[Photo by Xiaofen P on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 20
Build a Castle, Not a Village, Part 12
Meeting Your Residents
[Note: this is Part 12 of a miniseries within the broader Odysseus Files called “Build a Castle, Not a Village.” These miniseries will group broad topics thematically, helping you connect the dots between them more easily.]
Who lives in your acropolis?
Ultimately, your customers are in your acropolis for the purpose of transformation.
That means they need to meet your residents - the products and offers you make.1 Each resident in your acropolis has a job to do: to help direct your visitors to the change they need to experience.
Your offers are more than just the products or services you deliver. An offer is the sum total of everything that a customer will receive and experience when they buy a given product or service from you. This includes the core product, any bonuses or surprises you throw in, the price, any guarantees you offer (such as free shipping, refunds, etcetera), and the customer service that comes with the product.
Just like a character has a distinctive personality, strengths & flaws, and a backstory, get creative about designing your offers to emotionally connect with different visitors to your acropolis. Each visitor has the potential to get value from meeting multiple residents, so don’t be afraid to build offers at different price points, various levels of access, and that can solve multiple problems.
Making Offers That Stand Out
And don’t just rely on your visitors to tell you who they want to meet - if you do, you’ll look just like everyone else in your space.
Businesses of all sizes and types do this. From corporations and consumer brands to B2B companies and tech startups to local brick-and-mortar businesses and creator brands.
They follow the herd, so to speak. Copy what everyone else in their industry does. Fight over the same customers. Deliver (essentially) the same products or services. Think that what sets them apart is doing things “better” (as if every other competitor doesn’t think the same way…).
Then they test. And track. And gather data. And survey their customers.
All in the name of finding out what the customer wants.
But guess what? *Hot take alert*
Customers don’t know what they want.
And if you ask them, they’ll tell you the same thing they tell everyone else who is polling them.
Don’t believe me?
Writer Alex Murrell cites a study whereby a group of artists polled people all over the world to find out what their ideal painting was, with the goal of creating a series of unique paintings representing many different cultural tastes. Over 11,000 people and 11 countries later, the resulting paintings didn’t exactly go according to plan: every single one consisted of some variation of a landscape with a few animals in the foreground and a blue background.
To quote the article: “This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliche. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. Welcome to the age of average.”2
There’s a huge lesson here for businesses: those who track the same, look the same.
Your data and metrics are important, yes. There are obviously numbers in your business you need to be aware of. The point of this isn’t to say don’t track at all.
It’s to say, if you want to build a brand that stands out - that gets attention, that attracts the RIGHT customers, that is sustainable for the long term - you need to NOT do (or offer) what everyone else is doing.
Don’t get me wrong - understanding your audience’s deep-seated needs, pain points, and desires is important. Of course it is. But when you go far beyond what people tell you they want, you position yourself as a leader - guiding your customers through a transformation only you can deliver, that goes beyond what they can imagine for themselves.
Focusing solely on what people say they want now means delivering only the next iteration of what they have now. True innovators and visionaries - from iconic brands to impactful inventors - have the foresight to understand what lies beneath what people say they want, and then look 10 steps down the line to deliver something entirely unexpected.
They don’t create based on polls and focus groups; they build based on vision.
(Like Odysseus’ Trojan Horse idea: if he’d asked other Greeks how to beat Troy, they would have said to keep doing what they’d been doing - going toe-to-toe with the Trojan soldiers. But, you know, with MORE. Or BETTER.)
You’re the leader of this new community. It’s your job to guide your people into the transformation they seek. Do so with vision, courage, and conviction. Create offers they never knew they needed, but because of the relationship you’ve built with them (because they’re in your world, and your whole focus is on them), you know will contribute to their transformation.
Introduce these residents as exciting surprises to your visitors, delighting them with new discoveries over the course of your relationship. They’ll be grateful for the opportunity to pay you in order to meet your characters.
This idea of your offers being the “residents” of your world isn’t my original idea; I got it from Ben Settle, the master of business world-building.
Alex Murrell, “The Age of Average,” 2023.