Marketing Lesson From Buttwipes (No Joke, Literally… Buttwipes!)

You might find this video hilarious.

You might find this video in poor taste (and maybe even offensive).

But whatever you find it, there’s a very serious… and very important marketing lesson everyone should take away from it.

First, watch the video…

DollarShaveClub.com’s first video went viral and has over 11 million views on YouTube since it was posted about a year ago.

This new one for One Wipe Charlies is well on its way with over 1 million views in about 3 months.

But it’s not the viral nature of the video I want to talk about.

There are a few lessons to be learned from it, but the one I want to focus on here is this:

Positioning.

See, plenty of other companies sell a similar product to One Wipe Charlies, but they call them the very sterile sounding “moist wipes” or “baby wipes”. The brands selling them usually include words like “fresh” and “gentle” in the name.

That’s fine if you’re selling to women and babies. But there are few things less manly sounding than buying fresh and gentle moist wipes.

The beauty of this video is how it repositions moist wipes into a product that’s quite manly. Yes, it’s a funny video, but it’s also very smartly done and well thought out. It appeals to men by:

• Calling the product buttwipes instead of moist wipes
• Using crude humor in the video that most husbands will find MUCH funnier than their wives (and will want to share and talk about with their friends)
• Using marines and machine guns

By catering very specifically to their target market, One Wipe Charlies come across as a much more masculine product to use.

How can this apply to your business (the positioning, NOT the machine guns)? Ask yourself these questions…

• What product or service do you sell that could be repositioned to appeal to a new or underserved market?
• What product or service do your competitors sell that you could reposition to appeal to a new or underserved market?

I know guys in the online marketing world who were struggling and decided to focus on one specific market. So, for example, instead of offering SEO and PPC services to all businesses, they just offered their services to law firms.

I know a web designer who changed his business model to just serve Non Profits.

There are accountants who position themselves to just work with doctors or with truck drivers.

And by repositioning their businesses to target a very specific segment of the population, they’ve had much more success.

DollarShaveClub didn’t just go after the buttwipe market because they wanted to make a funny video. They did their research. They saw an underserved market. And they took an existing product and positioned it to appeal to a market the competition is largely ignoring.

You can do the same thing.

Reposition the products/services you and/or your competitors sell so they appeal to a very specific segment of the market. If you do it right, you’ll capture a much higher market share than trying to appeal to everyone.

And, you don’t even have to resort to making crude videos to do it. Though, if you do, be sure to send me the link! 😉

The Tool That’s Saved Me 38 Hours and 20 Minutes… and Counting

Ever wish for a little extra time each day so you can cross more off your To Do List?

Unfortunately, time’s always been one of those things you can’t buy more of… at least, until now.

A few months ago, a member of my Mastermind Group highly recommended a tool that I now use almost daily. It’s simple to use, does exactly what it says it does and does it really well.

And it’s one of the best time management tools around. Since I started using it a few months ago it’s saved me 38 hours 20 minutes and 43 seconds (it has a built in counter that tracks this for me!).

The tool is called MySpeed by Enounce. It’s a tool that lets you speed up videos you watch online to save time.

Videos are everywhere you go on the Internet. And MySpeed integrates with your web browser so you can increase the playback speed of any of those videos (or streaming audio) up to 5 times. And it doesn’t distort the video’s audio quality. Voices sound fast, but normal (not at all like chipmunks 😉

I watch a lot of videos online… mostly training courses, but also informational videos, promotional videos, recorded webinars, etc. I find I can speed them up anywhere from 1.5 – 2 times and still understand all the content in the video. Sometimes I even go faster than 2 times if it’s material I’m familiar with or fluff I want to skip.

(You can also slow down videos too which can be helpful if you want to take notes.)

With MySpeed I’ve effectively doubled the amount of information I can consume from video (which is a good thing because in the fast changing world of online marketing, there’s a lot of quality video content to get through!).

But I don’t just use it for business purposes. Know those commercials that pop up before you watch news/entertainment videos on the web? Just crank MySpeed up to full speed and you’re done with those videos in a few seconds so you quickly get to the content you wanna watch!

There are also news/entertainment videos that seem intriguing, but I don’t want to waste a lot of time watching them. Again, I can play them back quickly to get the gist of them, skip the fluff and focus on the good parts (if there are any!).

Now, it’s not a perfect tool. Some sites don’t have the bandwidth to stream videos quickly.  If you speed these up in MySpeed, you end up with the videos stopping and buffering, playing a few seconds, then stopping and buffering again. (Unfortunately, this happens for most TED videos which I’d love to be able to get through more of, more quickly!)

That’s annoying but, overall, MySpeed is fantastic. If you watch a lot of online videos, it’s an incredible productivity tool.

It only cost me a one-time $49 for the Premier version which has easily paid for itself many times over. I haven’t found anywhere else you can buy extra time so cheaply.

You can get a free 7-Day trial of MySpeed here.