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The BIG Lesson Of The MonthBy Dan KennedyPlease, I Beg of You,Get Yourself aTARGET Market. Please.By the time I was old enough to eat them, they were astaple in American homes. In 1952, Mrs. Paul’s Fish Stickswere an instant hit. They came in a convenient, predictablesize with no fish eyes, scales, bones or nasty smell pervadingkitchen and adjoining rooms when cooked. With tartar sauceor ketchup layered on the fried coating, you could hardly tastefish. So kids ate them. They were a revolutionary product, butit was not their revolutionary nature that made them a popularAmerican icon. And therein lies The Big Lesson.I am perpetually having to try and disabusepeople of their delusions abouttheir unique or superior product beingthe ticket needed to board The Wealth Express.Everybody wants to show off all theyknow about their product and talk endlesslyabout it – financial advisors are eager tobore their would-be clients to death (a novelapproach to making sure they don’t runout of retirement savings before expiring),speakers tell me their speeches (even whenasked to tell me about their market), small business ownersof every stripe are myopically mesmerized by their own deliverables.This was NEVER the master-key to riches, as Mrs.Paul’s Fish Sticks will momentarily illustrate. Not then. Certainlynot now. Now it is fastest path to poverty. I was recentlyvisiting with Gold Member Tony Rubeleski, author of MINDCAPTURE, who has made himself a specialist in the securingof space in a consumer’s mind, and he and I talked aboutthe amazing fragmentation of the media well past point of waytoo many competing places for consumers to look, so use ofmedia is akin to having a billboard on a highway with a 150MPH speed limit and everybody zooming by at 160. He and Italked about the overwhelming clutter. The getting of attentionfrom the mass-market is extremely difficult and expensive –too difficult and too costly for just about anybody who might bereading this Letter.The invention and arrival of Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks was aliteral godsend for the then-30-million Roman Catholics inthe United States who were prohibited from eating meaton Fridays or during Lent. We Lutherans went along with ittoo, just in case. In fact, 40% of all fish sold each year in theU.S. was purchased and consumed in just the seven weeksbetween Ash Wednesday and Easter, and nearly another40% on Fridays. By the time God changed his mind about theseverity of the sin of meat-consumption on Fridays and thePope got the memo, it was too late. Fish sticks were on everyschool’s Friday lunch menu, sold in every supermarket, andcontinued to be served at home one to two times a week. Thefamily behind Mrs. Paul’s qualify as Renegade Millionaires,by the way. They thumbed their noses at the then standardindustry practice of contracting with a singledistributor, instead granting no exclusives,dealing direct with chains, and driving demandwith advertising. In the earliest days,founder Edward Piszek convinced a store tostock the Sticks; his wife, posing as housewife,would engage other customers in conversationabout the product within earshot ofthe manager, and a team of relatives boughtbundles of the stuff with Piszek’s cash to artificiallydemonstrate demand and warrantbetter shelf position and display – guerillawarfare. That was not necessary for long, thanks entirely tothe Catholic’s joy at finding an easy, convenient, cheap wayto get through Fridays without rod and reel. In short, the productwas not the magic here; the magic was the market. Thismakes the WHO far, far more important than the WHAT. It canalso suggest or dictate Place Strategy. Bottom-line is: if youdo not have a specific target market for whom you are matchingeverything, and for whom you will be eagerly welcomedand paid attention to despite all other competing distractions,you are reduced to standing outside and jostling about in thecrowd; you do not have the master-key to the vault.nnnnnSource: Book: ‘Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed The Way We Eat’ by Carolyn Wyman.Page 12® The PLACE For PROSPERITY