ad company is to grow our clients' business to make them more money. Where does that money come from? Somebody else. It comes from somebody else.

We're not flying new customers into your market. We're taking business away from your competitors. We're making them switch. That's fricking brutal. We're making them change their minds. And you think you can accomplish that by simply doing the job? No, we're winning. We are the winners, and they are the losers. This is harsh stuff we're talking about. If you wanna win the game, you need to get fricking winners, not just get people who can do the job. I get fucking pissed about this.

Chris Torbay: Take that losers.  

Ryan Chute: That is really one of the myths that we outlined of the big ones that we constantly hear. Anyone can do marketing? Well, yes. Anyone technically can do marketing.

Mick Torbay: If you're ticking the box.

Chris Torbay: If you just need to put somebody in the chair.

Ryan Chute: There has been so many astoundingly obvious cases of massive failures of that exact thing. And it's not just a one-person thing either. It's not just the writer who matters. It's not just the media buyer that matters, but it's also the operator that matters. If the operator's not behind the brand, if the operator's not championing this at every single level, our most successful companies have always been obsessed with the brand. It's not just that this is my brand. This is my culture. This is everything.

Mick Torbay: My rant applies to everything. It applies to the media buyer. Some people say, “Oh, I've been buying media for a while, I can do it.” It's no, you can't. You can do it. You can do it. Yes, I could buy media too. I wouldn't do it well, but I could do it. And I can't do it in such a way that my media buy can beat another professional media buyer's buy.

Ryan Chute: It was fascinating to hear a person of interest, not what I consider a prospect, but a potential prospect for the Wizard of Ads say, “Oh, I buy my own media. I'm pretty good. It's a local station. I can get a really good deal outta 'em 'cause I'm a good negotiator.” I'm like. You have articulated everything that you don't know.

Mick Torbay: When you walk into the radio station, do your negotiation. You sound like a guy who walks into a Vegas casino and says, “I can win at blackjack. I've got a system.” Oh, they love people with systems. Please come in, try your system at our casino's new wing, I'll give you free tickets to Penn and Teller if you wanna try out your system with me. They love these things. You think that you can do that as well as someone who only buys media all day, every day and is constantly trying to win?

Chris Torbay: And this is the thing that gets me, is as soon as you reverse that argument and say, “I could probably install that water heater myself. You really just gotta connect the hot cold, plug it in.”

Mick Torbay: “I watched the YouTube video. It's not actually that complicated.”

Chris Torbay: There's lots of videos that show me how to do that. And they will go on about how “No, you gotta have years of experience to know whether such and such,” and they do, and they're right. Exactly right. So it's like, how come it doesn't apply for, nobody says, “I could do a little dental work. I've got a mouth.”

Mick Torbay: I got a drill.

Chris Torbay: “I brush my teeth every day. So I can certainly help you with your cavity.” What's. Wow. How hard can it be?

Ryan Chute: This is it. Fun fact, leaders in businesses absolutely call out marketing as the number one challenge that they have in their businesses every single day. And now marketing is a monstrous category. It includes sales, it includes advertising, it includes lead capture, and all of these different components. And yet they feel like getting it out to the lowest common bidder is going to be the solution to piece together this highly complex piece of machinery.

Mick Torbay: How many times have you been in a situation where a client says, “Hey, I'm gonna have an in-house marketing person. I haven't done that before. I'm doing that now.” It's oh, that's great. “It's my niece.” And it's okay, “oh, you're screwed.”

Your niece asked you for a job, and you said I'll put her somewhere where she can't do any damage because she doesn't know how to install water heaters.

Ryan Chute: She always wanted to do marketing.

Mick Torbay: And she knows something about social media,

Chris Torbay: She likes to Tweet.

Mick Torbay: We're looking to beat professional marketers.

Ryan Chute: You're putting yourself in a position of a special kind of screwed.

Mick Torbay: If your niece is 50 and really good at marketing, please do that.

Chris Torbay: If you're hiring away from Anheuser-Busch, there you go. By all means.

Ryan Chute: There's a skillset there, and there's a huge difference between a writer, a videographer, a marketing ops person, a strategist, a media buyer, and nobody is all of those people.

Chris Torbay: And that is one of those great myths that we're up against, which is, anybody can do marketing. And the number of times you've made this point, that's the number of times they promote a guy from the sales department to the marketing department, or from this department to the marketing department. It's “because he knows the stuff.” It's like new; it's a different job.

Mick Torbay: Sales and marketing are not the same job at all.

Chris Torbay: Those are not the same job. And just because you watch TV and you've seen tons of commercials yourself.

Mick Torbay: I watched all of Mad Men. I can do marketing.

Chris Torbay: Yeah, exactly. Guess what? I watched all of ER. Do not give me a scalpel!

Ryan Chute: They do think that it's the same. I grew up thinking that I knew lots about marketing. I knew lots about sales and promotion, but I didn't know anything about marketing, really to speak of, and you and I spoke about this before, Mick; there's a tension that needs to be between sales and marketing.

Mick Torbay: Their goals are not perfectly aligned, are they? No. And the worst case is when somebody puts somebody in charge of both of those jobs because that's a problem. Marketing's job is to make the phone ring. Sale’s job is to answer the phone and close a deal, and once the phone has rung, marketing's job is done. Sale’s job has just started. They're different.

Ryan Chute: And that's where most of our clients are hitting the wall with marketing, is that they think that marketing is selling.

Chris Torbay: They really do.

Ryan Chute: When selling is a subset of marketing. And marketing does not sound like selling at top of funnel. At the top of funnel, it’s about making a person feel enough that they trust you to show up at their door or come into your showroom or whatever the case might be.

Mick Torbay: To give you a shot.

Ryan Chute: Give you a shot, and it sounds nothing like sales. That's the very first lesson I learned at the first Wizard of Ads™ meeting with the Partners was, “Oh, I don't know what I'm doing here.”

Mick Torbay: It's one of the things I liked, actually, when I met you. I have to confess, I had a bit of that same myth in my own brain. I thought I knew about sales because I knew about marketing, and I was just as wrong. But when I met you and, “Oh shit. I didn't know anything about sales, actually.” I thought it was just getting people to walk through the door, and then they would magically purchase things. No, it’s not as simple as that.

Ryan Chute: There's a little bit of a dance, and that's why people struggle in sales. That's why people struggle in marketing, because people are gonna continue to struggle in the thing that is difficult for everyone, and that's communication. One, because people are a wild card, we don't know how they're going to respond individually. Masses of people are predictable, but the individual is not. What do we do? We have to play two different games as the game is being played, and that's a struggle for a lot of people.  

Mick Torbay: So there's a myth right there. Sales and marketing are the same. No. They should be fighting each other.

Ryan Chute: They’re dramatically different. They should be in tention with each other. They shouldn't be; they shouldn't be in friction with each other.

Mick Torbay: But sales should want more leads, and marketing should want you to close more deals. That's it. But they're not the same thing…

Ryan Chute: And here's one of the more brilliant things that I've ever heard was from Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, and he said, most people believe that their customers want the best thing, when in fact, what their customers want is something a little less shitty than what they have right now. Now, he was British, and he probably said that a lot nicer with a fancy accent; we can all agree that he's the epitome. But he makes a very valid point.

Mick Torbay: Almost nobody buys the best.

Chris Torbay: Anything actually, and if you think of a category, automotive is great, and it's true all the way up the top and bottom of the automotive category, right? Which is, what's the best car? I don't know. It's the McLaren (McLaren Automotive Ltd). It's the Lamborghini Aventador (Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.) or something like that. But you know what? People who want that car, they'll buy a Porsche ( Porsche Cars North America) because it's pretty damn good. Holy cow. I can drive a car that'll do it on a racetrack. And it's like then there are people who wish they had a Porsche, but they go, “I'll take the Civic Type-R, it's pretty sporty or whatever.” Like you pick the one that you want, that's a little better.

Mick Torbay: And on the same topic of myths, I'm sure there are an equal number of business owners who believe the exact opposite of what you just said, which is that consumers are looking for the least expensive. And that's why so much marketing is about “come to me, and you'll pay less.”

Think of the major Rent-a-Car companies, right? You got Discount, you got Thrifty, you got Payless, and you got Dollar. All of them are, “If you rent from me, it will cost less money.” Is that the only thing you have to say to people? “If you purchase products for me, you won't pay as much money?” So, that's just as stupid a myth because I don't believe that consumers are ever necessarily looking for the least expensive unless all other things are equal. If they believe all other things are equal, then marketing has failed.

Ryan Chute: True. And everyone would be driving a little Kia.

Mick Torbay: Whatever's the cheapest car, I don't even know what it is, but it would be the cheapest car. And they're not the most popular.

Ryan Chute: Base-level trucks and everything. And people don't. They gravitate towards the middle. If we're talking about the masses, having worked at Ford and a lot of other major manufacturers and automotives, they're going for the midline products 80% of the time. There's a few high-end ones that are sold. There are a few bottom-line ones sold.

Mick Torbay: Which means people do understand value.

Chris Torbay: And everyone’s got their own equation. What's worth paying for? Is this the best car? Even people who are buying a Mercedes, and a lot of people would think that's the best car. No, the Maybach is the best. There's always, there's another one above that. That's why I say there's a supercar that is better than the Lamborghini Aventador, right? There's always something more, but the equation doesn't work out. There are people at whatever stratus you're on in that thinking, it's, I would pay this much more to have this, but pay in this much more to have that, which is arguably better, but it's not worth the extra money for you.

Mick Torbay: There are always diminishing returns,

Ryan Chute: There's also a really interesting juxtaposition between an internally triggered purchase and an externally triggered purchase. An identity-driven purchase, like a vehicle. You go into a dealership, and you look to find the one that's just a bit better. And then a bit better than what you have right now. So something a little less shitty than what you have now. It's newer. It's shinier. It's got fewer miles on it, the whole gamut. The exact same thing in a hot water tank is the reverse of that. The only reason you would buy something more expensive is because you're getting a better warranty. You're getting something that's going to last longer and cause you less burden. So people are transactional in that externally triggered grudge purchase. We're relational or more relational-minded, because we're feeding our identity in one, and we're feeding our identity of being a good buyer in the other.

Chris Torbay: But equally, they will change their equation of, it is worth this much money for these advantages that you just named, versus is it worth this much money for some other advantages, I don't know. That's not as meaningful to me.

Mick Torbay: And we also have experience, like we have life experience. The  famous tagline for Stella Artois, “Reassuringly Expensive.” Which I think is a great line. It really is. Fulfills all the obligations of a good tagline. Reassuring the expensive, but I have a thing that I have in my head, which is the opposite of that, which is suspiciously affordable.

If someone says to me, a water heater. What does it do? Makes your water hot. Is there a Ferrari of water heaters? I don't think so. So I should really just get the cheapest one, right? If someone said, “Hey, we got this new water heater, it's $150,” I'd be like, “Hold on a sec.”

Chris Torbay: This is my basement, what we're talking about. I got some valuables down there.

Mick Torbay: “I don't know about this $200 water heater. That sounds like a terrible idea.” Why would I, as a consumer, not want the same thing for less money? It's because all of my experiences told me that the cheapest one is shit.

Chris Torbay: It can't possibly be the same thing.

Ryan Chute: And it gets grayer when there's less available information. Boxes in basements and in garages, cooling your house or heating your water, are so much different than the overtly public of lululemon pants and Ford Motor Company F1-50s, and that has a fairly dramatic effect on how people buy. The challenge is that when we're serving home service customers, they think that they can do internally triggered and identity purchase marketing tactics, and that's just not real. That's a myth that needs to be debunked, but it's 90% of the marketing messaging that's out there about marketing, which creates a dynamic, a challenge for us.

Another really interesting myth for us is that we've seen for years and years is that the reach is the thing that you're looking to get most when your talking about media buying. When we are talking about media, we want to reach the most amount of people with our media.

Mick Torbay: And that's a myth that makes perfect sense, and that's why it sticks, because it is very easy to explain to somebody we're gonna be talking to people about your business.

Do you want us to talk to 50,000 or would you like us to talk to 100,000? Shit.

Chris Torbay: More please.

Mick Torbay: I want more, please. Whereas, say we want to talk to these same 50, we want to talk to them a lot more often. That is not as clear to me as a non-marketing expert, why that would be. It actually takes experience, or in our case, decades and decades of doing it and finding out, to find out why would I want to reach 50,000 people three times instead of 150,000 people once in a week.

Except that what we know is for the same dollars. Dollar for dollar, reaching 150,000 people once a week or reaching $50,000 three times a week, you will make money, more money, reaching 50,000 people three times a week. We've done the research, we've done the math. That's the sweet spot. You reach 10,000 people five times a week. That's down, that's now a diminishing return. There is a sweet spot. Roy figured this out. He figured this out 20 years ago. We don't have to keep running these same experiments, but it's not as intuitive, is it?

Chris Torbay: No. And it comes from something we've talked about in previous episodes, about just because somebody sees your ad, the job isn't done, you haven't ticked the box. It's not a killer ad. It is that relationship you have, especially with a campaign, right? The more you see that ad, the more you go, “I like this campaign, I like these characters. I'm following this ongoing plot.” If there's enough going on in the ad, maybe if you hear it once, you don't hear all the jokes, you don't hear all the references, you don't get all the points, you want to hear it that second time, that third time, because there's more for you to get out of it each time. The value of those repeated listens, and then the next spot, and the next spot, is about building a relationship. And you don't build a relationship by going, “I saw the ad, they heard my ad, they have internalized everything I wanted to say to them because I tagged them.”

Mick Torbay: And that comes back to measurement again. The idea that you do a mailer campaign, a direct mail campaign, and then you wait for the phone to ring. And if it does, and if the phone rings, you pat yourself on the back. And if it doesn't, you say, “I guess direct mail doesn't work.” Well, no. Direct mail's like everything else, you have to hit them over the head with it over and over and over again.

But it's I remember this time I had a client in the roofing business, and we had a really great campaign for them. And I happened to know that the first commercial ran at 6:30 AM on the first day, and somebody called my client at 8:00 AM. It had literally run once. And they called the client at 8:00 AM, and I swear to God, he said the person on the phone said, “I've been hearing your ads.” No, you haven't. You used the wrong, you shouldn't have put an "S" on the end. Like you heard the ad once, and my client sold him a $50,000 roof, and he was like, “I love this new ad of yours.”

It’s like, “Hold on, listen.” And let me look you in the eye. That doesn't happen ever. Okay. Never ever does that happen. I tell this story because it doesn't happen.

Ryan Chute: Just that one time.

Mick Torbay: That one time, and he sold a $50,000 roof, and then nothing for a month and a half because that's not how it fucking works. That's not how it works. But it was just, but God, he wanted to, he was like so proud of this message, and I'm like, “We don't know if this is a good message or not. We're gonna know in a year.”

Ryan Chute: Now you do know in a year, because you now have revenue and leading and lagging indicators that show that. But again, we're chasing these red herrings is just absolutely exhausting for business owners. It's about trusting in a system that has been proven to work over and over again. Now, I find in a lot of cases, we either have the companies that are both operationally proficient and culture-oriented that drive this home and blow up.

The companies who blame their marketing for not working are the companies who are not delivering in the operations. They don't have the capacity, they don't have the wherewithal or even the right mix to do it right. We find a lot of these folks end up going off the reservation and doing some other stuff, and then blaming the whole thing from falling apart when they didn't actually continue running the marketing system, and it's the system that works as a whole. That system is always going to be more durable, more it's going to be stronger when you're running it as a single unit rather than a bunch of ad hoc little projects with the hopes of capturing that discretionary short-term lead that you're desperate for because something broke, or a pay-per-click went off the rails, or a “whatever” happened.

All of a sudden, you're beholden to these channels, and you haven't built any foundation. You're just on a house of sticks, and there's a windstorm coming.

Mick Torbay: And very often people can draw an incorrect conclusion. I think that's where a lot of these myths come from. People will draw an incorrect conclusion, and then they'll go and spread it around, and you hear anecdotal stuff from a competitor, or not a competitor, but like a friend of yours who's in business, and they're like, “Oh, don't do direct mail. I tried direct mail, and it doesn't work.” Or “Don't bother with TV. I tried TV, and it doesn't work.” It's like, are we sure TV didn't work, or did you run too much reach and not enough frequency? What was your commercial? Was it good? Was it shitty? Was it a good ad? We don't know. They're drawing the conclusion that the medium is a failure or that the channel is the problem. And there are a hundred other variables; it might have been that the production was rubbish. It might have been that the writing was no good. That's like me saying, “Hey, listen, I tried to build a house myself outta wood. Turns out wood's not a good idea, because I built it and it was just crap. It was a crap house. Don't try using wood.”

Chris Torbay: Don't use lumber for gas sake.

Mick Torbay: “Because they were all twisted and pointed the wrong way and the rain was, nails are coming in, it was, and then it fell over.” Definitely don't use wood.

Ryan Chute: Yeah. So true. And there's, it's we poke a little fun because we care. Ultimately, what it comes down to is there's an awful lot of misinformation. There's more misinformation and flat-out false information.

Mick Torbay: More examples of advertising that fails than an advertising that really works. That's for sure.

Ryan Chute: Exactly. So we'll have more of these episodes that we talk about, the myths, because we could go on forever on this. But really, I have to find a place where we can put a pin in it.

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Ryan Chute: Marketing myths are like urban legends. They stick around because they're easy, comforting, and sound just true enough to be dangerous. The truth is less glamorous, but far more powerful. Advertising doesn't have to be an expense, but being unremarkable is expensive. Perfect attribution is a fool's errand; measure what really matters.

Instead, cheap work looks cheap. This only works if you're the cheapest guy in town. Doubling down on your budget is no promise of doubling. Your lead flow or revenue reach is meaningless without frequency and impact. Marketing takes three essential elements to work best: brand awareness, sales activation, and lead capture.

And people rarely buy the best. They buy better enough. If you want your business to grow, ditch the myths. Spend enough to be excellent. Commit to the long game and trust your proven truths instead of chasing the fables of failure. This is how you bust myths and build empires. Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

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Let’s be honest—most marketing fails aren’t spectacular explosions. They’re slow, silent assassinations carried out by lazy writing, clueless assumptions, and business owners who think “quality, service, selection” is a personality.

In this episode of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Chris Torbay, and Mick Torbay break open the vault of tragic (and hilarious) marketing disasters—from Chevy’s “Nova” debacle to Subway’s catastrophic Jared endorsement—and extract the lessons every smart advertiser should tattoo on their forehead.

They dismantle the false belief that great ideas travel universally, warn against putting your reputation in the hands of celebrities (or yourself), and explain why unforgettable brands rely on campaigns—not one-off “killer ads.”

Because if your commercial is remembered but you aren’t… you just paid to promote entertainment. Not your business.

Episode Highlights

• Why translating your campaigns literally can kill it figuratively
• The hidden danger of celebrity spokespeople (even “safe” ones)
• How lazy writing quietly sabotages your brand
• Why “cute and clever” gets crushed by “campaign-able”
• The tragic fate of ads people remember—but can’t attribute
• The secret sauce behind long-term brand-building

🎧 Hit play—and let’s make sure your next campaign plays everywhere… not just in Peoria.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

👉 Two Questions:

1. Is your ad unforgettable—or just your joke?
2. And if people remember your story... does it actually lead back to your brand?
   

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In today's episode of Advertising in America, we look at the tragic mistakes marketers make.

It's fun to learn from other people's mistakes, isn't it? Other people are so stupid. I'm glad I'm not as stupid as other people.

I can think of a couple of marketing fails that stick in my memory, and while they might not be the most famous or the most tragic, I'm choosing the ones from which we can learn something.

Jared Fogel became famous by claiming he lost 200 pounds by eating nothing but Subway sandwiches for something like a year. It was big news, and Subway jumped on the Jared bandwagon quick. Subway went all in on Jared. The only problem was that Jared had a secret, and when he was charged with sexual misconduct with minors, it put a damper on his whole career as a sandwich celebrity.

One of the oldies but goodies was Chevrolet's attempt to launch the Chevy Nova in South America. After a few months, sales just refused to take off until someone pointed out that "Nova" in Spanish and Portuguese, which means “doesn't go.”

Ryan Chute: The greatest lessons are forged in failure. So let's fight through some real follies. First, here's Chris to focus on a few fabulous fumbles and bumbles, Chris.

Chris Torbay:  In marketing, there are some great stories of big, respected, should-have-known-better brands doing things that went famously wrong. And while they're good fun to laugh at, because we personally never make mistakes, we can also learn from what went wrong. And usually it's something pretty basic.

One of the oldies but goodies was Chevrolet's attempt to launch the Chevy Nova in South America. It was selling well in North America. Hey, let's rinse and repeat and roll it out in South America and rake in the profits. After a few months, sales just refused to take off, and the executives were baffled until someone pointed out that Nova sounds like Nova in Spanish and Portuguese, which means doesn't go. Yeah, not a good name for a car.

The other similar one was the rollout of Coca-Cola's Coke Adds Life campaign in the nineties. Somehow, the Chinese translation of this global tagline ended up closer to “Coke, brings your relatives back from the dead,” which you know, it doesn't.

The lesson from these two famous fails starts with your audience.

Who are they? What do they know? What do they like? What's their experience? What language do they speak, and how do they engage with your product or even your category? And just because your idea resonated with one group of people answering these questions doesn't mean it will work on a group with different answers.

In the Vaudeville era (the most popular form of American entertainment from the mid-1880s until the early 1930s), Groucho Marx asked the question, “Will it play in Peoria?” By which he meant, is this a lot of New York comedy for New Yorkers, or is this stuff that is universal? And that's a good question to ask. Politicians have picked up on it ever since. John Ehrlichman in the sixties, Ronald Reagan in the eighties, it was a way of asking their own people whether the things they were going on about in their speeches were too elite or suitable for the masses and no, people from Peoria, it doesn't mean that Washington thinks you're a bellwether of strategic judgment.

What politicians mean when they ask “Will it play in Peoria” is, will dumb people get it?

But that's a fair point in marketing. People just aren't paying that close attention to your dumb commercial in the first place, unless you make it relevant and compelling to them and speak their language. Know enough about your market to know what people are like, what they need, and what they think. And don't just assume that something that works in one market is gonna crush it in another, or what's meaningful to you is automatically meaningful to them. There's a reason Japanese companies don't run the Japanese commercials in America. Go ahead, Google them. You’ll see.

Ryan Chute: Only bellends use words like bellwether. Chris, such a knob. Mick, have you put up with your brother for so long? You deserve an award. What are some doozies you've learned from your years in marketing mayhem?

Mick Torbay: I can think of a couple of marketing fails that stick in my memory, and while they might not be the most famous or the most tragic, I'm choosing the ones that we can learn something from.

And so the first one I'll mention is Subway, and of course, Jared. Jared Fogel became famous by claiming he lost 200 pounds by eating nothing but Subway sandwiches for something like a year. It was big news, and Subway jumped on the Jared bandwagon quick, perhaps too quick to do a routine background check.

Subway went all in on Jared. The only problem was Jared had a secret, and when he was charged with sexual misconduct with minors, it put a damper on his whole career as a sandwich celebrity. He's in prison now. So that story has a somewhat happy ending, but not so much for his victims or for Subway. It's all well and good to distance yourself from a child molester, but it would be better not to be connected to one in the first place.

When you tie your brand to a celebrity, you get the benefit of everything that's good about that celebrity and also what’s bad. And just because everything is good now doesn't mean that it can't change. People do bad, stupid, illegal stuff. That's the trouble with people. So when you're using people, choose them carefully, and you might think, “I can make sure that doesn't happen to me. I'll just put myself in the ads. I have no baggage. I have no skeletons in the closet. I'm squeaky clean.” Are you?

We had a client in Florida who managed to get himself a rather public driving, while intoxicated charge, and lucky for us, he wasn't the star of the TV commercials that would complicate things. Remember, if you're the business owner or anyone driving a truck wrapped with your company name, everything you do is a representation of that business, of the brand.

If you cut somebody off, the company cuts somebody off. If you get pinched for doing something bad or stupid or worse, it's your company that takes the hit. That is a tragic marketing mistake.

Actors can be replaced. They could replace the Geico lizard with another lizard if the original lizard did some really bad reptile stuff. I'll bet JELL-O (owned by Kraft Heinz) was thanking their lucky stars they hadn't been featuring Cosby on their commercials for a decade or so. Just imagine how ugly it would be if they had to quickly remove an accused rapist from all their packaging and marketing materials, and who would've guessed a guy like him? He'd never do anything bad, right?

Humans, we suck.

Choose your partners very carefully, and if you're putting yourself forward or allowing yourself to be put forward, that means you can't drive after drinking. You can't tweet your controversial opinions, and you can't take your girlfriend to a Coldplay concert if you're married to someone else. It's hard enough to do good marketing when you do all this stuff right? Don't make it harder.

Ryan Chute: I'd be willing to bet. Jared enjoys several happy endings a week in prison. I hear he still allegedly prefers the six-inch option, though, allegedly. When we return, we'll discuss the pitfalls to avoid and the roadblocks to hurdle, but first, a word from our sponsor.

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Ryan Chute: All right. Let's move from the epic fails into the silent killers of good advertising. The ones that don't make headlines, but quietly sabotage good brands every day. Mick.

Mick Torbay: One thing we have to be careful about when we're talking, discussing a topic of essentially what not to do, it is possible to take the wrong lesson from that and say, then we'd better just not do anything risky or interesting or controversial. And that's not a solution either, because if you simply say if all we do is we just narrow our message down to quality, service selection, price, convenient location, free parking to professional staff who really cares about your needs, then we can't go wrong. It's no, actually, that's wrong too.

Like we're still talking about good marketing, we're still talking about marketing that's gonna move the needle. You do have to do things that are risky. You do have to do things that stand out and move the needle and shake people up and disrupt the consumer's mindset to get them to think something new. For goodness' sake, don't simply say, then let's just aim for the middle where it's safe. Safety is actually, yeah.

Chris Torbay: Boredom is also a tragic fact.

Mick Torbay: Boredom is bad, too.

Chris Torbay: And one of the reasons that list of things that you rhymed off maybe is great. In my examples, it was people who made language mistakes, right? They didn't understand the translation of Nova. They didn't understand the translation of the Coca-Cola thing. That's not really a risk, I guess, for a lot of our clients, but the idea of speaking in the language of the business and not speaking in the language of the consumer, I think really is.

When you see these ads that say quality service, selection, low prices, plenty of free parking, all those sorts of things, that's the business saying, “here's all the things we'd like to say about our business”, as opposed to saying, I wonder what it is that our consumers are interested in. What's on their minds? What's bugging them? What are the problems they need to solve? What are the challenges they're faced with? How can I address those things? And so again, that's about knowing who your consumer is and work backwards from them. What are they faced with? And then how can you position all of your stuff in a way that helps them?

And maybe that's where the speak in the right language metaphor actually translates to reality.

Ryan Chute: What I'm hearing from you is both is your brand story isn't necessarily the story of your brand. And what I mean by that is it may not be the origin story of the owner of the company and the legacy that he or she is carrying on. It may be just some outrageous character that's fighting an injustice in the world.

Like the HL Bowman or the the villain character that's not really a villain, that anti-hero of Billy Ray's hole digging, and being able to create a feeling around, in a lot of cases for who we work with, a home service company, but even with retailers and professional services like legal and medical, all need to have these more interesting than what your business actually is advertising, to get you noticed so that you can have something far more meaningful than the table stakes. Far more, far less risky than an endorsement spokesperson who may or may not be a good representative.

There's loads of times when we have clients that we would never put on the television, and that's just good business. But there's also loads of times where that makes a great idea.

Mick Torbay: These stories need to be curated, right? Everybody's got a story, but nobody's story is palatable in its entirety. There's always going to be some things we're going to want to skip over. And there's gonna be some things that we wanna focus on. And in a sense, it's the job of your ad guy to make sure that we're pointing the spotlight at the stuff that's gonna resonate with the consumer, and maybe not so much light up the part where maybe you did time in prison, or were struggling with addiction. These are all real human things; I gave two examples that two of my clients have faced. It's not that we're judging people for that. It's just that we also understand that the consumer is not necessarily able to look at those big pictures the way we might hope.

Chris Torbay:  They just wanna know the part of your story, which is relevant to them, and they don't wanna know the other stuff. And this is what reality TV has always been about. We all know reality TV isn't real. They shoot and shoot, and then they decide, “If we grab this here and this here, it'll look like there was a real conflict between these two people,” and so you pick and choose the parts that you think tell a good story.

And so pick and choose the parts that you think tell a good story to your consumer about why you are the person they should be interested in, or why your business is the one they should patronize.

Ryan Chute:  So it is truthful about your brand, but it is not a perfectly true, perfectly aligned story. It is a curated, well-positioned, well-structured story structure to make good movies.

Mick Torbay: Yeah, but to Chris's point about language, there's another mistake that people can make without knowing it. And this is a mistake that the client can make is to use language that is typical within their business. And they will sometimes encourage people to use this language just because they say it all the time, and they'll think it sounds normal.

Give you an example. If you go to an appliance store and look at those things that wash clothes, you and I would call that a washer and a dryer, and the appliance store will call those “equipment laundry.” Whereas we think laundry is the stuff that comes out of it at the end.

So if you leave the client on their own, they will tell you, “We're having a sale today on laundry.” And the rest of the people are like, “Why do I wanna buy somebody's laundry?” If I show you a tow-truck, you're gonna think that's a tow truck. The guy who drives it calls it a wrecker. Don't use that internal language.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. In Britain, they refer to all appliances as white goods: washer, dryer, freezer, fridges, all that stuff. They call them white goods because normally they're white. You don't call them white goods on the commercial, you No.

Mick Torbay: No, because nobody wants to buy white goods.

Chris Torbay: Nobody goes out to buy white goods.

Mick Torbay: They go out to buy a fridge. That's it.

Ryan Chute: And even when they're buying a fridge, they care much less about the fridge than they do about how the fridge is going to solve their problem. Not just keeping their food cold, but maybe an aesthetic, possibly a safety, certainly, there were times when safety was a significant issue, performance, energy consumption, how long it's gonna last if it's gonna be big enough. All of these things are features, but it's not the feature that people wanna buy. It's not even the benefits of those features that they wanna buy. It's the advantage they have of having that fridge versus not having that fridge.

Mick Torbay: All of these are examples of most advertising, and the reason why most advertising sounds the same is that it comes from the perspective of the business owner's problems, what the business owner is looking to achieve. And not necessarily what the consumer really wants out of their life.  We've all heard examples where clearly the problem that is trying to be solved by the commercial, by the marketing, is that this guy bought far too many of this product, and now he's gonna make that the consumer's problem.

And it's your inability to manage your inventory that is not the consumer's problem. It's that inward focus, looking at the business and what's important to the business owner, and most advertising people will simply listen to the business owner and when the business owner says, “This is what we want to do,” they will, they'll simply do that without saying, but does it, does anybody give a shit about that?

Chris Torbay: And it comes from this idea of you focus on coming up with a great idea and forget the missed opportunity is understanding what the consumer is looking for. And you're excited about your new idea. You're so excited about this new tagline that's worked well in this market that you totally just wanna run with it and whatever, because you're so excited about your idea and you miss the opportunity to find out what are the, what people are looking for here? What are people looking for here? And the same thing happens when people do creative, where the commercials are outrageous and hilarious. And people talk about them at the water cooler, but then they forget who it's for. And I always say the biggest tragedy I hear is when people come up and say, “Hey, I saw this really great commercial on the weekend. It was like these two penguins. And they were, and then, and I forget who it was for, but it was really funny because the first penguin said this and whatever,” and it's oh my god, you've done like four fifths of what you're supposed to do as a commercial.

• You've made people excited about it.
• They're so excited about it that they wanna tell their friends about it the next day.
• They remember the entire plot of the commercial,
• and they can't link it to your brand.

You got so fixated on how great your idea was that you didn't ask yourself, is my brand being tied to this being so that whenever people think of this great idea, they a hundred percent just go straight to me and attribute all of that great goodwill to me. That's a tragic fail.

When people get it, it's often a young creative mistake or something like that. It's “Oh, I got a crazy idea,”

Mick Torbay: It's lazy writing.

Chris Torbay: It's like crazy ideas are not what we need. We need a crazy idea that just so much comes from the person you are advertising for.

Ryan Chute: I certainly have an obsession around cute and clever gets its butt kicked by campaign able every day.

If it's not campaignable, it's not going to be remembered in the way that it needs to be remembered to pull the trigger, when the trigger happens. And ultimately that's what we're trying to do here, from the jingles, and the sonic signatures, and all of the things that are used to deeply strategically, deeply scientifically, to get the customer to take an action towards our brand.

Chris Torbay: Yes. It specifically takes you, if you remember the idea, you have to make sure that in remembering the idea, there can only be one brand that answers that, so that all of that memorability and all of that goodwill gets transferred to that single advertiser.

Ryan Chute: That just circles right back to copywriting. Copywriting is the critical component here, of effective marketing or ineffective marketing. And the majority of copywriting we see is tragic. It's astoundingly bad. Setting aside celebrity spokespeople and translation issues, just in America, there are massive amounts of challenges when it comes to putting out something that sticks and makes a person feel, and gets out with enough repetition so that they actually have a chance to get past that short-term memory and get into the long-term memory..

Chris Torbay: And gets attached to a specific brand. We do it all the time. We always talk about, “it's gonna look like some beer commercial.” Why do people use that as a term? It's because all beer commercials show young, happy people drinking beer, having a good time, and socializing with their friends. Whenever you see that kind of imagery, you don't associate that with one brand or the other because all of the beers are all trying to claim that territory.

Or a car commercial. All cars are fun to drive, apparently, because every car commercial will show their car going through this impossible course.

Mick Torbay: Even if it's a minivan.

Chris Torbay: It can be a minivan. “It's the minivan that's fun to drive.” And it's “No, Porsches are fun to drive. Yours is a minivan.” Sell it on something else that's cool.

Mick Torbay: Take your kid to soccer practice.

Chris Torbay: But everybody wants to own the same territory, and so you can do a great commercial, you can find the best car commercial road that we've ever seen, but I'm not necessarily gonna remember your brand because of that.

And like each of these genres, they're all doing commercials, which are all doing the same sorts of things, in which case, a perfectly good job of it is still not gonna, I'm not gonna remember yours. It's not going to stand out. You're just like, “Man, I remember seeing that car drive over that hillside at sunset. Boy, that was great. Never gonna forget that commercial.” Yes, you are. That's what every commercial does.

Mick Torbay: Boy, you're the one who came up with that, isn't that right?

There's a lot of lazy writing out there. Let me tell you, copywriting is full of laziness. And that's where you get what Chris calls the 50/50 as where there's half of it is the nuts and bolts that the client wanted in, the quality of the service, of the selection, and then the other half is, “I wrote a really funny joke.”

Is there any connection between those two things? “No, but at least I put in the funny joke so that you would remember it.” No, that's lazy writing. Go back to the drawing board. Try that again. And make me an ad that doesn't just entertain me, but takes me somewhere that I want to go back again. That the next time I hear that distinctive sound, I know whose business this is. And I say, I want to turn the volume up this time because I want to hear what's the next chapter in this story.

Your point about campaignability, I think, is incredibly valid because I wonder where campaigns have gone?

It seems nowadays we're so enamoured with a really interesting ad. “The man, your man could smell like” [by Old Spice] brilliant freaking ad. I wish I had written it.

Chris Torbay: But it's the exceptions that proves the rule.

Mick Torbay: But it's not an example of an ad where you can do another one.

They did, in fact, do another one. Does anybody remember it? No, because it has no second chapter. And although it was strategic, it was well connected, it was for Old Spice, we all remember that. It was definitely an Old Spice commercial. So it satisfies that box that you always wanna get ticked, but what it lacked is the ability to say, okay, so what is the next story? So I don't think people will ever think of my ads as being as disruptive or crazy as the Man Your Man Could Smell Like.

But what our ads do is they make you wanna say, “What's he gonna say? What's Jesse gonna say in the next ad?” Or what's going to be the crazy thing we have to get out of, in the next chapter of this story, so that people are actually encouraged to participate in the ads rather than simply say, “Oh, it's a commercial. There's nothing for me.”

Ryan Chute: One of the other things that most people don't know about how we are writing at Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services is that these are slow, tiny micro transformations over a period of three to five years. Jesse is going through a whole situation where he's been hired straight through to,

Mick Torbay: It's a story arc. Like a procedural TV show.

Ryan Chute: And that's something to be said because people get invested in that. Oscars are won by the movies where the person at the beginning of the movie is different than the person at the end of the movie. They've changed. They're a different person now. They've gone through a journey and a transformation where the blockbuster hits of the summertime and explosions and sex scenes and violence and fun stuff, entertaining stuff. But they don't win.

Chris Torbay: And it all starts to blur together. It is like every Marvel or DC movie kind of looks like every Marvel or DC movie. You don't go, “This one was really good. Boy, they really had some stunts.” It's no, they've all got stunts. Yeah. What are we talking about?

Mick Torbay: Using your screenwriting analogy, I think that's a really good point and maybe the key to this.

In a movie, when you're writing a screenplay, when you're writing a movie, the protagonist has to be a different person at the end than he or she was at the beginning. That's how you know a good movie.

You are this person at the beginning, and at the end you're, you have transformed into something different.

A procedural is different from that in the sense that everybody, if you're gonna watch every week, they can't change; actually, they have to be the same. They change over seasons. Not over two hours, like a screen. So it's interesting you use that analogy because we use screenwriting techniques, but I focus more on the screenwriting techniques of procedural long-form television and sitcoms versus two-hour feature films.  

Chris Torbay: And to wrap that all together, what's the fail?

When you talked about Old Spice, which is the exception, actually, that proves the rule.

Mick Torbay: It's like a feature film. It's a great moment.

Chris Torbay: But what's happening there is they got a killer ad. And the problem is, too often people are saying, “How can we find a killer ad?” And it is very rare that the killer ad actually does it. What normally works is the campaign, right? It's normally not that one awesome Old Spice commercial or that one awesome Budweiser Brewing Company APAC , “whatttts-up”, or that one spot really stood out. It's the seven years of “I'm a Mac, I'm a PC”, or however many years of the GEICO Gecko, where it's just episode after episode. It's the sort of false goal of “If I could just come up with a great ad, everybody would change their brand allegiance and switch to mine.” No, they need to grow over time with a brand that they have to grow to attach themselves.

Mick Torbay: They need to grow to like you and feel something. You felt something about the Mac and the pc.

Chris Torbay: You can very rarely do that with just one awesome ad every once in a while. But that's a weird goal to go for, given how rarely it works and how often the other thing works.

Ryan Chute: And the cost of doing that now, most people have no idea what kind of money is spent to develop those ads. The amount of testing, the amount of figuring out the fine-tuning of the words and the terminology. Certainly, the actors and the set design, the amount of effort and the physical set design

Chris Torbay: And the amount of wasted material. When I worked on Budweiser and when we had an entire floor of an ad agency, and when it came around to trying to get ads on the Super Bowl, we would all write a dozen ads. Each team would write a dozen ads, and we'd all take them to the creative director, and then he'd pick a few of them, and we'd take them to the client, and they would pick a few of them, and we'd take them to research, and we'd end up with two or three that made it onto the Super Bowl. But we had written literally 50-100 ads that all went in the trash.

And it's like, how much money?

Mick Torbay: And they were all one-offs?

Chris Torbay: And they're all one-offs. They are all fine. They were good enough for us to take to the creative director and good enough for the creative director to say, “Yeah, that's good. Let's take that down the street.” It's all good stuff.

Mick Torbay: But did any of them want you to come back for more, or were they all trying to be killer ads?  

Chris Torbay: They were all trying to be killer ads, but then, like, how much money are you gonna spend, just with a bunch of really talented teams, just go throw in throwing ideas until you get one.

Mick Torbay: What I'm suggesting is that Budweiser should fire their agency and hire us. That would solve the problems, that would be much better. But it is crazy, though, why is Budweiser concerned with long-term growth any less than any of our clients? Like, why are they still focused on these short-term killer ads instead of coming up with a campaign that you can lean into for five to 10 freaking years?  

Chris Torbay: And it won't happen with the first commercial or the third commercial, but I tell you, when you get to the 15th or 16th, people are gonna go, “You know, have you seen this? This is the thing. I’m kind of digging  these.”

Ryan Chute: This is a whole thing. And therein lies the rub. There are many ways to market your business.

There are many ways that are sunk costs and are compounding investments. There are many different ways that you can get attention. Getting attention's not overly difficult; holding attention is really quite hard,

Mick Torbay: And you can't do it with lazy writing.

Ryan Chute: You can't do it with lazy writing, and you miss the big piece from holding a person's interest, particularly when you have a long purchase cycle. And that's to have them have already decided that they know, like, and trust you before they've even bought what you sell. Including the parasocial relationships you have with people that you will never sell, but they will convince somebody else to buy.

This has been an interesting topic today, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

Ryan Chute: So what's the moral of this tragic comic parade of marketing missteps? Simple. Know your audience. Don't assume what worked over there will work over here. Translation isn't just about language, it's about culture, context and meaning.

• ‍Choose your messengers wisely, celebrities, spokespeople, and even the owner. When you tie a human being to your brand, you're betting your reputation on theirs. Make sure it's a safe bet.
• ‍Don't waste words. Skip the table stakes. Instead, hammer home the one thing only you can say in a way, only you can say it.
• ‍Stick the landing. If people remember your joke but not your name, you've paid for an ad that promotes entertainment, not your business. The hopeful part. Every marketer, yes, even the ones with international translation failures and creepy sandwich spokesmen, gets the chance to do better next time.
• ‍Mistakes don't have to define your brand, but ignoring the lessons will lead to avoidable pain. So take risks, be bold, but be smart enough to learn from the flops of those who come before you, and that way your next ad won't just play in Peoria. It'll play everywhere.

Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

‍

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

They said AI would change everything. It did—just not the way you think.

The boys dissect the hysteria around AI search, SEO panic, and why your competitors are about to burn their marketing budgets chasing algorithms that don’t care about them.

Because here’s the dirty little secret: AI doesn’t make people change their minds—it just helps them justify the ones they already had.

Episode Highlights

• Why AI is just the Yellow Pages in a shinier suit
• How “fast-talking AI salesmen” are selling fear, not strategy
• What McDonald’s and Porsche teach us about skipping the search entirely
• The truth about why your best marketing investment is still offline
• How to own the “tomorrow customer” instead of chasing today’s click

🎧 Hit play. Then go build a culture that actually means something.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

👉 Question for you: Is AI search the new marketing revolution—or just the same old Yellow Pages in disguise?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business.

Now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI. And everyone is up in arms because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion.

Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff, a lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge.

The internet doesn't know what information is what, and so the user must decide.

Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're sales channel sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that.

Computer brains are changing; these brains, the ones in human heads, aren't changing much at all this year. And you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did.

Ryan Chute: On this episode of Advertising in America, we explore how AI is changing the way people search for your business. Is search engine optimization dead, or is it more important than ever? Let's ask Chris to list everything that's wrong with the internet today, Chris.

Chris Torbay: So here's what's wrong with the internet.

People use the internet when they want the answer to any question. What's the capital of Tanzania? Dar es Salaam.

What’s the highest ranking achieved by legendary Hawaiian sumo champion Konishiki?  Ozeki.  He was so close to becoming Yokozuna, but alas, he was denied.

How long is an oboe?  Yay big.

These are all things I actually know because of my profound, but somewhat haphazard, intelligence. But you could have looked those things up on the internet, and felt as smart as me. And the information is likely to be pretty accurate. Wikipedia is well-moderated, so inaccuracies are quickly rectified.

But ask the internet how good Nickelback is, and you will get a wide variety of answers, based on the wide variety of opinions people have posted. You will get some information from the legions of die-hard fans – and there are millions of them, by the way … that’s how they got to be one of the highest-grossing bands of all time – and you will get a bunch of snark from the haters who go on in great detail about how – and why – they are crap.  

The internet DOESN’T KNOW what information is what, and so the USER must decide.  And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for you), that means people fall back on their own pre-existing opinions and use the internet to justify why they’ve been right all along.

A similar thing happens when choosing a business to patronize. In the Before Times – in the 1900s, back before the turn of the century – we had the Yellow Pages – a big book of ads from people saying, “Pick me.” You could buy a big ad or a small ad, but people still had to pick.  Then we started Googling things like “Jewelry store near me,” and we’d get a list of retailers that WE thought were impartial. Companies could actually buy their way to the top of the list, but still, you had to pick one.  Even when we see a ton of 5-star reviews – or 1-star reviews – from knuckleheads we’ve never met, it’s still up to US to decide what value we place on those opinions.  If you really want the thing you’re looking for, and you’ve already made up your mind, you might look at those 1-star reviews and think, “Yeah, but this guy sounds like a knucklehead, so I can totally ignore his 1-star review, and just buy it! ‘Because I want it!”

So now people are searching for companies to do business with using AI.

And everyone is up in arms, because now it sounds like AI will do your research for you and help you form your opinion! ChatGPT, or Siri, or Claude will tell people which company is good at what, and the mindless consumers will do what they’re told.

“So, how do I get AI to say it’s me?”, you ask.

AI is still just another Yellow Pages. If you’d paid a guy to flip through the Yellow Pages and read the ads to you, it wouldn’t have made them anything more than a list of businesses you knew nothing about.  If you’d paid a guy to read out the top five responses in a Google search, however weighted they may be by paid search, you would still have had to choose from the list of businesses you knew nothing about. So when you ask AI to find you a plumber, it’s going to do what the internet has always done and say, “Well, there’s this guy, and this guy … and this one has low prices, and this one has speedy service, and whatever random facts it manages to scrape from the various websites.

And just like before, if you recognize one of those names and you remember something specific about them, you’ll say, “Oh wait, I know these guys! They seem good. I should pick them.” Like we always have.

You will fall back on your own pre-existing opinion and use ChatGPT’s response to justify that you’ve been right all along. The AI-powered internet is still just the Yellow Pages – in a shinier package – and no one has ever built their brand on the Yellow Pages.  You build your brand advertising offline and serving your customers, and however they search, when they find you, they will remember you, feel connected with you, and make the decision they are drawn to make, no matter what the search device tells them.

Ryan Chute: I don't care what ChatGPT says, Nickelback is crap. I can say that I'm Canadian, Mick.

If I had a nickel back every time someone asked me about AI search this year, I'd be a thousandaire. What are your thoughts?

Chris Torbay: I'm excited about AI, but not for the reason you probably think. What I love most about AI is that one, nobody really understands it. Two, whatever it is now, it will be something else in three years. And C, everybody feels they have to change everything. Is this good? Yes. But only if, like me, you zig when everyone else zags.

Throughout history, we've been told everything is changing, so you'd better not be left behind. And so brands dutifully make reckless modifications to their marketing plans because the only thing they know for sure is that they can't keep doing what they've been doing.

And the only ones who disagree with them are consumers. You see, consumers don't change their opinions, their preferences and their behaviors just because a bunch of software engineers tell them that they're going to. In fact, consumers are quite predictable, slow to adapt, and slow to accept new things.

There's a lot of inertia in consumer behavior. Brands can act quickly, but your customer likely doesn't, and that's why Chris can tell you about a focus group they did at Anheuser-Busch, asking what the Budweiser tagline was, and they said, “This bud's for you,” which they hadn't been promoting for about eight years.

So I said this was good, and here's what I mean. Your competitors are likely being sold a bill of goods by fast-talking AI salesmen; they're being bombarded by the threat of being left behind. They're gonna change stuff. A lot of stuff. The more they change, the more these salesmen can charge. So they're going to be recommending a lot of changes.

Your competitors are gonna fall for it. It's a whole new world. AI is here, and if you don't do it the new way, then no one's gonna be able to find you when they search for you on AI. Well, you know what? I've heard that shit before. And although computer brains are changing these brains, the ones in human heads aren't changing much at all this year, and you can still reach those brains, those people, those customers, the way you always did by talking to them over and over again about stuff. They care about, making them laugh, or think, or ponder like a friend, unchanging. If you ask me, the biggest opportunity in marketing that AI presents is the ability to differentiate yourself from your competitors by changing nothing.

Ryan Chute: If AI’s big secret is that people don't really change, then you're gonna love this next part. And that from our sponsors now at 25% more cussing.

Ryan Chute: We're back. Now, let's discuss whether Chris is living under a rock and Mick is just minging about those damn kids today.

I think we all agree that AI is changing where people are searching, but essentially, people are still searching like they've always been since the Yellow Pages. So, how does ChatGPT generate the responses when we ask, “best AC repair in Phoenix?”

Chris Torbay: Perhaps the mistake that we're making is that we are assuming that searching with AI is somehow a monumentally shifted way from how we've been searching before.

And here's what I'm getting at. When we talk about, well, people are searching on AI, and the people who are trying to sell you AI to help with your search are still basing it on something, on an assumption that is not quite true. It's based on the assumption that consumers do not have a preferred brand.

And that, by the way, is exactly how the Yellow Pages came to be, right? I mean, we've talked about the Yellow Pages before and what a powerful advertising medium it was, but it was really only a powerful advertising medium if there was no strong leader in that category. So if nobody in your town was the leading plumber, then you go, well, you go to the Yellow Pages, you just go to plumbers, and you look at all the plumbers.

And when you flip to the restaurant section of the Yellow Pages, there'll be big, big full-page ads for restaurants. But here's what wasn't there, McDonald's. They never bought a big ad in the Yellow Pages. They really didn't. And in fact, try this at home, Google “hamburgers near me” and you'll have to go through like eight or nine pages till you get to McDonald's.

And yet their parking lot is always full. So they have managed to skip Google. They skipped the Yellow Pages and got straight into people's heads to the point where, if there's a group of people that said, “We need to get a quick burger for lunch, where are we gonna go?” Somebody in that room would say, “Eh. Fuck it. We’ll go to McDonald's.”

And so they skipped it. Well, those people will also skip the AI search if they already know and love you and don't necessarily have to do that. So in that sense, I don't think it's changed much at all. We have to wonder, are we assuming that there is no leader in this category?

Ryan Chute: That’s a very, very valid point. And when we look at the data, the data does tell us that yes, a lot of people don't have a chosen provider, but that's probably because there's not a whole lot of companies doing a great job. Branding their companies and putting out a message that matters, which is a huge opportunity for the one or two people who do, big or small.

Mick Torbay: That’s kind of where I'm coming from. If the solution to getting more people to call your business is to find an AI solution, to get them to magically come to you, instead of going to somebody else when they're searching those bland, unbranded keywords. You know, category keywords, then that is just proving the point that there is no leader in that category, and that's a tremendous opportunity for brands. Then take that leadership position.

Chris Torbay: The other thing that's interesting about AI is everyone assumes, and I think it's because it speaks in plain language, right? Whereas your previous Google search would just give you a bunch of entries, whereas this one gives you a lovely paragraph, and it makes it sound like somebody smart has said something. “Well, I found this company over here, and they specialize in such and such, and I found this other company over here that specializes in this other thing.” And it was things like, “Wow, you've really dug and done some research.” And it's interesting, which is that it is still a product of whatever it can find.

And, like back in the seventies, when people still had big ENIACs that were the size of an office floor.

Mick Torbay: He means computers.

Chris Torbay: They invented this term GIGO, “garbage in, garbage out,” and that is still true today, which is, if all AI does is check everybody's website and take the random bullet points that are on everybody's homepage, then if everybody's saying the same things about low prices and quality products and qualified staff who really care about your needs, the AI is just gonna choose to say this thing from this guy's website and choose to say this thing from this other guy's. They haven't vetted them, it hasn't thought it through, they haven't checked and compared it with the reviews, and said, “Well, these guys say they have low prices, but a lot of people disagree.”

It hasn't actually done this thing, but because it presents the answer as if it were your best buddy saying, “Well, these guys downtown have this.” You seem to think it carries some weight, and it's really just grabbing random, random facts off the internet, and they may or may not be true.

Ryan Chute: My pal Tim Brown 🪝 at Hook Agency, recently posted about the most cited websites for the different AI models.

Number one, Reddit. It goes through 20 of these things, and these are just the top 20.

• Wikipedia, 26%
• YouTube, 23%
• Google, 23%
• Yelp, 21%
• Facebook, 20%
• Amazon, 18%, and on, and on, and on.

Well, why does this matter? Well, if we're thinking about how I can spend my limited marketing dollars the wisest and still get the volume and momentum that we get, that we want, that the big players are spending the money on, how do we compete against the big players?

Well, the answer is to say something that's relevant enough that you have customers talking to you on Reddit, about you on Reddit. You know, I think our friend down in the Rio Grande Valley who is absolutely eviscerated on Reddit.

Mick Torbay: There are four or five subreddits about how much his ads suck.

Ryan Chute: But then there are the people who support him, and there are the people who are for him and against him, respond to it and say, “No, I think he's great. It's amazing.” Yeah, that's right. And they say by name, and they say very specific things. And all of these things start to show up on Reddit.

Now, for a very tiny digital budget, this man is generating tremendous revenue, tremendous volume, and tremendous lead flow. And it's all because he has a terrific brand to get him in front of the competitors in his marketplace, rather than trying to be on 20 different things deeply and robustly with one marketing coordinator on staff and a respectable budget.

So this is very much about how do we win this game? Well, you can invest all of your dollars into digital saying things that no one cares about, and you're not gonna satisfy Google's EEAT, but the natural language processing that it's looking forward to say, “Yeah, these guys are relevant and they're saying something important.”

What in the world do we need to do? Well, we need to do exactly what you say, the same thing that we've always done. Tell stories, be relevant, look bigger than you actually are by having a huge frequency, not a huge reach. And say something that matters.

Chris Torbay: And give people a preconceived conception of somebody that they know in that space.

Ryan Chute: Know, like, and trust.

Mick Torbay: Our guy in Texas, because he's all over the television, he's all over the radio. Literally, everybody in that community has an opinion either for or against. But the point is, they have an opinion, whereas most air conditioning companies, people are not even aware of their existence. So our guy at least is, is on the radar and therefore, you know, even the people who say, “I hate that guy's commercial.” It's like, great, but name me an air conditioning company. There, fuck you. I win.

Chris Torbay: Where else are you gonna go to?

Mick Torbay: Because I wonder we're on the short list.

Chris Torbay: I also wonder if human nature, regardless of how much nicer, I guess, AI interaction is as opposed to just typing in queries and having to figure it out yourself, based on a list or visiting a few of the things to figure it out. You get this lovely text conversational response back. But I wonder if people, it's interesting you make that comparison to “let's get a hamburger.” If you asked your friends, “Hey, where, where should we go for a hamburger?” Does anyone say, I got a great idea, let's go on the internet and search through and see if we can find something. Or, would you rather have somebody say, “I know this really great place downtown. Let's do what Dave said. Cool, let's try Dave's place.”

Like I would much rather do that. I don't want to go search; I didn't want to have to Google it. I didn't want to have to dig out the Yellow Pages 25 years ago. And I don't necessarily want to write a good prompt for ChatGPT and spend all that time, if somebody can just say, “Hey, I got a brand that I actually, totally like, why don't we try with this place? You guys will love it.” Done.

Ryan Chute: Well, that's often why we went back to the same restaurants all the time.

Chris Torbay: Exactly, because he knew it was a sure thing.

Ryan Chute: We knew what to expect. We understood the consistency of it. The implied agreement was already in place, as you'd expect.

Mick Torbay: Well, and that's sort of what I was getting at at the beginning, is all these discussions have this assumption, which I think is flawed, which is before we buy anything, we always search. And it's like, well, that's only true when there is no preferred brand. If I said to you today, “Can you, can you pick me up some ketchup on the way home?” You would not take out your phone.

Chris Torbay: “Let’s see what all the ketchups are.”

Mick Torbay: “Which ketchup has the best, has the most five-star reviews?” No. There are actually some people who are skipping the search entirely, and that's what we are recommending.

We're recommending you skip the consumer taking the step of the search, which could be Google, in the day it was Yellow Pages, and soon it'll be, “Hey, Siri, tell me the best catch-up.” No, they're not doing it. We want our consumers to skip the search entirely, already have the solution in their head, or be standing next to a person who has a solution in their head and say, “Let's just do this.”

Chris Torbay: I think I've mentioned this one before. When I worked on the Porsche business, one of the things we knew about Porsche was that when people are ready to buy a car like that, normally, when people are ready to buy a car, they have a shortlist, and the average shortlist of all car buyers is sort of three or four. And so when you're ready, it's like, “okay, well I'll look at the Corolla and I'll look at the whatever, whatever, but I've got a shortlist of three or four,” and you maybe go to whatever.

When people are ready to buy a Porsche, their shortlist is on average 1.2 cars. They've spent their whole life saying, “One day I will buy a Porsche 911.”

That's where you want to be. And nobody says, “I'm 55. I've made a certain amount of money in my law firm. Now I'm ready to buy a car that I only drive, you know, two seasons outta the year.”  I want “Google sports cars that I only drive in the summer.” You know, they don’t. They have always wanted this brand. They knew that one day they would get to where they could buy it. They're looking forward to when that day comes. They've got a brand in their head. They don't Google it.

Mick Torbay: Well, that's sort of my point is that these people who are trying to sell AI solutions, everything's different now because of AI. What they're doing is they're saying to people, when they're searching you, it's based on this flawed assumption that everyone is gonna be searching, and there is no leader.

Chris Tobay: There's no one who knows what they're looking for.

Mick Torbay: And so we need to stop them and say, “Hang on a second. Everyone is searching at all times, and there's no leader. That's a pretty huge assumption, which is not true.”

Ryan Chute: Well, and so are we optimizing for AI search? You're certain not to get to the top of the list unless you're the biggest. You could force it. For periods of time with gaming the amount of content that you're putting out or getting blips along the way, and having all kinds of AI-generated key wording to AI search.

Sure, but you're putting in a massive amount of effort for a short-term gain, and that is then going to be shifted over to paid search, where you're now going to be paying for not only to show up, but you're also going to pay against your competitors.

Chris Torbay: And you’re doing all this effort, as Mick says, for the people who don't have anything in mind, who are undecided. There are a bunch of people who aren't going to be captured by all that effort.

Ryan Chute: So it quickly spirals out of control. Like what you're saying is that we're dropping $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month, on trying to get the today customer on an AI search to be on all of these different search listings and beat our competitors and pay the person doing it and pay the pay-per-click tax when the cheapest pay-per-clicks that you'll ever get are always and unpaid-per-clicks. No-pay-clicks is the brand.

Chris Torbay: Your actual brand. Either Google your name or they type your name in, the consumer says, because they know you’re a reputable company.

Ryan Chute: That's right. And, that's good advertising,  in the sense of they're typing in your name, but even typing in your brandable chunks, typing in little stuff from

Mick Torbay: Typing in the stuff from the ads they heard. The one with the kangaroo? “Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Google will figure out which one is the one with the kangaroo.”

Ryan Chute: Well, and AI will do it far better than anything else when you have this ultra, ultra uniqueness. Billy Ray's hole digging….

Chris Torbay: And, Wally, the walrus, know the Wal Air conditioner, walrus. If you type that in South Carolina, you will get Waldrop. And AI will give you Waldrop Plumbing Heating Air, in fact. So that's how you answer that question. How do I get AI to pick me?  You ask AI, “Who's that walrus who fixes air conditioners?”

Ryan Chute: This is where I do enjoy AI search, is that I do type in incredibly vague things that I know about, that I have forgotten the names of specifically, and it's able to pull this stuff up.

Do I want to be trying to chase down AC repair guys that I like or the best AC repair guys in South Carolina or Greenville, or do I want to be the Walrus Air Conditioning Company in Greenville? Boom, you own that! You absolutely own that. Because your competitors can't be the Walrus Company. If they do, they're gonna fail. They can't be the Billy Ray hole-digging company because if they do, they'll fail. And you got that for fractions of the price.

Now, where did you invest the money? In the brand. The difference being that a brand is a compounding effect because you're building real estate in the brain. The real estate that you build digitally, is a sunk cost. They see it, they experience it. You pay for that experience of them experiencing it, and then it disappears from their brain, and you go back to being invisible again. Well, that's not a winning solution. You're just spending money to lose it. Where with branding, you're spending the same money, but you're doing it to build a compounding effect in the chemistry of the brain that's going to have you completely win out over the list.

Chris Torbay: And then no matter where, it was Google last decade, it's AI this decade, whatever it is, a decade after this. It’s going to win at that too.

Ryan Chute: Well, and it's moving to voice search, and people are going to do exactly what I do, which is poorly explain the thing that I kind of remembered because I've not had enough interface with the particular brand yet, but I knew I found something that I liked about it.

And then in two, three years time, as your brand is deepened in five years time, and 10 years time, as your brand is now entrenched in your community, you own it. And that really is what we're trying to figure out for our clients.

I perceive the marketing mix differently. I believe that the marketing mix is three different things, generally speaking. It's not about the channels, it's about what we do with our marketing. One being the brand awareness, two being the sales activation, and three being the lead capture. And when you get that mix right, your lead capture costs are going to start to dramatically drop, you're going to see the cost of this stuff go down because you are doing the things necessary to have the people looking for you, and you only.

And that's the real challenge. But 90% of the effort is in lead capture, the four, maybe five different ways. Five, if you have a showroom. Four different ways that you're going to get a customer? Well, the easiest, fastest, cheapest long-term strategy here is always going to be to have the brand that people know, like, and trust before they need you and come top of mind when the trigger happens.

That's always gonna be the way.

Mick Torbay: Well, and one other little thing that I think is worthy of mentioning is I don't think we give the consumer enough credit for being able to tell the difference between something paid and something not paid.

When you're, when you're searching on Google for something and a particular paid answer comes up, I think people know, well, that's not necessarily the best one. That's the one who spent the most.

Chris Torbay: Scroll down a bit here and see what else.

Mick Torbay: And as soon as people start paying AI to put their name at the top of that list, then you're not really asking your buddy, “Hey, have you heard of any good air conditioning companies?” Actually, what you're doing is you're talking to your friend who gets paid to tell people what kind of air conditioning companies.

And I don't think it's going to take that long for consumers to realize, “Wait a minute, they're not really trying to give me the best thing. They're trying to give me the thing they were paid to do.”

If I ask my friend who works at the Apple Store whether I should get a PC or a Mac, gee, I wonder what he's going to say.

Ryan Chute: It’s no different than asking your buddy, introduce me to a nice girl and he introduces you to a prostitute. That's ultimately what's, well, ultimately that's what it is though. You're, you're saying, “Oh, this is the one you pay for versus the one that you'd marry.” And there's a dramatic difference between the two. Both are fun, but one is much longer-lasting than the other. And at the end of the day,

Mick Torbay: Well, this has gotten awkward.

Chris Torbay: I'm gonna take your word on that one.

Mick Torbay: And he's married now, so it's fine. There's nothing weird about it,

Chris Torbay: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Ryan Chute: So many years ago.

You guys, so yes, is there an effort to be done in training effectively AI, that your brand is the brand of choice through unbranded keywords? Yes, but it's a fool's errand to invest the bulk of your money and to rely solely on that because what you become is the slave of the channel. I promise you that the channel wants you to be their slave, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Bing. All of these organizations are doing everything in their power to keep you on their platform and to contain you as a revenue source. It's an absolute tragic mistake for business owners to be thinking about how do I show up on all these things without asking the more important question of how do I show up for less?

Mick Torbay: How do I skip all of that shit?

Ryan Chute: Exactly. I show up, I'm present where people go looking for me, but because I've done something of impact.

I talked to a friend of mine the other day, Lisa Nichols, a very famous woman, she's buddies with Tony Robbins, and these guys are all transformational coaches, and she said, “You don't get fame without first giving impact.”

And this is true. Now, we have a parasocial relationship that we can create, and you have to earn your celebrity in your town. But you're never going to get that without first having done something that sticks with the potential buyer or the potential buyer's friend who's going to influence you to buy that parasocial relationship.

The long-term, much, much, much bigger winning game is to put a balance of your marketing budget into the brand awareness segment, and then to balance that out appropriately with lead capture in the unbranded world, but do everything you can to transition yourself away from the unbranded world as quickly as you can. Which is probably gonna be somewhere in the realm of three to seven years, depending on your market and your competition, and all of the different factors that you have at play that are affecting your competitive landscape.

Mick Torbay: The only alternative to doing it the easy way, which is what we're talking about, is to do it the hard way, which is to just try and buy your way out of this problem and spend your way to the top of that list.

Chris Torbay: And that is an endless pit of money.

Mick Torbay: And that is a ridiculously expensive, expensive way to do it. And that's the only thing that these channels will recommend you do.

Ryan Chute: And it's not lost on us that you need leads today, right? You need to go hunting. You need to feed your business, the cash it needs to survive. It's also not lost on us that it feels expensive when you can't attribute it. So you're like, “Oh, I didn't show up, so I'm not getting leads because of this.” No, it's not happening that way. It's a balancing act of the two, and you have to transition out of one and into the other. You will absolutely spend more on marketing if you're ambitious and looking to grow, and have an operation and capacity to support your growth, but then it's not expensive.

If you want it to remain expensive for a really long period of time, you keep dumping your money into things that don't give you any compounding effect in the brain.

Mick Torbay: Fight it out with all the other non-leaders.

Ryan Chute: It's way less expensive to own the real estate in the mind than it is to own the real estate in the digital presence. So if we can just get rid of the costs around the digital presence, will we still show up? Yes. But, what if you were able to get a thousand leads, like one of our clients does every single month, on their name, not on AC repair near me? That keeps their trucks busy. They do many, many tens of millions of dollars. This is possible, but it takes effort, and frankly, that's why branding is hard for people. Because they don't understand branding. It's not your truck wraps, it's not your logos, it's not your colors.

Mick Torbay: And Google is not going to recommend that you spend your money doing that. They're gonna recommend you spend your money with Google.

Chris Torbay: Yes.

Ryan Chute: Oh, absolutely. Golly. Like, no one wants to absolutely convince you. Most digital marketing companies are not marketing companies. They're the sales channel, sales companies. They're selling you the thing that they provide. I respect them for that. They're not bad people. They're doing a service.

Mick Torbay: But their job is to sell the thing that they have, sell their service.

Ryan Chute: That's right. And they're in a silo. And that silo is perpetuating failure.

Mick Torbay: The billboard guy is going to say, “You should spend your money more on billboards if you actually wanna succeed.” We don't care where you spend your money. We want you to make money. The three of us.

Ryan Chute: This is it. Where you spend to say it more, maybe a shifting or nudging over how we say that. We absolutely care where you spend your money. We just want to spend the least amount of money for the most amount of results of impact. And that's going to mean that we're going to look at the whole landscape, online and offline, instead of just AI search, and that matters a lot.

EEAT. Have an interesting story. Say something that no one else can say. No one else can talk about Wally the Walrus. No one can talk about Billy Ray's hole-digging. No one can talk about Call Dad AC & Heating in the same way that our clients are talking about it. And that makes a massive difference. Not today, but for the tomorrow customer, that's gonna skip all that stuff and go right to where you're looking for. They might do it on AI, they might do it on voice search, but they're still going to be looking for “that” keyword, not the generic unknown keyword, and that's way cheaper, way more powerful, way more opportunity for your growth of your business at a much more reduced cost in the long term.

Most of the people that we deal with work with long sales cycles, high average tickets, and massive amounts of competition. So you have to find ways that you're going to be able to create efficiencies, and this is just one of those things. Not to say that you don't do those things as well, but investing your dollars in a slightly different mix is not going to garner a today result, but it is going to garner a tomorrow result, and then it's going to far outpace your next week's result. And I say that, on a consolidated timeline, three to five years is when you should see the multiplier effect of your brand kicking into play, not just the fractional growth that you would get from it normally.

‍Ryan Chute: AI isn't a magic bullet, and it isn't the death of SEO either.

It's just the latest version of the Yellow Pages; shinier, faster, but still dependent on what people already know and feel about you. 

So here's your job. Build a brand that people remember so that they look for you by name. Unless you're a giant, you need to chase keywords that only you can own. “Best AC repair in Phoenix” is too expensive, but no one can steal your authentic and unique brandable chunk.

Content is king, but generic keyword content is dead if you want to truly get ahead. Until next time, this has been Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.

Till next time. this is Advertising in America.

‍

Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

Qualifying Questions have been a popular litmus test to determine whether a prospect is worth working with…or not. Countless businesses engage in qualifying prospects to help weed out those who aren’t ready and willing to buy your solutions. At the end of the process, qualified prospects who survive are deemed worthy to enter the sales funnel.

There’s just one problem: qualifying prospects is utter nonsense.

The reality is clients don’t need to be qualified. It’s the solution provider that needs to be qualified.

Stop making your problem their problem. It’s bad manners. 

Why?

The fact is, your customers aren’t the authority on the solutions they need. You are. It’s your job to ask the right questions to determine if and what you might have to solve their problem correctly. 

Your business and solutions may not always be the right fit for your customer’s needs. Using qualifying questions will allow you to properly assess a client’s situation and determine the perfect solution for their problems. 

One must never use their solutions as the gold standard prior to working with a prospect. It’s always about identifying your client’s specific needs first, and then presenting the right solutions to their needs.

That’s what qualifying questions should be about. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how qualifying questions work and explore 27 questions to ask prospects.

How Do Qualifying Questions Actually Work?

Sales statistics information reveals that at least 50 percent of your prospective customers are not a good fit for your solution. That’s why many businesses think that qualifying prospects is a good idea to avoid wasting money, effort, and time.

But what this data doesn’t reveal is how well the seller understood their prospects' needs. Time and time again I have listened to sales presentations and wondered if the salesperson was even in the same room when the prospect expressed their desires and needs. 

Qualifying a prospect is lazy, entitled, and selfish. Being qualified to offer a solution by really understanding a prospect is key. We all know that the buying process should always revolve around our customer and exceed their return on perceived investment. Their investment is money, energy, time. Once your solution's value exceeds their MET (money, effort, and time), a sale is made. 

To this end, qualifying questions should not be used to qualify a customer, but rather, for the seller to become qualified to sell them the right solution.

Think of it this way.

A sales professional asking qualifying questions to customers is like a doctor diagnosing a patient. During the interview, doctors don’t shove their medical achievements, facilities, and expert staff down the patient’s throat. 

Instead, they actively listen to the patient and try to understand the sum of their symptoms. Only when they have a complete understanding of the situation will they be able to prescribe the right treatment.

For you, qualifying questions operate with the same intent.

You want to fully comprehend your customer’s situation to properly diagnose their needs. This enables you to prescribe the right solution. Ultimately, when your presentations are tailored specifically to your customers’ needs, you will boost your conversion rate, average sale, and profit in the process.

27 Qualifying Questions to Ask Your Prospect

The thought of all the possible questions you could possibly ask a prospective buyer can feel overwhelming. When I really studied all these questions, they ultimately fell into three essential categories. 

1. The prospect's needs that make them feel right about the purchase.
2. The environment that the solution is exposed to.
3. The solution needs to be the most fitting option, perceptually and literally. 

Well conceived, open-ended questions help you gather intelligence to determine the best solution and if your business is the right fit for your prospects. 

Contrary to popular opinion, there are stupid questions. These are the ones that neither propel the conversation forward or set you up for a successful closing sequence.  

Furthermore, pay attention to the tone you set. Use your playful voice and your reassuring late-night FM DJ voice. Your vibe will directly affect the responses you receive. 

This is why you build a deck of solid qualifying questions that uncover the 3 essential needs. 

27 Qualifying Questions 

Prospect’s Needs

1. Would I be crazy to think you want this fixed right the first time? 

“No” oriented questions allow the customer to feel in control and state their truest desires. Everyone is transactional until you make it relational. This is done with tactical empathy and confident competence. 

2. Who has been servicing your needs up to now? 

Finding out if you're the fool or the favor helps you figure out how to win their favor. Rule of thumb: if they are a new customer and have used the same provider more than once, you’re in the role of the fool. Figure out what’s changed. 

3. When home repairs like this come up, how do you tend to fund them? 

While clearly not a question to ask early on, this is a great way to open up a conversation about finance options, minimizing the cost, and saving money. It’s a portal to a deeper, more empathetic, more competent solution. It’s never about you making money. It’s always about how you save them money, stress, and time both during and after the problem is resolved. 

4. Have you had any bad experiences with contractors before? 

Knowing what not to do is arguably more valuable than knowing what to do. Most people are guided by good manners and a servant's heart. Recognizing things that trigger a negative feeling allows you to show up in the best way. 

5. What matters most to you, the cheapest solution, or the lowest overall cost solution? 

The cheapest solution is most often not the lowest cost solution. Most customers don’t want the best solution, they want a slightly better solution than what they have now. If it is broken, they want it fixed. If it can’t be fixed, they want a new one that gives them the most value for their money, efforts, and time, both during the sale and after. 

6. Would you rather have the same thing as you have now or an upgrade? 

This is a simple to answer either/or question that clarifies where the buyer’s mind is at the moment. You’re setting yourself up to share options by planting a seed that you offer choices, not ultimatums. 

7. When were you hoping to have this problem solved? 

The short answer will naturally be, “It depends.” This question holds some tension in it, but you want to understand how much urgency the prospect has to make this problem go away. You can decide how to most appropriately raise consequences in your closing sequence. 

8. Would I be off base to think you’re probably anticipating some problems arising?  

When you gently tug out and preemptively address objections before they become a roadblock, you make closing so much easier. This shows up as empathy, and allows you to show your competence, which are the 2 key ingredients to trust. PRO TIP: After you’ve asked the question, go silent and allow the prospect to speak. 

9. Would I be silly to think that there are 2 decision-makers for something this important?  

Using “no” oriented questions allows you to protect your prospects' dignity with a sense of control. They will be certain to correct you if they are the only decision-maker, but almost always they will reveal they have a built-in stalling mechanism in place to avoid quick commitments. Knowing this allows you to set up your closing sequence for a higher chance of first-sit conversions. 

Environment‘s Needs

10. When did you notice the change? 

Knowing when things changed, internally and externally, is helpful in coming up with an accurate diagnosis. Things don’t break in a vacuum. You also learn how urgent the issue is to them. If they’ve been putting it off, I’d be curious what hasn’t felt right to have them act. 

11. What are some of the ways you tried to make it work again? 

You learn a lot about a person’s understanding of the problem by what they attempted to do before calling you. From nothing to something, you gather helpful intelligence. In some cases, the equipment is exposed to tinkering, while in others, the solution has been sitting there uncared for. 

12. When was the last time it was given scheduled maintenance?

Having a homeowner verbalize their duty of care gives you a good indication of what you’re facing. Most people want their home’s major systems to silently work and remain invisible. That means they often forget about it. This gives you an opportunity to sell them the convenience of annual preventative maintenance. 

13. Would I be out of line to advise you if I find something concerning? 

Asked in a nonconfrontational, “no” oriented question, you can elicit a lot of helpful information from the environment their home’s systems survive or thrive in. The environment includes both what a system is exposed to and how the systems are cared for. 

14. Are any of your spaces uncomfortable? Do you have all the hot water you need?

By speaking about how the prospect's environment feels, you are exploring the environment from the opposite direction. This shows both empathy and competence, which has them feeling right about you solving any problems you may identify. 

15. Might it be crazy to think you invited us here today because you’re not completely happy with how your system is operating?

This ”no” oriented question gives your prospect a safe way to reveal anything that they have on their mind. People can be hesitant to show their cards, and if you were to ask the same question, soliciting a “yes” response, they will be more guarded as they fear you trying to make a sale. 

16. Does this room/equipment get exposed to any extreme conditions? 

Are there abnormal conditions that could be affecting the existing solutions or new solutions? Heat, cold, old wiring, wind, large windows, low water quality, etc., all have the ability to affect performance. If the prospect recognizes it as an issue, it is an indication that they are open to accepting specific performance or finding solutions. 

17. Do you want to fix it or risk it if I find something is broke? 

While you’re not trying to find problems, very often there are small problems that can be fixed to avoid an impending catastrophic failure. This question plants a seed of doubt and indirectly asks permission to share your concerns if any arise. It’s an empathetic way to broach an uncomfortable conversation about a grudge purchase. 

18. When’s the last time you gave your system a deep cleaning?

Ever go into a teenager’s bedroom and nearly die from the smell, twist an ankle, and hear a rustling noise as you run out in terror? A lot of homes are like this for residential systems and equipment. Every once in a while, it’s essential to give everything a proper clean.

Solution’s Needs

19. Has the equipment been keeping up with your comfort? 

Knowing how people perceive their equipment performance will give you insight into two things. One, their level of interest in their equipment, and two, how they feel the equipment is serving their needs. 

20. Does your equipment do…or not do something you want? 

If there is a gap, they’ll share it with you. If there is something unpleasant happening, they’ll tell you. Not surprisingly, they will never offer up what they don’t know to offer up. So, stay curious. Do you have a lot of dust in the house? Do your tub, toilet, or taps have stains? Do your lights ever flicker? 

21. Would it be uncommon for you to have a power bill over $500 a month these days? 

Framing this question to a “no” oriented response empowers the prospect to respond effortlessly. Removing friction from an odd, mildly intrusive question allows you to get past the first roadblocks of a more open conversation about how you could improve their situation with more efficient solutions. 

22. Does your equipment ever make any funny noises? 

Funny noises are a good indicator of potential problems. The term “funny noises” leaves space for family-friendly humor, too. Keep your word choices simple and relatable. Don’t be afraid to even mimic a few of those potential funny noises to drive home your point with a bit of a chuckle.

23. Did you pick out the equipment, or did you inherit it with the home? 

Asking a prospect how old their equipment is will expose you as a slick Willy sales guy. Asking them if they bought it or inherited it is a subtle way to learn more about the relationship they have with the equipment. 

24. Anything you want me to pay particularly close attention to today? 

Your client called you for a reason. Give them their voice so they may guide you. This shows empathy and respect for their input and opinions. It also presents you as more competent, having given them the time to feel heard and understood. 

25. Where do you keep your filters? 

People who know where the filters are typically care for their equipment. For those who have no idea or don’t have filters on hand, have a lower duty of care for their equipment. One prospect likes having you help care for their equipment, and the other desperately needs you there to care for their equipment.

26. Do you notice any weird smells coming from your equipment? 

Smells are a sign something’s wrong with your household equipment. They are intrusive. They give your home a stigma, mentally and emotionally. And you are your client’s problem solver. Their painkiller.  Their odor eater-upper. 

27. Would I be crazy to think we could fix it today instead of replacing it? 

In the greedy world of short-term sales quotas and revenue maximization, all to please a bunch of soulless shareholders that don’t even live in the same state, the privately-owned, hometown contractor that wants to be appreciated at church on Sunday, their kids' football game on Friday night, and the grocery store on Wednesday. Replacement sales will happen when they need to. 

Finding ways to save a customer money (at the right price to be profitable) represents your brand far more than closing that big deal and leaving a trail of disappointment. 

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. 

The Rest of the Diagnosis

Not all questions are for your client. Much of the questions you need to have satisfied come from cleaning and inspecting the equipment and the environment it is in. Make it a good practice to NOT ask questions that the environment and equipment can answer for you better. This will show your competence. 

A prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice. 

Once the doctor gathered all the anecdotal information, they would set about running tests. Your job is no different, even if the diagnosis is to replace the old unit. 

Why? Because what if? What if the system could be fixed? What if it was something simple? What if the ethical sale is a repair? 

Would a doctor amputate a leg if he could stop the infection? No. Neither should you. 

Be thorough. Be satisfied that you turned over all the stones. Serve the buyer at the highest level, and they’ll demand that you come back, again and again. 

Did You Notice?

Not a single question started with the word why.

Most of the questions we have are why questions. It instantly exposes intent. There’s just one problem. It’s TOO forward. It feels cunning. It FEELS intrusive. Almost adversarial. Certainly salesy. 

The good news? Any “why” question can be asked in a different way to get a response. Often a better response, because you’ve not set off their spidey-senses. 

When you embrace the truth about serving others at the highest level, you operate within the two core elements of truth — empathy and competence. 

And that means choosing your words with intention. 

Even the smallest changes will garner dramatically better results. 

Remember, in a transactional category, the only differentiator you have is how you make people feel. 

Good Selling. 


Interested in asking Wizard Ryan Chute the questions you want the answers to, contact us today!