Offers Start With Principles, Not Products

The offer that needed a new hook every month

A consultant launches a program. The first ads work. A month later they stop.

So she writes a new angle. That works for three weeks. Then another.

Then a new name for the program, a new bonus, a new price.

She is good at marketing. That is the problem. She keeps solving a marketing problem, and she does not have one.

What she has is an offer with nothing underneath it. There is no reason it works that she could state in a sentence, so every month she has to convince people from scratch. Including herself.

Built backward

Here is how most offers get made. Someone sees a format selling well for a competitor. A challenge, a course, a done-for-you package.

They pick the format. They write the sales page. Then, last, they work out what is actually inside.

That is building from the top down: start with how it will be sold, end with what it is.

It is fast, and it launches. But the marketing is doing all the work. The product is an afterthought, so nothing about it makes a customer come back or tell a friend.

Here is the cost, in plain terms. An ad can only earn the first sale. Every sale after that has to be earned by the work itself.

The Principle Ladder

The other way starts at the bottom. Six rungs.

Principles. What must be true for the customer to get the result? Not your preferences.

Things that would hold no matter who did the work. Thinkers have called this reasoning from first principles for a very long time.

Point of view. Put your principles side by side and a way of seeing the problem appears. This is what makes your offer yours.

Process. The steps that follow from that point of view, in order.

Product. The process, packaged. What is included, how long it takes, what it costs.

Message. What you say about it. By this rung it almost writes itself, because you are describing something real.

Distribution. Where the message goes. Ads, articles, email.

This is the last rung, not the first.

Bottom-Up Builders: a company that did it

The clearest large example is an airline. For decades Southwest Airlines was the odd one in its industry, and consistently profitable while rivals were not.

It began from a few things it held to be true. Planes make money in the air, not at the gate. Simple is cheaper than complicated.

People will give up frills for a low fare and a flight that leaves on time.

Look at what followed from those. For most of its history it flew one type of aircraft, the Boeing 737. One type means one set of parts, one kind of training, any crew on any plane.

It flew point to point instead of through big hubs. It did not assign seats. Each of those looks like a quirk.

Each is a principle turned into a process.

And the message, low fares with no nonsense, did not have to be invented. It was a plain description of how the company already ran.

The same thinking sits behind the Toyota Production System, which starts from a handful of principles about waste and builds every practice on top of them. Bottom-Up Builders do not need a new hook each month. The hook is the way they work.

"I do not have principles. I just do good work."

You may be thinking this is for airlines and car makers, and you just do good work for clients. You have principles. You have never written them down.

Here is a twenty-minute way to find them. Think of your three best client results. For each, ask what had to be true for that to happen.

Not what you did. What had to be true. "The owner answered the phone within five minutes."

"We fixed the page before we bought any traffic."

Then think of your three worst. What was missing?

The things that show up in every success and are absent from every failure are your principles. There will be four or five.

Those are also the things worth saying no over. A prospect who will not accept one of them is a future bad result. This is the same instinct behind the gate in our conversion-first audit, and it starts from knowing the job the customer is trying to get done.

What to read next, and why

Southwest Airlines (encyclopedia entry): Read the history with one question in mind. Which decisions were principles, and which followed from them?

First principle (encyclopedia entry): The old idea of reasoning from what must be true instead of from what others do.

Toyota Production System (encyclopedia entry): A whole company built upward from a few stated principles.

Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done" (Harvard Business Review): How to find what the customer is really trying to accomplish, which is where principles come from.

So the simple takeaway is this: before you write another ad, write down the four or five things that must be true for your customer to win. Your offer is whatever follows from those.