Keep It Simple

Earlier this week, we had a content shoot with our client, the Hurricanes.

They’re a professional sporting organisation with over 11 M+ eyeballs on their team every single season.

The shoot was to capture content that would help them land new corporate leads.

One of the talking points was, “What does your brand slogan Unite and Excite mean?”

On top of all of the cultural and value-driven meaning, Avan shared something worth repeating:

“It’s simple and easy to remember externally and internally.”

Everyone knows the Nike slogan of “Just Do It'‘ or Apple’s “Think Different.”

These slogans are simple and easy to repeat.

The best marketing is repeating a simple message to a group of people who are genuinely interested in hearing it.

A question to ask yourself when looking at your marketing collateral is,

“How simple is it for my customers to understand what we do?”

From what we’ve seen from the millions of dollars we’ve spent on ads, if your marketing is hard to understand, it will get ignored.

Sunk-Costs

Sunk costs probably aren’t a new idea to you. I remember learning about them multiple times during school.

The official definition is "a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered, regardless of future decisions."

When you're making a business decision, it objectively makes sense to ignore sunk-costs. But that’s rarely how it plays out.

When it’s your time, energy, or money on the line, the emotional attachment is hard to ignore.

I see this all the time with my team, and in businesses I’ve worked with over the years.

In two separate cases—two different founders, two different businesses, five years apart—I saw a simple meet-and-greet lead to commercial commitments that created years of future problems and costs.

The second time, I saw it coming. I tried to stop it. But in the end, the sunk cost held more sway than I did.

Imagine that. A coffee and a dinner that ends up destroying six figures of value in your business.

I can't remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying: never break bread until the cheque is signed. That seems particular poignant for those two examples.

Just this week, I ran into the sunk cost fallacy again.

At Compound, we’ve run a few training courses (which I’ve written about before). They haven’t really worked. They required repeated marketing pushes from me, which I can’t keep doing. So even though our most recent course block exceeded our earlier predictions, I’ve decided to pull the pin.

One of my team pushed back—he’d spent a few hours training coaches to deliver the courses and didn't want to see that go to waste.

Chances are most businesses are doing at least one thing right now purely because of sunk costs. Even though it no longer makes sense to continue.

What's yours?