Do You Know The Law Of Sacrifice?

There are laws when it comes to marketing. 

Things you need to do to win. 

Most don’t pay attention. They’re the foolish ones. 

The Law Of Sacrifice

The winners – they know what they’re doing and how to succeed. They follow the laws. 

And of all the laws in marketing…perhaps the hardest one of them all is The Law Of Sacrifice. 

Familiar with it? 

Sure you are , here it is:

You Have To Give Up Something… 

In Order To Get Something!

Let me illustrate this law within the world of marketing through a story — one that has to do with a successful businessman by the name of Steve Jobs. 

Here’s the tale.

It’s the late nineties. The advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners one of the leading advertising agencies in the country at the time gets invited to Apple headquarters to meet the legendary Steve Jobs.

They were summoned there because Job needed help…and fast. 

You see, this is back in ’97. And Apple at the time was, in Steve’s words, “in deep shit.” Time was not on their side. Money was running out…

Jobs walked into the board room late (after all this is Steve F’ing Jobs we’re talking about — there’s no way he is going to be on time) and meets the agency team. 

After the standard pleasantries, Jobs summed up the situation with Apple this way. 

“I believe if we do some simple things very well, we can save Apple and we can grow it.”

Then Jobs moved to a whiteboard and began to draw out 14 boxes. Each box representing a different Apple product. 

The agency team looked on. 

One by one, Jobs drew a line through each box. When he was done, only two boxes remained. 

Jobs said:

“The two projects that remain, are for products we’re calling G4 and the iMac. They represent what we always wanted this company to be about: they’re technologically superb and visually stunning. And I’m going to bet the future of this company on them.”

From 14 to 2. 

That’s The Law of Sacrifice.

At that time Apple stock was trading around $13 per share.

A few months later it would be five times that amount. 

And over the next few years, Apple would go on a product tear launching iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. And in the process, completely change the company and the world. 

Three Things To Sacrifice 

In their book: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout argue there are three things that businesses need to sacrifice. The first, as we have just read about, is product. 

As we saw with the Jobs’ story, product line extensions are often a trap many organizations fall into. 

Hell, even Apple fell prey.   

Lured on by the possibility of grabbing a tiny piece of a big market – many can’t resist. The temptation is too great. 

But there’s seldom a reward at the end. 

Instead, product extensions turn into a black hole–sucking dollars, manpower and focus away from the core business. And it will keep going until it pulls down the entire enterprise with it or until someone kills the project. See the Jobs story above. 

Fast food restaurants constantly struggle with unsuccessful line extensions. Consider McDonald’s and salads. 

It didn’t work. 

It was too hard to maintain the quality/price ratio. On top of that, people don’t think of salads when it comes to Mickey D’s. 

But salads stayed on the menu for over three decades. 

Look at coffee giant Starbucks…a company that OWNED the luxury coffee market. They not only owned it – they created the category. 

Today it struggles. One of the main causes – a product line that has gone bananas. 

As of the writing of this there are over 87,000 different drink combinations. 

Let me type that number again: 87,000!

Too many? 

I think you know the answer. 

Can product extension work – you betcha it’s possible, but we are talking probable here. Consider Amazon. They started with books. Now they have just about everything. 

Now consider: how often does a beast like Amazon come along?

The second area of sacrifice is target market. 

Your product/service is not for everyone. 

Authors Ries and Trout talk about the classic battle between Coke and Pepsi. 

It was the late fifties; Coke was outselling Pepsi five to one! They were dominating the space. By the sixties it had gotten so bad for Pepsi they had to make a bold move. 

They decided to sacrifice all other markets except for one. 

Pepsi decided to focus on the teenage market. 

Over the course of the next twenty years the strategy worked. They closed the gap. In fact, they ate away at so much of Coke’s share of the market, that Coke walked away from their classic formula and pivoted to a something called New Coke. 

It was a disaster. 

But something else happened. Pepsi couldn’t stay the course. They moved away from their focus on the teen market and broaden out …in the hopes of appealing to more. 

Today, Coke is back on top of the cola business. And Pepsi is a distant second. 

Let’s me share another example: Walmart. 

Everyone knows this company is a retail beast. But to get there required remaining focused on their target customer. 

They are happy at serving the value market with everyday low prices. And by serving that market they have become the world’s largest retailer. 

We can also look at the other end of the spectrum as well. Tiffany & Co., Rolex, Birkin Bags, there focus is singular — appeal to an upscale customer. And the sacrifice has paid off. 

Now, let’s talk about the final area of sacrifice – and that is change. 

Ries and Trout argue brands should sacrifice the desire to change for the sake of change… That’s the third!

This can be devastating to a brand – case in point: Bud Light. The move by Anheuser-Bush to create a change caused a huge backlash with their customer base. 

According to a CNN report, it may have cost the brand somewhere in the area of $1.4 billion in sales.

How long will it take to recoup those dollars or the brand image?

I will spare you more examples, you can ponder and fill in your own, they’re all around 😉

The Takeaway: 

By now, the points should be coming together. There’s a lot of temptation out there to expand and broaden. But, as we have seen, it’s often quite hard to pull off. 

The business landscape is littered with the horror stories of companies trying to go beyond their core business. These companies have paid no attention to the law…

And that’s why I selected the law of sacrifice for the topic of this post. Because I believe it’s the hardest of all the laws of marketing to master. 

As humans we love new vs. old. 

New is exciting. New is sexy. And new is very, very tempting. 

In today’s world we become easily bored and distracted. We doom scroll in search of the next new thing but are often left unsatisfied. 

Moreover, we don’t want to cut back. After all this is America, we don’t cut…we add on!

But The Law of Sacrifice argues to give up (with precision) vs add on. To simply focus on what your best at and be consistent. In other words, operate a business that’s an inch wide and a mile deep, versus one that tries to be all things to all people. 

Simple, right? 

It is. But it’s not… easy. 

Resist the temptation. Make the sacrifices. Keep the focus. It might not be glamours…but it can deliver robust sales growth.