How to Become Uncopyable: Build an Unfair Advantage

0:00If your biggest competitive advantage can be copied, how much of an advantage do you really have? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this podcast, Dan Kennedy and Steve Miller explore the difference between simply being better than your competitors and becoming genuinely difficult for them to copy or replace. You'll hear why studying your own industry can actually make it harder to stand out, what turns ordinary customer loyalty into real attachment, and why attracting the right customers may require deliberately repelling the wrong ones. If you are tired of competing on the same promises everybody else makes, this episode will challenge you to rethink what actually makes your business different. Here are Dan Kennedy and Steve Miller. I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really the lessons, they're kind of laws that you'll live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

1:03His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name. The world we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to Diamond Call. Our guest, as you know, I think if you hear for the right reason, is Steve Miller. Steve and I go back longer than either one of us would care to count. And Steve, I think it's fair to say sort of made his bones as an expert in trade shows. Both bootmanship for the exhibitors and marketing for the shows and over time has become a broader and more eclectic and diverse branding, marketing, business.

2:05Electic, I like that. That's a good expert. Yeah, nice, huh? I like it. Electic. It's much better than saying confused. You know, or random and erratic. So, but to quickly a couple of credits, certainly in a trade show world, Steve has worked for the biggest and the best. The International Home and Houseware Show, which is huge. Connex Bowl, which is huge. Some big, what I call big dumb companies, B&J, Caterfeller, Stompock, Coca-Cola. Has given a TED Talk. Been in just about every business publication there is, including Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. I have not been in highlights for children yet, which is a goal. I saw that in your bio and, yeah.

3:06Hey, everybody's got to have a bucket list. That's right. That's right. So, Steve is with us and we're going to talk a little bit about some stuff from his excellent book Uncompable. Let me just let you flesh that out, Steve, sort of, without going back to the womb. Where you came from, how you came to be doing what you're doing now, and what you are doing now, and we'll go from there. Okay, I don't want to take too much time talking about me. I'm just going to back it up by saying that, because you mentioned eclectic, and that's kind of my life. And I think that's been a big help in where I am right now, is that some of my friends even call me like, I'm kind of a forced dumb kind of a guy, because so many things happen to me in my life that were so wildly different from each other. You know, my dad was the co-inventor of the HACK player.

4:09I was a professional golfer for a while. I was actually a stuntman in Hollywood for a while. And, you know, just kind of all over the board. But what that background has helped me to do, because once I got into sales and marketing, and I started learning about sales and graduating into the marketing world, you know, something like, you know, 35 years ago, you know, I've always seen this sameness of marketing, so to speak. And having been in these eclectic different, you know, like you say, kind of an eclectic background, it helped me to kind of see things a little more clearly, that, you know, one of the things we have to do is be different. You know, it's not enough to just be better. So, you know, without getting to too much of my background, it was really my background had a huge impact on how I think now and how I teach my clients,

5:11you know, both the corporate and I still do some trade association work. So, and that's where the book came out of, too. And so, I don't know if this is sort of your curve or not, but before we do marketing stuff, the subtitle of the book I'm copyable is, how to create an unfair advantage over your competition. Right. And a couple days ago, I had another one of these conversations about the, the immorality of capitalism and competition. Were you talking to my brother-in-law? No, no, no. We all, you know, we all have one of those. This was actually, you know, emotionally troubled client. And so, I actually want to spend a couple minutes on that. You use the term deliberately, not accidentally.

6:11And so, how do you square the circle of seeking unfair advantage and being worthy for application for eternity in heaven instead of hell? Well, frankly, I mean, you and I, you know, one of the reasons why I think you and I connected so many years ago was because we kind of look at stuff from a fairly blunt perspective. And, you know, we tend to use blunt language and blunt rules and stuff like that. The softwaived of saying unfair advantage is to say that we have a monopoly. And that, like I say, that's the soft terminology for it. But unfair advantage is something that I think everybody should be, should be aiming for in business. No matter how small you are or how big you are, is that you want it.

7:14Why should rules be fair? I look at businesses being a street fight. And in a street fight, there are no rules. And you want to, you know, to say there's the old saying, you know, bring a done to a knife fight. Right? That's an unfair advantage. You know, you want to have that over your competition. You want to have it to where the customer has no choice, whether it's, you know, they deliberately choose to, you know, to work with you or maybe they don't deliberately choose to work with you. I mean, the airline, I could say that American Airlines has an unfair advantage over the rest of the competition in my book right now because over the years, I've now developed, you know, six plus million miles of flying. And so they own me. And you know, they have an unfair advantage. I can't leave them. And in fact, I don't call it a frequent flyer program. I call it a frequent prisoner program.

8:17And so it works both ways that an unfair advantage can be a positive thing or it can be a negative thing. But regardless, I don't want my competition to have any opportunity to take business away from me. That's the bottom line. Well, I agree. And look at the monopoly word troubles people too. Yes. As does the word scheme, by the way, I mean, I always say take a go-rich, be a better titled scheme and go-rich and that, you know, we talk truth. Yeah, that's exactly right. We ought to, when we go into any situation, be scheming to have an advantage over everybody else who might be there, you and I come from the speaking world. And in the very early years where I would still take a breakout session, then I would develop this whole scheme on how to completely screw the two other speakers who

9:18had simultaneous breakout sessions. So their rooms were empty. That there was standing room only in mind, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think the moral answer to that is, well, they should have been figuring that out too. So talk about the uncopiable idea. Well, the uncopiable idea, again, it kind of goes to that unfair advantage thing is that, you know, I'm going to blame technology in a lot of ways. I'm also going to blame heuristics in a lot of ways. The two of those kind of works side by side. I'll start with the heuristics and that is that industries tend to have a strategic orthodoxy. In other words, they look inward. You and I both believe in this idea of, you know, you don't get new ideas by staring at your competition. You get new ideas by stepping outside your competition, stepping away from your world.

10:22And that's why you say, go study Disney, right? And I say the same thing. Well, you know, if all we do is stare at each other, and I'll ask my audience at some time, you know, I'll say, okay, which hotel chain invented the Curve Shower Rod? Nobody remembers. And it's only been a few years that Weston hotels stuck with Curve Shower Rod in their hotels, thinking this is going to be a competitive advantage. Well, it was a competitive advantage for about, you know, a week. And then everybody else had Curve Shower Rods. Back with, I was actually consulting for Procter and Gamble in the introduction of the Swiffer Wet Jet, and you know, many years ago. And it was, you know, it was a deep secret and it was hidden from everybody for so long. And then when they finally introduced it, it was probably less than three months before there were copycats on the market. So that, and that's what I was talking about earlier, is that, you know, in

11:29businesses, when companies are staring at just their industry, then everybody tends to become, it tends to become like a processionary caterpillar type of thing, where somebody comes up with, you know, in a manufacturing world, maybe somebody comes up with a CNC machine that makes, you know, 500 parts per hour. The next company says, well, we can build one that, you know, makes a thousand parts per hour. So you should buy from us, because we're now better than the competition. And that just becomes a big pissing contest, you know, of who can out better the other guys. And I keep calling my clients. I keep saying, you know, you'll never out better the other people. You know, you'll temporarily do that. But for a long term, what you want to do is you want to create a situation where they cannot better you. You know, that what you are doing is so uniquely relevant,

12:37unique has unique value to the customers. But it, but you own it. And nobody can take that away from you. And so what ends up happening is that your customers, you know, for lack of a better way of describing it, your customers will will realize that they will lose more when they, if they leave you, then they will gain by going to the competition. So I think that's just so important for people to get is, you know, I talked to Carl Feltabra, you know, what exactly are you, are you trying to do? What are you working on? And if it is incremental superiority over your competition, you're spending an enormous amount of time and energy doing something that if you succeed at it, you'll be lucky to hold on to it for 90 minutes. Right. You know, that's not the thing to aspire to. Yeah, no, it's not,

13:38but that's, but that's the, that's that's that's heuristic, you know, it's kind of like a mental habit that people fall into the trap. But what is exacerbated in this situation nowadays is that it used to be you could build a product or something that had a life time, I shouldn't say a lifetime, but it had, you know, 20 years ago, you could build a product and you had a one-year advantage over everybody, because it took them a year to copy and produce and develop, you know, prototypes and it was very expensive. That is just no longer the case. You know, nowadays because of technology, I mean, little small companies can now compete with really, really big companies. And so that advantage is gone. And, you know, all my work, when I did most of my work in the infomercial business, if you had a hit, you had 12 to 24 months before you had serious competition. Yeah.

14:42Now you've got, you know, 24 days. Yes. Because all the production barriers are down. That's technology. Yeah, exactly. Yep. That's exactly what's happened. And so, so we, we got us, you know, we have to recognize that the old days of relying on whether it was a, you know, a unique, a better product, maybe even customer service, you know, those, those days were kind of gone. You know, there's a level of expectation now. There's speed of speed to market now. That's, you know, light speed faster than it used to be. Exactly like what you're just talking about. You know, and everybody, everybody says they have the best customer service, which I think is hilarious because, you know, the term I learned from you was the term vague generality. And that's the phrase customer service. You know, what does that,

15:42you know, when you say you've got the best customer service, what the heck does that mean? I have no idea what it means. So it's a vague generality, but everybody says they got the best, you know, and so nobody does. Nobody does. And, you know, it's crazy out there. So I know you got multiple prescriptions. Run over the list and or give us one of the answers to this environment that we're in. I am one, too, but you will. Yes. Well, my big, the big goal to me is that the big goal of being uncopyable is that you are creating not a loyalty, not a relationship. You are creating an attachment with your customer base. That's what the objective is. It's to create an attachment to where they literally, you know, it's like you have an umbilical cord to them. And they cannot leave from you at all.

16:49The, you know, like you say in the book, I've got quite a few examples of color. We just talk about color. You know, is one of those certainly can can talk a little more about that. But the big one that I would take is what we are doing exactly right now. And that is that the diamond members, you know, for no B.F. Intercircle, which I'm very happy to say that versus that other name. Um, no B.F. Intercircle is, uh, this is the club that everybody wants to be a member of. And they join the club. And now they get this stuff like, you know, our interview today and and your weekly facts and they get all of it. And these are the things that they get by being in the club that they will lose if they leave the club. You know, after in one interview said,

17:52in in every neighborhood of our era where we were growing up, there was one house where everybody wanted to go play. Yep. Right. And and everybody wanted to stay and eat dinner there rather than go home. And stay into the evening. And he sent out to build a today we would use the word virtual. I forgot. I think he used metaphorical metaphorical house like that for his customers. Yeah. And I think that's a very good way to think about this. Yeah. And in fact, uh, an a modern, you know, a more modern example, uh, which I was involved in peripherally when I was doing some consulting for Starbucks. And, uh, and it was at the time when they were starting to determine that their objective was to be the third place. Uh, and, you know, figuring out that

18:55people have two existing places that they are locked into, one being their home and one being their work location. And Starbucks wanted to become that third place. So it's sort of like, like what you're talking about is that when you're growing up, there was that third place. Now as adults, we probably, you know, we don't have it. So Starbucks is saying that's what we are. That's what our objective is to be that third place. And that's a club. That's what that is. It's a club. So let's go a little more micro. If you go to a trade show, um, which is always kind of an interesting environment because it's in one way so horrid because theoretically all your competitors are gathered there in one place. It's almost a physical analogy for the internet. And there's, you know, more than anybody could absorb. And there's almost a reluctance to engage. It's a perverse entity. Right. People go to

20:00a trade show. Right. Or the purpose of being in a trade show. Right. And then they walk at double time up and down the aisles trying not to engage with anybody. Uh, which is very strange. But you know, it is what it is, right? Well, both sides of the aisle are guilty of that. Yeah. Well, you're right. You're right. So there's this ocean of stainless. Yes. So how does somebody kind of show up there in a way that is uncopiable? Well, the first rule of thumb is I always say the last thing, the last thing you want to do, and this is actually the first thing that everybody does when they're especially when they're exhibiting at a show is they take a break. They walk around the show looking for ideas for next time. You know, and this is a perfect example of what I was referring to earlier where I was saying that everybody looks at each other and they go around and

21:02they say, Oh, that looks, oh, that's a good idea. They've got a putting contest. You know, that's what we'll do next time. You know, or they've got a wheel of fortune or something like that going on. You know, that's what we'll do next time. So I'm, you know, again, and I've always made the joke that if I walk into a trade show and if I see a magician in the first aisle, you can bet money. I'm going to find six more magicians. You can just take it to the bank, right? So the first rule is go ahead, walk around and look what everybody else is doing, and then don't do that, right? You know, you've got to look for it. I mean, if, like in high tech shows, for example, high tech shows, if I, if I were allergic to the color blue, I'd be dead in the first aisle. Because in the high tech world and the blue is the color to be. And if I, if I knew everybody

22:02else was blue, my booth would be the brightest orange. It could possibly be. You know, just to absolutely be the biggest visual train wreck that they could, that I could possibly have. I would be looking for ways to, and I call it hunting moves, you know, where, you know, looking for, I have no interest in talking to everybody, you know, at, at a trade show. I just want to talk to the, to the, the moves I'm, I don't want to talk to all the animals in the forest. I just want to talk to my moves. But the first thing that has to happen is they have to see me. And so, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to have, number one, I'm going to have messaging in my booth. And this follows right along with magnetic marketing, you know, is that, you know, what is the, what is the number one pain problem that my, you know, my move is going to have. And then I'm going to blast that I've got the answer in there. I'm

23:06also going to have the most aggressive staffers that you can possibly get. Staffers are uniformly terrible at trade shows. They're extremely passive. They're waiting for something to happen. I'm, you know, mine, whenever I work with the company, not as much as I used to. Of course, like you say, I, you know, used to be, you know, full time trade show staff. But the one thing I always, I always taught them was, you know, get out in the aisle. You know, I'm, you know, I'm talking about that. I mean, they ever told you. My first and only job when I, you know, was employed, was as a sales rep for Price Turns Lawn, which has been absorbed by, I don't know, Simon and Chirster, I think. And about two weeks after I was hired, was the Chicago gift show, which they had a big booth at. And that year we had, the big deal was we had the book, the push

24:12button telephone song book, which had, you could call somebody up and, you know, play it. By the way, they told a million copies of that. I remember that. So I go to the show, right? I'm so wet behind the years I'm dripping. And I am cautioned ahead of time by National Sales Manager and then every rep don't really try and write business at the show. This is, you get catalogs of people's hands, you make nice with them, you, you generate some leads to follow up on later, but you know, you don't really so anything. And, and you try to talk to the people who are within your territory, right? So everybody walking by, their badge says, Helen Schwartz, such and such a business and the city and state their front, right?

25:13So I don't like this advice at all, because I actually need to eat. Yeah, you're not making any money. Yeah. So everybody else is exactly as you say, passive nearly to the point of combatose, standing in the booth. If they're talking to anybody, they're talking, the reps are talking to each other, like guys at a car dealership. Right. And so I am stepping out in the aisle, looking at the badges. And if there's somebody in my area, here's my opening question. Hey, I see you're from my territory. Are you going to place an order while you're at the show today? We've got new stuff. Awesome. And, and I horrify the crap out of everybody associated with the company. But I also wrote more business at the show than all the rest I've mad at yet, because people would be taking it back and they say, well, I don't know,

26:15or well, I guess so. And you would march them over and show them stuff in right orders. You'd see by rocket science to be. Well, you know, and I, you know, even today, even though, you know, at a lot of, at a lot of events, buyers don't necessarily come to the show to write orders anymore. But still, people are way too passive. And, you know, they have conversation, they might, you know, they wait back in the booth, people come in and they finally have a conversation. And it's always a conversation where the ending is sort of like, well, let me scan your badge or let me get your card and we'll follow up with you. Right? Again, vague generality. You know, even, even if I don't, I mean, I would, I could even still use the opening that you used. And because if anything, all it's doing is getting a conversation started with that person. And if I could say to somebody, hey, how you doing? You know, I see you're from my territory and, and are you here to write an order?

27:16You know, at the show or, or what are you looking for or something? But at the point is that, that would probably get a laugh out of them. And, you know, they'd say, gee, I don't, you know, I really wasn't planning on writing any orders. What do you, you know, but it starts that conversation where I can then get as close to writing the order as possible. You know, and sometimes like, you never know, you might actually end up writing an order that you never expected to get. But well, I want to go back to, you know, you used to term visual train wreck. Yeah. Halberg used to talk about a success being somewhat proportionate to the willingness to commit image suit suicide. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you know, when you see the, when you see the June newswaters, we are returning to visual train wreck and image suicide on purpose.

28:20And Adam and Van H are perfectly okay with that. And it just to me is, if everybody else looks like a magazine, you can't look like an magazine. Exactly. I mean, and then you've got to figure out what you're going to look like, but it damn sure can't be like everything else. And there are a lot of people that are just, you know, terrified about this. I think pure disapproval, employee, mute me. I mean, you must fight it. I fight it with people with clients. Yeah. All the time. All the time. And that's, you know, and that's also, you know, when you go back to the title of my book, uncopable, how to get an unfair advantage over your competition, you know, that terminology is also designed to call out the people who I don't want to read my book. You know, that's part

29:20of, that's part of what we want to do is we want to weed out people that we don't want to work with. Yeah, some are people to buy into too, but it's really true. Sure it is. Sure it is. You know, and, you know, so it's almost like you're going to have to offend some people or you should. If you're not offending somebody, then you're just not trying hard enough. Yeah. So we have, you mentioned brother or earlier. So I have a relative who they absolutely hate Disney. What's wrong with them? Yeah, well, 20 million people. And so they vehemently object to the commercialization of childhood. Oh, okay. And the, and to sell it. And so in their young years, the kids are not allowed to have any

30:21character merchandise or books or, you know, whatever is given to the kids when they're young. Like for birthday and Christmas can't be, you know, a Disney princess style. It has to be a non-gender specific, non-denominational, non-branded, and certainly not Disney branded thing, which are not easy to find incidentally. I'm sure. And they would absolutely refuse, hey, we'll take you and your kids to Disney. No, no, no, no, no. Hell no. And so I actually was curious about this. And Hensomite does research for me from time to time. I should just do a search online for me, social media chat, et cetera. How many Disney haters there are who have the same objections. Or, you know, is this one in our family really an outlier? Yeah.

31:25This is a big thing. Sure it is. I mean, there's a big population of people who vehemently object to this. And obviously it has zero effect on Disney whatsoever. Right. They still got the problem of too many people showing up. And they still keep raising their prices. And they still keep raising their prices. Now they're doing dynamic pricing. Yeah. And that created a bunch of negative media briefly. And you think they care about that? No. No. And they don't even respond to it. No. And that's really just what people see. I think there's a direct link to to power in the marketplace to what you would call being uncopyable. And being willing to ignore a lot of criticism about things that actually are disliked by large numbers of people.

32:25Yeah. Oh, I completely agree with that. I think there's power in selectivity. And it's for a company to select their audience. And if you're trying to go after everybody, and that's the old adage, if this is for everybody, then it's for nobody. Now, I mean, remember back when actually when we first met, we connected because I had given a presentation at the National Speaker's Office. Because Association Convention many years ago titled How to Be a Big Fish in a Small but Rich Pond. That's what it's all about to me. I would rather find a very rich pond, you know, then try to be, you know, a small fish in the ocean. Well, it's also now a real defensive position. Sure.

33:30That again, to your point, the internet has made more important. I mean, I talk to people, I talk to people all the time. If your thing is, is can be Amazon, not necessarily by Amazon, but by something like Amazon or by Amazon. And it's big in any way. It's got to be Amazon. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Now, if it's small enough, even though it may be really rich, if it's small enough, those guys won't mess with it. Yes. That's not the way they play the game. Oh, they are. Go big or go home. Yeah. So, you know, if you're in the legal, if you've got law firms and you're dealing with rank and file public, you're in deep trouble. Sure. Because legal zoom in their equivalent is going to eat your lunch.

34:32If you're a specialist in affluent families that have somebody diagnosed with Alzheimer's, well, it's going to be a long time before. They figure out how to Amazon. Right. Right. Yeah. I was just recently doing an interview with the HVAC HVAC industry. And they have for many, many years relied on two step marketing or two step sales with a distributor managing the inventory. Right. And doing the selling. Well, you and I both know the distributors don't sell. They just take orders. And part of the conversation that I had with them was about the fact that they were saying that they were, that they were, people, the scared people said, we're going to get Amazon. We're going to get Amazon. But then there was this core group of people and companies and distributors who were the big guns, you know, who stuck to their guns by saying, oh, they can never replace us.

35:46And I said, I just said to them, I said, guess what? You know, I met Jeff Bezos at Ted, a number of years ago. And I asked him the question. I said, you know, what are you going to try, what are you going to try to sell? And he just looked at me. He just said, we're going to try everything. You know, and we're going to find out if it can be sold online, then we are going to sell it online. You know, and I just said to these guys, I said, you need to expect that Amazon is coming after you. Because if you're doing nothing but taking orders, then you're providing there is nothing of value that you have in there. Yes, there's no added value equation. Or, you know, look, there's a big segment of the market that will sacrifice that value. I mean, I thought I'd do a lot of work with orthodontics and Dr. Burleson.

36:48We have an excellence in orthodontics program. And I really thought up until three years ago, you are not going to Amazon orthodontics. It's not going to happen. And Swildred Club, which in visoline now owns a big hunk of, actually ships the damn braces to them, direct at a box. Does the dog dostics over the internet? And there are parents who will settle for. And in some cases, it's okay, playing orthodontist at home. Yeah, I don't think I'm taking, I'm doing that with my kid. I doubt you would do it with yours. I don't think really a fluent people are going to do it. Or they'll be the last to do it. So, a lot of this is about what market do you own, not what product do you own. Yeah, exactly right. And there's a phrase that I have been telling my clients now for a number of years

37:51that is the scariest phrase possible to a business person. And that phrase is, it's good enough. You could talk all day long about how great your product line is. You know, how, like you talk about the orthodontics, right? It's not that these people don't think that going to an orthodontist isn't better. It's just that this is good enough. Yeah, and there's a good enough spot kind of for every strata of the market. And it's usually pretty big. It's usually a pretty big segment of the market, who will say, yeah, that's good enough. It's like meetings. You know, in the meeting industry is that in trade shows, I keep pounding into people's heads that, you know, when you have a meeting or you have a trade show, you are asking somebody to give up two or three days of their time to come.

38:52Now, think about that. You know, if you call up somebody and say, hey, can we have a three hour meeting, most likely they're going to say, well, can it be an hour? Can we do it on the phone? You know, thinking in terms of creating time. And, you know, and there are a lot of meetings, you know, still a lot of organizations that they're going to say, oh, people want to meet face to face. I go, yeah, they want to. But if they're looking at the trade off, and if it's good enough, that's what's going to win. Yeah, people think products are periordy in part because they fall in love with their products. Oh, yeah. You know, is the big issue. I say process superiority, Trump's product superiority, any day of the week. And it better be matched with a specific market. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're asking, and then again, you know, stepping forward, you know, I would say,

39:52and then you have to create an attachment with that market. Um, that nobody, nobody can copy. Great calls. Thank you all for being here. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing it on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever, designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now, this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money making information for free, just for saying maybe you can get this gift from Dan right now at nobsletter.com. Not only do we get a $20,000 gift, you also need a subscription to two marketing newsletters that will be hand delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift in your subscription, go to nobsletter.com right now.