Joshua Bell: A Story About Positioning

This story about Joshua Bell and the Washington Post is very much a positioning story. In 2007, The Washington Post did a bit of a social experiment. They had Joshua Bell, who's a world-renowned violinist -- he plays a three-and-a-half-million-dollar Stradivarius violin -- he played with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and for an hour, he gets paid about $60,000.

The Washington Post did a bit of a social experiment. Before a show, they had Bell set up as a busker at a railway station. For an hour's work, he got paid $32.

He played the exact same set that he played at the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. In one scenario, he made $32. In the other scenario, he made $60,000 -- the difference being positioning.

If you're positioning yourself as a street busker, then you get paid as such. If you're positioning yourself as a world-class performer arriving at the place where people really value what you do, then you're going to get paid accordingly as well. A lot of the time, people will appraise you at your own value.

Having said that, you can't cheat. You can't just say, "Hey. I'm a world-class performer," and then you get out your instrument and you can't really play at a world-class level. Obviously, you have to have the skills according to how you're positioning yourself.

A lot of the times, you'll see people who are just amazing, but maybe they have low self-esteem, or for some reason they position themselves much lower than they really are. Having that difference of positioning -- that can make a world of difference to your income.

There is always an investment. If you don't have the money, then your investment is time. You want to connect with, as Kevin Kelly calls it, "your thousand true fans." I think almost any artist can make it if they've got a thousand true fans, the people who really love what they do and connect with what they do.

It's all about finding: Who are you for? Who is your audience? Who are your people that are willing to be your raving fans, and the people who are willing to follow you where you go? That kind of thinking necessitates that you need to think about, "OK, who are my people?" Too many people try to find an audience for their stuff, whereas I like to do the reverse.

I like to find an audience, and I like to serve that audience with what they already want. Rather than trying to create demand, saying, "Here's my stuff. Buy my stuff," or "Follow me," or whatever, I want to find that audience who already want something, and I just give it to them.

It's far, far easier to give someone what they already want, rather than to make someone want what you've got.

It's very tempting to say, "Hey, I'm going to find someone and I'm going to outsource all my marketing to them. They're going to send me all the leads, and I'm going to just do what I do."

That approach really does not work. Very rarely, if ever, have I seen something like that work. As a business owner, you've got two major jobs. Number one is innovation. Number two is marketing. They're your two biggest jobs that you have as a business owner, as an entrepreneur.

And you need to start building your marketing team. You need to be involved with the strategy. You don't need to necessarily be across the tactical side. You don't have to be on Facebook doing the Facebook ads and all of that, but you need to understand the strategy.

You need to say, "Look. This is our audience. This is our specific message to our audience, and this is how we are going to reach them." Then you put the team in place.

The days of hiring a general marketing agency to do all of your marketing, I think that they're over. Marketing has become much more complicated, much more fragmented. You need to start hiring that team.

I like to hire from the top down. When I hired my team I hired my team leader first. Then I had her hire the rest of the team. Doing it that way makes her much more responsible for the team.

It also means that I'm not the center hub of all the communication, where someone's saying, "Hey, ask the copywriting guy to do this or get the tech guy to do that," so I'm not the bottleneck.

I work with my team leader on a regular basis, but she manages the rest of the team. That's a much better way of doing it than trying to be in the center of it all, because you become a bottleneck.

As a business owner and an entrepreneur I know that you are going to get bored with the routine stuff. You're going to get busy. You're not going to do it for whatever reason. You need to find that person who's going to wake up in the morning and think about marketing your business.

I use portals as a last resort when I can't find anybody within my network. I think, almost everybody within their network will have someone. If you put it out to your network and say, "Look, I'm looking for someone to come in two days a week, or four hours a day. This is what I'm looking for. I'm being very specific."

Almost everyone will have someone in their network. Someone will know a wife, a cousin, a daughter who maybe wants a few hours of work. You don't need to hire someone full-time on day one.

A lot of the times, moms who are getting back into the workforce, maybe want to do a few hours a day of work that can't get back into the workforce full time or they don't want to. They can be a really good resource. There's specific websites to hire people like that.

Think about what's one thing that's been on your to-do list for a long time. Maybe it's getting that opt-in on your website going. Or maybe it's getting postcards out to your whole customer list or whatever.

Get someone in to just do that one thing. Once that thing is a system, once that thing is happening on a regular basis, then add another thing, then add another thing, then add another thing. That's how your marketing system is going to snowball.

Start with one thing. Get it systemized -- the thing that you know you should be doing that's been on your to-do list forever -- and just get someone in to get it done.