The Power of a Point of View

Christopher Lochhead shares an excerpt today from his first book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets about the importance and the power of a point of view. He shares to us why legendary marketers opt to sell a POV, rather than sell a product or service. Market the POV, not the product! Legendary creators and designers, market the point of view or POV, not their product and services. When companies show consumers the idea or the problem that they envision to solve, consumers will most likely become interested in the products and services around that idea. “Its counter-intuitive for most marketers, innovators and CEOs. We think what we're doing in marketing, is marketing a product with features and maybe, benefits. When in reality, category creators and designers market the POV, because once people subscribe to your way of looking at things, they are going to be interested in what you have to market.” - Christopher Lochhead POVs are timeless POV is the company’s true North. It doesn’t change over time, unlike messaging. Companies such as Salesforce or American Airlines have consistently focused on their POV. These are companies who have anchored their business to a point of view, about what they stand for in the world. Messaging is Tailored POV for an Audience Christopher cites examples on how messages are tailored POVs for an audience, idea or a trend. He shares how they train an entire company on how to deliver their POV. Employees watch a 10-min presentation on thePOV of the company. The ultimate goal is for the employees to be able to deliver the POV. Play Bigger Chapter 5 Here is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of the book Play Bigger: "Stories have always been an industrial-strength force in human progress, from the epic poems of Homer to the tales of Marco Polo, Shakespeare’s historical plays, the novels of Ayn Rand, and biographies of Steve Jobs. Stories alter perspectives and exert influence. When traders on Wall Street consider a stock, they often ask, “What’s the story?” When pitching a venture capitalist, entrepreneurs get funding when they craft a great story, and now a cottage industry offers pitch training. Raw information reaches us on an intellectual level, but stories reach into our hearts and our pants. Decades of brain research have demonstrated that stories have a more lasting impact than facts. One 1969 Stanford study, “Narrative Stories as Mediators for Serial Learning," showed that students remembered six to seven times more words embedded in a story compared to random words. [i] In the 2010s, Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University found that character-driven, attention-grabbing stories actually increase oxytocin in the brain. Oxytocin is an empathy chemical, and it motivates cooperation and understanding—quite important when trying to convince someone to, as Apple used to say, think different. “My experiments show that character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enable better recall of these points weeks later,” Zack wrote. He added a swipe at the way too much business has been conducted for far too long: “In terms of making an impact, [storytelling] blows the standard PowerPoint presentation to bits.”[ii] That’s why category designers tell a story. We call that story a point of view, or POV. After you come up with an aha of an initial market or technology insight, and after you discover and define the right category, you have to craft the story about the category that you’ll tell. You need a powerful POV. A POV tells the world you’re a company on a mission, not a missionary company looking to make money any way it can. It frames the new problem that your category identifies and sets you up as the answer. When someone can articulate your problem, you believe that person must have the solution. It’s why Bill Clinton won two presidential elections by c...