The Sign Nobody Read

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, on the high street, where every shopfront was painted last spring and they all came out the same colour.

Two grocers watch the trade they're in,
Both study hard where they've not been.
One copies all the rest have done,
One asks what nobody has begun.
By spring, one's seen, one's passed on by.
Who studied best? And tell me why.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two grocers in the town I've never named, and their stock, in the old chorus, was equally good. Both wanted more custom, and both, being sensible men, began by finding out what the successful shops were doing.

The first did his homework properly. He walked the high street with a notebook and wrote down what the busiest grocers had on their signs, and by the end of the week he had a list: quality goods, keenest prices, established 1841, family firm, satisfaction assured.

So he had his own sign repainted to say quality goods, keenest prices and family firm, since his family had indeed been in the trade since before he was born. He was rather pleased. He had studied the market and done what the winners were doing, which is the advice every man in every trade has always been given.

And it worked precisely as well as the sign next door, and the one after that, which is to say it did nothing whatever. He had spent good money making himself indistinguishable from four other shops, and then concluded that the high street was simply too crowded. What he had actually done was join a crowd and then complain about its size.

Here is the part he never saw. His sign was not read by anybody. A person walking a street of five signs that say the same thing does not compare them; the eye slides across the lot and settles on nothing, and the shopper goes where she went last time out of habit. The words were not wrong. They were invisible, which is worse, because wrong words can at least be argued with.

The second grocer did a different piece of study, and it took him the same week. He wrote down what everyone said, exactly as his rival had. Then he did the useful half, which almost nobody does: he asked what nobody was saying, and whether there was a reason.

Nobody said anything about where the goods came from. Nobody named a farm, a boat, a day of the week. Nobody said what they would not sell, and nobody had ever put a promise on a sign that could actually be tested.

So his board said this: Fish landed Tuesday, sold Tuesday, or your money and your journey back. Nothing kept overnight.

Every word of it was checkable. It named a day, a rule and a consequence. And it made him a smaller shop in one sense, because a man who has promised nothing kept overnight cannot sell yesterday's fish at a discount on a Wednesday, which is a real loss on a real day.

What he got for it was to be the only sign on the street that anybody read. The trade did not talk about the grocer with quality goods, because there is nothing to say about that. They talked about the man who threw out anything unsold, which sounds like extravagance and was in fact the cheapest advertising in the county, since it was carried about for nothing in other people's conversation.

His rivals, watching him prosper, then painted fresh daily on their own signs, which is the same claim with the testable part removed, and it did nothing for them at all.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Studying your competitors to see what to copy is how you disappear. Study them to find out what nobody is saying. The research is right and the conclusion is backwards. Everything the successful firms say has been said so often that it has stopped carrying meaning, and the moment you say it too, you have paid money to be filed alongside them in the one place you cannot afford to be, which is the part of the customer's mind marked all much of a muchness.

And notice why the copying feels so sensible. It is safe. Nobody was ever thought a fool for saying quality and service, whereas naming a day, a rule, a refusal or a number can be checked, and being checkable is uncomfortable. That discomfort is the entire price of being noticed, and it is why so few pay it.

So the useful survey is the one done backwards. Collect every rival's claim, then set the list aside and ask what is missing from all of them: the thing none of them will promise, the customer none of them serve properly, the honest disadvantage none of them admit. What is missing is nearly always missing because it costs something, and that cost is exactly what makes it impossible to copy by teatime.

Two cautions, both earned by watching people get this wrong. Different for its own sake is not the point: the second grocer did not paint his shop purple, he made a promise his customers cared about, which is the seedsman's sentence pointed at a whole market rather than one buyer. And expect to be copied badly, as he was, since a rival can always paint the words and rarely the substance behind them, which is the glazier's old point: make the claim that costs you something to keep, and the imitation will not survive its first Wednesday.

Three questions, and do the first with a pen and an afternoon:

1. What do all your competitors say? Gather the actual words from six of them: the sign, the page, the opening line. When you have them side by side you will find four phrases repeated by everybody. Cross out every one of those from your own material. Whatever survives is what you actually have to work with.
2. What is nobody willing to promise? Look for the gap rather than the crowd. Then work out what it would cost you to promise it: the discount you could no longer take, the job you would have to turn down, the day you would have to keep free. That cost is not the obstacle, it is the whole reason it would work.
3. Could a stranger check your claim by Friday? Read your own words as a sceptic with a notebook. Anything that cannot be tested is not persuasion, it is scenery, and it is the same scenery your rivals have already erected.

The Answer to the Riddle

Who studied best?

Both men did the same survey. One used it as a copy-book and the other as a map of where everybody already was, in order to stand somewhere else. The first ended up saying true things that no one could hear, and the second said one thing that cost him money every Wednesday and was repeated in every kitchen in the parish. The high street was never crowded. It was merely full of men who had all been given the same good advice and taken it in the same direction.

The verse:

The words that every rival paints
Are read by none, for all their claims.
Go find the thing they will not say,
And say it, though it cost the day.

Until next time. Go and write down what six of your competitors claim, cross out everything they share, and see what you have left.

P.S. Should the exercise leave you with nothing at all on the page, that is not a failure of the exercise. It is a finding, and an urgent one: you have been trading on being adequate and nearby, which works only until somebody adequate opens nearer.

Also in the archive: Everyone Does It, Nobody Says It, There Is One of Me and The Doubled Rim.