Market Research
As the sun sets over the badlands and the sagebrush, a lone rider comes into sight and dismounts by his campfire, frees his horse to browse the dry grass, and walks toward the camera. As his face comes into focus you recognize the weatherbeaten, leathery visage and white walrus mustache of none other than Sam Elliott.
You know this has to be a truck commercial.
Sam puts his hand on the roof of the vehicle in the dying light of the day, and begins to growl in that gravelly cowboy voice, “Out here, a man has to be strong and savvy. You don’t get no second chances. That’s why real men know when the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’, and nothin’ gits you through like a Sahber-troke.” Sam looks adoringly at the gleaming stainless steel, moonroverish Cybertruck catching the last rays of the sun…….
Then, of course, you wake up and shake your head. It was only a dream.
It may be that if Elon Musk paid Sam Elliott enough money, he might do a Cybertruck commercial. But I really doubt it. I think the man has too much professional pride and would rather do one for Chanel No. 5 or Victoria’s Secret.
I live in a very rural county in a very rural part of Canada, a place where the Canadian Tire store sells guns and ammunition and maple syrup making equipment. It’s no surprise, then, that the vehicles in the parking lot are mostly trucks, everything from a wired-together 1972 beater, through dozens of Ford F150s, Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and even a goodly number of Toyotas and Nissans, many tricked out enough to put their retail prices ranging up to $100,000. These are trucks, or as Sam Elliott might growl, “trokes”.
To be fair, I have seen one or two Cybertrucks scuttling along under cover of darkness, but you never see one out in the open surrounded by a half dozen local boys, decked out in Carhart work clothes and steel-toed boots, checking it out with a mix of admiration and jealousy. The best you’ll get are sneers, snickers, and crude comments. They’d rather be caught in the ladieswear section of Giant Tiger.
Now this is not meant to be a beatdown of the Cybertruck or of Elon, but to make an important point about business and the professions. From a utility perspective, the Cybertruck actually has much to recommend it in terms of performance and payload. It has really only one drawback: nobody in the truck-buying public would want to be seen near one.
The Cybertruck is now firmly established in a league that includes the Ford Edsel and the Pontiac Aztek as howling sales disasters, the butt of comedians’ tirades, and financial sinkholes for their producers. The man delivering government efficiency on behalf of Donald Trump has lost enough money on this four-wheeled spaceship to buy a couple of American states.
But surely Musk saw this coming? A man and his script kiddies who know everything about everything? Surely he had focus groups and surveyed the cowboys and loggers of the Old West? Had his wizards get to the heart of why Ford builds and sells more F150s than all their competitors’ models combined?
No, actually. In fact, Elon brags about “no focus groups, no market studies”. From his mighty brain to the Tesla sales lot, poof, like a Hogwarts wand!
In the professions and in business, there are two “most important” things. The first, as everyone who reads these rants knows, is to live and work in the centre of your Giftings. The second, just as important, is to understand clearly who your ideal clients or customers are. The straight line between your unique Giftings and those people who desperately need exactly what you offer is called Alignment. Get that right and it’s almost impossible to avoid success and happiness. Interestingly, Elon used to understand that.
Nailing down who exactly is your ideal client, your target market, your target reader or listener, is rarely a simple task. While a few lucky ones “just know”, most of us spend a lifetime trying to get it exactly right. It’s in listening to what your clients and customers tell you when you ask for honest feedback that you begin to home in more and more closely on why exactly they sought you out in the first place. Why do people come to your talks? Why have your customers been coming to you to buy wares they can get at a hundred other places? Why do clients drive three hours to consult at your office?
It’s in getting to the root of these questions that we begin to understand why a certain set of customers and clients seek us out, and we then hone our Giftings and put in place systems, efficiencies, and enhancements to enable us to give them even more of the “best us”.
Anytime Elon wants to come out to Lanark County to talk to the men (and women) who drive “real trucks”, I’d be happy to squire him around. In a tricked-out Ford F150.