Graham McGregor: What is your Big Bold Statement?

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing marketing expert and best selling business author Andrew Griffiths.

In our interview Andrew talked about the importance of differentiating your business from all your competitors by having what he calls a Big Bold Statement.

Here's a good example of how well this works:

Andrew was contracted by the Government to go out to regional Australia a while back and help small businesses that were struggling.

One business that he came across was a general store in the middle of nowhere in Queensland.

This old store had been there for a long time and an old lady ran it. The store itself was in two parts. One half of it got so full of old mining and farming equipment about 30 years ago that they literally closed the doors. (It was full of all this stuff still and the owners just moved the general store next door.)

The general store was on a through road and very few people were stopping to buy. Business was terrible.

Andrew was talking to the old lady running the store and asked her 'can you tell me how long it has been a general store for?'

And she said "Oh well over 100 years".

Andrew then asked "Is it the oldest general store in Queensland?"

Her comment was "Well it could be."

Now Andrew is a marketing guy, so he did some homework and found out that this general store was in fact the oldest one in Queensland

So the big bold statement was he made this business...The oldest general store in Queensland.

Then he thought 'we need a bit more of a hook here, half of the shop that's filled with junk, if you have a look at it, it's actually very interesting.

If we kind of open that door we could have people walk on in, we could actually call this a museum. And the path through all that stuff leads into the new general store. So we could have a museum and why don't we make it free entry for this museum as a great hook?'

So all of a sudden we've gone from a nondescript general store with dust on the side to the oldest general store in Queensland with a museum that has free entry.

And bizarrely this Big, Bold Statement literally turned the business around overnight.

Andrew got some very cheap signage put up that said:

The Oldest General Store in Queensland

Before long there are film crews from around the world filming this general store. Busloads of tourists are stopping and getting out the front and getting their photo taken with the oldest general store in Queensland. They are buying food and drinks and souvenirs. It got featured on Japanese television shows, German television shows, it's in Lonely Planet travel guide books and so on.

Now nothing changed here apart from some signage about the Big Bold Statement.

Andrew turned a very ordinary business into something significant that stood out and all he did was come up with a Big, Bold Statement about the business.

And as Andrew explained in our interview you can create a Big Bold Statement for any business by following some simple steps. And he gave some great examples on how different businesses have done this.

(You can read my full interview with Andrew in my free marketing resource 'The Unfair Business Report'.)

In the meantime, what is a Big Bold Statement you could come up with about your own business?

"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read." Leo Burnett

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the Unfair Business Advantage Report.