How do you help your brand stand out in a sea of competitors? In this episode of The Growth Pod, Jesse James Wroblewski reveals his diabolically effective strategy for differentiation.

Specifically, Jesse shares:

• Key ways to stand out in a commoditized world.
• How to captivate and engage audiences by going against the grain.
• The easiest way to outshine your competitors.

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Marketing for Supervillains (Jesse's Book)
• Marketing for Supervillains Nuclear Edition

Connect with Jesse:

• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

About Jesse:

Jesse James Wroblewski has been at the helm of a NY marketing agency for close to three decades. His often offbeat work has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Book "505 Weirdest Websites Ever" and Fangoria, as well as a plethora of other media outlets. After the realization that the entire marketing industry had gone insane, he retooled, reimagined, and reemerged as something different, something more powerful than the marketing world has ever seen. Ready to share his new vision for the world, he proudly presents Marketing For Supervillains: Diabolical Tips On Differentiation, Decommoditization™ and World Domination.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

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Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today on the podcast, we have Jesse James Wroblewski. He has been at the helm of a New York marketing agency for close to three decades.

His often offbeat work has been featured in Rolling Stone, the book 505 Weirdest Websites Ever, and Fangoria, as well as a plethora of other media outlets.

After the realization that the entire marketing industry has gone insane, he retooled, reimagined, and reemerged as something different, something more powerful than the marketing world has ever seen. Ready to share his new vision for the world, he proudly presents Marketing for Super Villains.

Diabolical tips on differentiation, decommoditization and world domination. Jesse, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. Angela, excited to be here.

I am so excited. I held this up during your intro.

We're going to get into your book a little bit later in the episode, but today specifically you're talking about how to build a brand distinction in sea of competitors. So why do you think that this is an important topic for business owners to pay attention to?

So it became an important topic to me. After much denial, I realized that I had become a commodity.

And with an increase of competitors into the field, things like fiverr, things like offshoring, and now with AI, I'm not as special to my clients as I was in the past. Right. I used to get tremendous amount of pride. My clients would call me, I'm the only one that could solve their problem.

And now the conversation's kind of switched to, well, why should I use you? I can get it cheaper here. And with the just the Internet in general, I think every company out there now faces an explosion of choice. Right.

So back in the day, you'd have to like, know someone who knows someone to get a good marketer. Now at any given moment I can find a thousand marketers and without getting out of my chair, interview them and pre qualify them.

So I think across the board, if not just for myself, figuring out a way, especially in a market where people are racing to the bottom and they're starting to feel the price crunch, figuring out a way to actually charge a premium where everybody else is going in the opposite direction as far as pricing goes.

Yeah, absolutely. I, well, we're both in the agency space and so I really relate to, you know, somebody taking your proposal, giving it to somebody.

Well, this has happened to me and taking my proposal, giving it to somebody else, and then told me, you know, this person's going to do the exact same thing for cheaper. And in your book you mentioned that every brand over time will become commoditized. So why do you think that is.

So similar to the Internet experience? I think we're inching towards an age of abundancy.

And the recent headlines were now with AI and the ability to efficiency or efficient size, if that's even a word. Everything. We're heading towards this age of abundance. And people just are used to things on demand.

And if you can't give it to me Now, I got 10 other people that are ready to give it to me, probably faster, probably cheaper. So I think it pertains to any industry. One of my favorite examples is, you know, back in the 80s, there was an airline war.

Nobody really had a brand loyalty to an airline. What you decide on cheapest ticket I'm going to get, I'm going to use that ticket and hop on a plane.

Then some genius came up with the idea of a rewards program. What if we reward people for flying our airline? We'll call them frequent flyer miles. And that differentiated that airline.

And their sales went through the roof. And then everybody else, what happened, they're like, oh, we'll jump onto that trend. And now frequent flyer miles are par for the course.

So now everybody's back down here in a price war again.

So even if you're in an industry or successfully decommoditize yourself, it's not the end games, right, because everyone's going to either copy or catch up. So it's a constant battle of always trying to remain differentiated.

And if you're like me, you take somewhat a decent amount of pride in being, you know, I always strive to be the best. I'm always refining my education. And for that not to be reflected in my sales is like demoralizing.

So I'm always trying to figure out ways to, you know, continue to stay up here, much like the airline did with their frequent Flag.

Yeah, I love that.

I think that was something that resonated so deeply with me in the book is even though you are the best and you're constantly refining your skill set that might not be reflected in your sales, like you said. And so you have to think of these other ways to show that you are remaining competitive in the marketplace.

So I love your example of the frequent flyer miles. I know like, Starbucks did something similar with their, like, drink rewards program, but again, now everybody's doing that.

And so how can you continue to, you know, innovate and try and remain decommoditized in the marketplace? So with that, what are the three? There's you outlined, like 12 ways in the book, I think.

But what are three key ways that the audience can go and start building brand distinction in their niche, in their. To stand out from their sea of competitors.

Absolutely. So it's typically, and I mentioned in most business books, they say, go out, find your differentiator, and then tell it to the world.

And those are two monumental tasks for anyone, and they don't really walk you through the process. So in the book, I narrow down the 12 ways that big brands or big and small brands throughout history have successfully decommoditized themselves.

And we call it the universe of differentiation. But a great example, even before you get to the book, before you kind of dive in, is you take an industry that's saturated, pun intended.

Any industry. I like to use water. The ultimate commodity. Water is free. It's pretty much anywhere you go.

But they still sell billions and billions of dollars a quarter. So right now, across the Globe, there are 7,000 brands of bottled water. Right?

And by and large, if you sit without using Google, just having pen and paper, chances are, if you try to write down every brand you can think of, you'll probably max out at seven. Seven brands out of 7,000. And that goes the same across the board.

So if you're looking for an agency and you think there's tens of thousands of agencies out there and my clients have all these choices, chances are they probably maybe narrowed it down to seven. So forget about thinking of the thousands and thousands of competitors. Think about the seven that your clients might associate with your service.

And then from there, step two would be putting those seven on a board and then imagining having a thought experiment. If the same price on a proposal was from those seven competitors, how would you get your potential prospect to pay $1 more?

So if you can figure out a way to get $1 above these seven competitors, you just basically successfully eliminated 99% of the competition. And then once you figure out how to get that $1 more, that's a great way to start building your differentiator.

That $1 can easily turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars in premium pricing.

I love that focusing on your top seven is so important. I think looking at the sea of competitors can be so overwhelming. It's not something that, you know, your client or your customers even doing.

They're not making a spreadsheet and looking at all the pros and cons of 7,000 people, only about, like, three or four of those seven. You know, maybe they look at seven and then do a pros and cons but they're not actually actively speaking to many more than, like, a handful.

Don't get discouraged, you know, being. Being a student of this. The reason I love it so much is probably because I failed dozen, two dozen times.

Reimagining, reinventing, you know, repositioning my agency over and over and figuring out how to be successful at it, and then from there, how to make a process out of it. So chances are you'll fail at first.

But the nice thing is, in this day and age, you could rebrand, reposition, and probably wouldn't even show up on a. On a client's radar. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, just. There's 7,000 agencies, but there's millions of people who need, you know, your services. Um, and it's true for any business as well.

So I love that, um, building off of that.

You shared a story in the book where you needed to reposition your niche, and you did all of this research and you found, you know, the right niche, but something was missing. And you talked about the importance of authenticity when choosing your niche. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Why is it not enough just to pick a niche that, you know, you think would be good?

Yeah, so great question. That seems to be.

When everyone talks about positioning and specialization, everyone says, you know, find a niche, you know, find the port, you know, look through your portfolio, figure out what you have the biggest foothold in, and kind of build on that. So I kind of went that route. I call it logic versus magic. Right. So the logic told me to go into this niche.

Big problems that I could solve, big money being thrown around. And like I said at the beginning, I tend to like to be the best, almost the best in the world at anything I try to do.

So I had this great, great playing and great, you know, a sandbox to play in.

But when it came down to me saying or writing blogs about this or addressing their concerns or entrenching myself going to a trade show in that specific niche just felt like work, a lot of work of something I did not want to do. So the logic was there, but authentically, it's just me literally pulling something out of a. Out of a hat.

So one of the people that I work with, Blair Enns, very, very well known in the. In the industry as far as positioning goes.

He says, you know, imagine you're sitting backstage and the MC says, joining us today on stage is the world's leading expert in Blank, please welcome. Right, fill in the blank. What do you want your future to be the leading Expert of what?

And if it's something that doesn't excite you or something that seems like work, chances are you're never going to get to be the best in the world at it because it's just going to be another thing on your plate. So find something that truly resonates authentically that you can sink your teeth into. That's a.

That's a really great start that a lot of business books I found did not offer as far as insights go.

Yeah, I love that.

I think coming from that place of authenticity not only makes it easier on yourself as the business owner doing something that you enjoy, but it comes across too with your clients. I have an esthetician, like skincare lady who just obsesses over what she does and that comes through.

And, you know, I've been to other similar services in the past and they're just kind of like doing it as a job and they never got me to come back.

But because she was so invested in what she did and it came through through, you're going to be able to attract more people, but also you'll be able to retain your clients and customers longer as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's not a.

It's not a hard and fast rule, but if you want to stack the deck in your favor, which super villains usually do, authenticity first is definitely a way to stack the deck.

I love it. So that's something I wanted to ask you about.

You have in, obviously your book is titled Marketing for Super Villains, and on your website and through your marketing materials, you have this super villain Al that you've adopted. Can you tell us a little bit about the meta behind that? How does this super villain theme, does that play into the concept of decommoditization?

Is it just something that you enjoy? What's kind of the thought behind that?

Yeah, the genesis of it was I've been doing this 25 years. I'm kind of burnt out and cynical. So maybe I'm not a marketing superhero. I'm going to.

I'm going to, you know, show the dirty underbelly of the industry. But the more I thought about it and actually I was actually living the super villain lifestyle without even knowing.

So if you think about it on a grand scheme, if you're a smaller guy entering a market or you're trying to compete with a big brand in your industry, Big brands, the industry leaders are usually like superheroes. Right.

They have huge public favor, everybody loves them, they have big muscles, which in marketing equates to big budgets and to Try to go head to head with a superhero, especially when you don't have all the resources. It's like a recipe for disaster. So a lot of clients would come to me and say, hey, I sell business phones. Let's do social media.

I'm like, google doesn't care that you're this small. You're going head to head with AT&T. In Google's eyes, what makes you different or in a sense, I need to stack the deck so that I can be successful.

I can't just go out there and sell business phones with no. With no differentiation.

So if you think about any movie, a super villain usually isn't as strong and as big and has as many resources as the superheroes do. They usually have to use their brains to outwit the superhero. So I'm sure you see this in your industry.

You're always asked to do a lot with a little. Right? So figuring out ways to kind of use what you have, which is usually not. Not a lot, and yet tremendous, tremendous results from it.

So things like differentiation, things like, you know, putting yourself where the other people aren't, to try and get a little bit of extra yardage, to use a football analogy, is kind of the genesis of where the whole super villain lifestyle came into. And then, I don't know if you can tell from my background, but I tend to like offbeat things that are not. Not mainstream.

So the authenticity of speaking to these super villain tropes and movie quotes and all that stuff just tied into my actual personality perfectly.

Yeah, absolutely. And I can see that reflected in the book.

I think that using this not only helps you kind of understand the concept a little bit better, but it creates this nice theme throughout everything you're doing, which is great to see, and it just makes everything so much more understandable. So you also mentioned, you know, doing more with less, which I think is something that's so common just in marketers in general.

But a lot of the listeners to this podcast are bootstrapped founders and entrepreneurs who are doing just that, trying to do as much as they can with the budgets that they have, either through their business or through the savings that they have to start their business. And so I like how you've taken this idea of, like, scrappiness, but given more power to it.

Absolutely, absolutely. Glad that Ryan came through. That's definitely the intent.

Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, what's next for you, Jesse?

So the book is still fairly new.

So again, similar to our clients, bootstrapping it, learning the ropes, figuring out how to sell more books than every other marketing, you know, marketing flavorless vanilla book out there. Which is another reason for the COVID and the name. Trying to make yourself stand out. When people are looking through the library, they see a book.

Marketing for super villains, definitely different. So I ventured into creating the super villain Roadshow doing keynotes across the country. Just did the first one in Oklahoma.

It's kind of a multimedia marketing extravaganza. So seeing if I like that, bootstrapping that as well, just you know, learning as I go.

So I could take all this knowledge and kind of impart it on my clients as well.

So always, you know, with 25 years in the, in the agency world, definitely needed something to reinvigorate me, a challenge to make me sharpen my sword again. And this definitely is checking all those boxes.

So just book promotion, public speaking promotion and we'll see where supervillain pops up next in the populace.

Awesome. That sounds so exciting. If listeners are interested in learning about your next supervillain roadshow or purchasing your book, where can they.

Or even checking out decommoditized, where can they learn more about you?

Yeah. So I, you'll see as the authenticity shows, I love creating content on this stuff. So I'll go through my list.

You can get the, you can get the book on Amazon. I am a frustrated filmmaker at heart so I tend to put over production into my little marketing videos.

So if you find me on YouTube I'm sure you'll crack a smile.

Definitely over the top marketing videos under decommoditized on YouTube and then for shorter form content, Instagram marketing, super villains, TikTok marketing, Supervillain and marketing for supervillains.com where one lucky person truly wants to recreate their origin story. We have what's called the nuclear edition of the book where this is not a joke.

You have to spend a weekend with me on board a nuclear submarine and we will craft your new origin story and super villainous marketing plan somewhere underwater on the planet earth. And you'll emerge with a brand new identity and an origin story. So marketingforsupervillains.com if you want to check that out.

And yes, it's a real offer. So there's three versions of the book that being the platinum tier one of one sort of one lucky reader.

I am obsessed with that. And that's what I was saying earlier with like this theme of supervillainy is present in everything you do. That is.

I'm going to have to check that out. That is mind blowing insane absolutely amazing.

And I think that again, there's so much imagery and power in that you're creating your super villain story. Then you emerge from the depths crafted anew. I am obsessed. I am like cheesing so hard.

This is because we're also doing an audio version of the podcast. So if you're listening, I am like so giddy over this. So definitely go to all the links Jesse just mentioned.

Jesse, I checked out your YouTube yesterday and love the really theatrical videos that you're putting out there. So listeners, if you're into, you know, learning by video or short form, all the links will be in the show notes.

The links to the book will also be in the show notes. Overall, really enjoyed our conversation today, Jesse. So many insightful impacts in the book. I've really enjoyed that as well.

And thank you so much for your time and sharing all of these insights with our audience.

Thanks so much. These supervillains aren't so bad.

Yeah, they're really not.