The Competitive Advantage Right Under Your Nose with Bryan Kramer
Jan 17, 2023
You have a competitive advantage in your business and might not even realize it. In this episode of Cash In On Camera, renowned business strategist Bryan Kramer, aka 'Zen Master to Digital Marketers', shares how to identify and leverage the human side of your enterprise.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll hear…
▶️ [0:46] Well, thank you first of all for having me here today. This is absolutely wonderful. I've been looking forward to this. And the competitive advantage is such an interesting term because it throws out this feeling of challenge. Like you're challenging another human being or you're challenged by. And so what is your competition and how are you gonna be competitive in this nature? And you know, I suffer, we all suffer from this syndrome that I don't know if I'm the originator, but it's certainly hurt something that I think we all suffer by, which is terminal uniqueness. And we create from where we are and who we think we are. And we are unique, and each and every one of us has a unique story to tell. And we have our own backgrounds and we see things from different perspectives. It's really super important that we stay grounded. We stay grounded with our terminal uniqueness and do that while not having too hard an ego or taking it to the point where our terminal uniqueness creates friction with who we are as people.
▶️ [2:18] Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean, remember back when Apple Steve Jobs just took over for the second time and Apple was struggling and the first time that he went on screen at a major event he had behind him bill Gates on a giant screen. It's because he went to bill and said, "I need your support. I need your help in order for Apple to survive." Microsoft of all companies, "I need your help for Apple to survive." And he invested. They invested in Apple and they really needed to, they didn't have to, but they needed to in order to create a pool of success around them. To have a competitor or to not have any competitors is no good. I mean, look at, you know whether you like Elon Musk or not, he opened everything around the autonomous driving cars everything, his public domain. Now, he could have taken everything that he invented around the electric car and actually Patented all of it and not opened it up, not given all the other car companies access to all the patents that he held and held it for himself and created a car company that was standing on its own. But he knew that in order to grow, and, Scale, he had to allow other companies in, and he's super smart about that.
▶️ [5:24] And the reason I think it resonated so loudly and still does today with, you know, look at artificial intelligence and augmented reality and bots and the list goes on, is because we, at the end of the day, are the people that are creating the tools. We create the tools. The tools do not create us. I would say that again like we create the tools, humans create tools. Tools do not create humans, and we set the standard, we set the engagement, and how we humanize things is really super important. And so as we start to look at what those things are, there are ways that you can break down what makes something more human versus less human. That's what we gravitate towards. I'm sure you gravitate towards things that feel more in your heart because you identify with them. You don't identify with what a robot says or what bots are saying, and you can tell a mile away when something does that versus when somebody's really talking from their soul.
▶️ [7:25] There are three different things that I talk about in the book, and I still stand true to what unlocks those things. And really you can take this as an individual, as a person, or as a brand, whichever way you wanna identify with this. The first one is simplicity. simplicity is something that, you know, when you look at a, let's just take it from a brand standpoint. When you look at a brand that, that is simplistic in nature, you totally get them. You understand them. It's not very difficult to understand what they do, how they do it, how they deliver it, and what you get out of it. What is the maximum I'm input or output of what it is that you need or desire, and they deliver on that promise? The simplicity of it is just so hard to come by these days, especially now that we make things so complex. Acronyms, oh my God, there are more acronyms in this world than we know what to do with. And I'll go through the second two really fast.
▶️ [9:47] So there are a lot of different ways that we can see simplicity, empathy, and imperfection. But when you put all three together and you build it into one brand or one person and how you interact, it changes the game. We're not organizing it anymore around whether are you doing social media, or are on LinkedIn. How are you emailing, what's your email marketing like? And all the different marketing and sales tactics. Yes, they all serve a point and we need a purpose for each one of those but what is making them more human in each of those different channels? Start there and then move to the channel.
▶️ [11:06] Absolutely. You know, emotions, God willing, that we all have emotions and actually express them in ways that we never would on a public channel or in a marketing channel or a sales channel. And there are six different emotions that Paul Eckman describes. The interesting thing about emotions is when you express them outwardly over any marketing, sales, whatever or keynote, whatever you're about to express through or even those six emotions are interesting because, and I'll save you the time of reading his 25-page report and boil it down to one thing, which is that when you have one emotion, call it joy, surprise, angst, or disgusted, anger, each of those different emotions when you put them out are you're more likely than not to have reciprocity in that same emotion. Now when I tell you a story just think about it. That story is either sad or happy or joyful, your immediate reaction is probably to celebrate in that same emotion.
▶️ [13:59] And the way that we stand out is just knowing that being human is actually your competitive advantage. It's like when we got direct mail all of a sudden cut-off. I mean, when was the last time we got a thank you note in the mail? And now you know, we get an email. Well, guess what? Maybe it's time to go back and do direct mail again because we might be the only ones that stand out in the universe of the mail carrier system and actually send somebody a basket of something neat with actually a personalized note that says, "Hey, thinking about you". That would, I wouldn't be gotten one of those for a long time. So those kinds of things are really unique and if we take a step back and look at what can make us more competitive in being more human, that's the ticket.
▶️ [16:21] Oh my gosh. It's endless. It really is. Just take a step out and look at each person individually and know that the thing that they want to receive is the thing that helps them to be seen. And it's not always something that costs money but it is something that actually had thought put into it. If you put thought into something that you deliver, it doesn't matter what it is. That goes for like over the holidays, my son gave me a book that he wrote out or filled out. It was over 40 pages of things that he remembers about me. He gave one to his mom, my wife as well. and he sat and actually took time and filled out all these different details and things of what he remembered growing up and what he connected into and his first memory and all these different things that just brought me to tears and I think it's the greatest gift I've ever received from a family member. And it didn't cost him a ton of money. It cost him a ton of time. That is the kind of thing that you can do with another person where when you put that thought into it that's the thing they remember.
▶️ [18:02] I think that's a great action step that anyone listening or watching could do is I have a whiteboard actually behind the camera right now. I'm looking at it thinking, I'm gonna wipe all that off, and I'm gonna just do exactly what Bryan just said. You know, put it all out there and just look at it and say, How can I be more human in any of these facets of my business? I think that is a great action plan that we can leave our viewers and listenership with today. Bryan, I wanna give you an opportunity to send people to your website, so please tell us where we can reach out.