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In this episode of The Marketing Factory podcast, host Marissa Candy dives into the art of marketing products and services often deemed "boring." She challenges the notion of what constitutes a boring business and emphasizes that just because a product may seem unexciting, it doesn't mean the marketing has to be dull. Marissa encourages listeners to embrace unpredictability in their marketing strategies, suggesting that there are vast opportunities for creativity in every industry. With over two decades of experience as an award-winning marketer, she shares proven strategies to transform perceived limitations into powerful marketing campaigns that drive real impact.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - The Power of Unpredictability in Marketing

00:01:03 - Identifying Boring Products and Services

00:02:19 - The Importance of Attention in Marketing

00:03:34 - Learning from Virgin Airlines

00:04:59 - The Unpredictability of Steve Irwin

00:05:30 - Finding Your Unique Angle

00:06:22 - Case Study: Human Resources Marketing

00:08:30 - Creative Approaches to Safety Messages

00:10:03 - Redefining Boring into Exciting

00:10:24 - Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

One of the most important elements that you can add into your

marketing is to be unpredictable. Just because your

product or your service is boring, doesn't mean

your marketing has to be boring. Your business can really

shine if... You think you have a boring product

because guess what? Everyone else in your industry thinks that

they've got a boring product too. What are you prepared to

do that others in your industry aren't? Are you willing

to push some boundaries? Are you willing to take on

a new angle? Welcome to The Marketing Factory, where we don't blend

in. I'm Marissa Candy, founder and award-winning marketer. And

for over two decades, I've helped businesses think differently about

their marketing and achieve powerful results. In this podcast,

I'll share proven strategies so that you can create profitable marketing

campaigns that drive real impact for your business. Ready

to turn clarity into action? Let's get started. Hey,

hey, welcome to the Marketing Factory podcast. I'm your host,

Marissa Candy. And in this episode, we are

going to be discussing how to market boring

products and services. So do you have a boring

product? How do you quantify boring anyway, right? So do you think

you have a boring service? Is what you do boring? Well,

guess what? I believe that if you think

you do have a boring product, you probably don't. And you actually

have a massive, massive marketing opportunity.

Because, just because your product or your service is boring, doesn't

mean your marketing has to be boring. Right? No,

it doesn't. So what's a boring business anyway? What

do you quantify as boring? So your

business can really shine if you

think you have a boring product, because guess what? Everyone

else in your industry thinks that they've got a boring product too. Or

they've got a boring service. Who wants to market, I

don't know what, lawyers? Who

wants to market training, compliance,

safety training? Wow. Some people would

rather do other things than actually go to a training course.

So finding the opportunity in that is the key. Now,

let me ask you this question. Do you listen to the safety announcement on

every flight? Do you pay attention? Do

you look at the flight attendant as they're telling you to, you

know, put your buckle in and clip your buckle and this is how you get into it and this

is how you get out of it. I've always wondered, actually, why they

tell us in the safety demonstration how to get in and out

of your belt when you've probably already done that multiple times and

they go around and make sure that your belt's actually done up before the

safety announcement. But anyway, that's just me. So

do you pay attention every time you've already got into your Netflix series, you've

already dove into that book? But let me ask you this,

when you fly a particular airline, and you're gonna know the one I'm talking about,

and there's a colourful flight attendant that is giving an

ad lib safety message, and it

is colourful, and you don't know what that person's

gonna say next. And that airline, I will call it out, it's Virgin,

and it's owned and run and managed by an incredible businessman,

an incredible man that I admire, Richard Branson.

Everything about that business stems from the top down. He's

a colourful character and he is an incredible marketer.

Because one of the most important elements that you can add

into your marketing is to be unpredictable. When

we used to put together the success publication, I

would say the brief to our graphic artists was this. Make

every page unpredictable. Never let the audience

ever know or expect what was going to happen next.

And it's the one of the greatest tactics in marketing. So

what you can do is actually take it away and be inspired by

Virgin. You want some inspiration? Go and have a look at their

branding. Go and have a look at their business. Go back in time and research what

they have done over time because they've done some absolutely incredible

things. Unpredictability in marketing. Let

me give you another example. For those of you in

Australia, you'd be very familiar with our famous crock

hunter, Steve Irwin. He had such a following. Why

did Steve have such a following? Apart from the fact that he

was wrestling dinosaurs, right? Apart from

that, you just never knew what this chap was going to do next. You

just never knew what Steve was going to do, what was going to happen. The

unpredictability forced people not

to look away. He had attention across the

globe. It translated across languages,

cultures, whatever it was. The unpredictability drew

people in because you never know what was going to happen next. These

people, like Virgin, like Steve, they're prepared to

do things that others aren't prepared to do. So

here we go. Let's think about this, okay? Let's bring it back to you. What

are you prepared to do that others in your industry aren't?

Where are you prepared to go? Are you willing to

push some boundaries? Are you willing to take

on a new angle, take on a new approach? Because if you are, the

rewards could be there. Now let me give you a little example of

a client that we've got, an industry that we were then exposed

to. So a client comes to us, they're in HR, human

resources, human resource management. Everyone gets excited about

that, don't they? I don't know, you tell me. Everyone's got

a different level of excitement or things they get excited about, right?

However, what we found was when we were exploring other

HR companies was that everyone sort of did the same cookie

cutter marketing, that everyone was going to market saying that,

you know, we've got this training course on, we've got that training course on. And

it was all very typical things that you would expect,

like people being shown in a corporate setting and

wearing corporate clothes, lots of handshake photos, you

know, the ones, right? So we saw a lot of this and then we

went, boom, Bingo. I think we've got an opportunity here

to be a little bit different. So what did we do for

this human resources business? Well, we

start where we always start. And that is with what?

If you've been listening, it's with what? The strategy. That's right.

That's what I heard you say. The strategy. We took a strategic approach

to determine what we are trying to say. We are looking for the

outcome. Okay. We're looking for the outcome. The outcome of

engaging this human resources company is that they have

training courses on that are going to grow people's coaching

businesses. Okay. So the outcome is

that they are growing your business. So

what did we do? We put together something that's

going to deliver an outcome. So we went

back to basics to deliver what the outcome was, what

we were trying to say, what the benefit was. was that

their target audience was coaches. Their human resource

company was offering training courses to grow coaches' practices.

Yeah? So what we did is we put together a campaign

that promoted the outcome in a bit of a different way.

We said that we can see that the

future is clear, that your coaching practice will

grow. And we led that with

a vision, the image of a fortune teller. A fortune teller

doing palm reading, a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball saying, the

future is clear. Your coaching practice will grow if

you're using our business. Is anyone in

human resources, in HR, that you know, using

a fortune teller as their main hero imagery throughout their

marketing, throughout their campaign? No. And what's it doing? And how many of these images

do you see actually getting around online? How many images do you see of

sort of creepy, somewhat fortune tellers, online at

the moment, staring into crystal balls, palm reading and doing the

like. You don't see it often, therefore it gets attention and

you bring attention and something different, a bit of quirkiness

to your marketing and therefore you get noticed. Now, we didn't

know, but this client of ours is fantastic, by the way.

They took it a bit further. They went and got some photos shot.

And what did they do? They dressed up as fortune tellers themselves, giving us

great additional imagery and media to use

throughout the campaign. And we brought poses in

saying they were the gurus and they embraced it all. So

when you engage a marketing agent, you want to let them fully

get the full benefit from them, you need to leverage and use

all of their creative power and all their creative juices for you. There's a massive opportunity

to make waves. Now, to give you another example, if we've got time,

really quickly, emergency videos. Now, how

do we get people's attention to listen to the safety demonstration on an airline? Emergency

videos, when you're entering a stadium, it's really important information,

but You know, I'd rather watch paint dry. So

what did we do? We were engaged by Stadiums Queensland, again

in one of their massive major venues. We had

to put together the critical instructions of a safety message. Now, we

got the message across. But we did it in a fun way. We

engaged the local NRL players to be the stars of the

video, to put forward the messages that we want to

get across, because we know the people that go to that stadium love those

players, those NRL players, so they might listen to them. I

hope that this has proven that there are massive opportunities out

there to make waves. And now, hopefully, that I've inspired you, let's

go out there and let's redefine boring into exciting.

And to recap, just because you think something's boring doesn't mean

that it has to be. Go out there, be creative, bring some fun

into your life, and I can guarantee you this, if you can find another angle,

another way, you will be rewarded. I'm Marisa Candy, this

is the Marketing Factory Podcast, and I'll see you again soon.

Thanks for tuning into The Marketing Factory. If today's episode helped

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