Howdy. Nice of you to be here. Today we’re talking about the ‘cabbit’. The cabbit is pillar two within connection marketing. A cabbit is an aspect of your offering, your product or your service, that is remarkable and that is worth talking about. Now why would you want to implement a cabbit within your business?

Because why should people settle for ordinary, bland, crappy products? That’s basically why.

We talked about how you can’t connect with others based on just your price-point and we already have everything that we need, we now buy things that we want. Back in the day you would create a product or a service that filled a need and then you would offer it and people would buy it. Other companies saw this happen and it happened very, very well, so they started competing. What they did is they competed on price alone. Now that we have everything we need – now that we buy things that we want, you can make your product or your service really stand out and profit that way.

In order for you to implement cabbit into your business here are a couple things that you believe in.

First of all you believe in genuinely helping other people. You believe in creating goodwill and thinking outside the box. If you keep thinking the way you’ve been thinking you’re going to keep getting the results that you’ve been getting. If you really want to stand out you have to think differently, therefore thinking outside the box is a very big one here.

What you can’t stand is generic, one-size-fits-all answers and products and services. You can’t stand the hype; hyping of a very crappy product. You can’t stand that stuff.

You can’t stand sheep mentality. Sheep are people who wait and see what everyone else does just so that they can follow along and do the same with a different logo on it or something like that.

In the cabbit there are six steps. Again if you can incorporate all six steps, awesome – you’re golden. If not, try one or two or as many as you can. They’re actually pretty simple steps too so let’s get right into it.

The first one is what I call the ‘product conceptualization’. (Say that three times fast)

This is knowing how and where your product or your service may encounter hazards – friction spots or spots where you may get problems. One very quick way to figure that stuff out is to look at what everyone else offers and then NOT do that; do something different. You want to stand out, so you’ve got to be different.

This is where I would probably recommend that if you sell a product, that you physically have the product sitting out there on the table and really have a look at it and jot down every possible hazard. If I’m going to use the example of a chair, (let’s say you sell chairs) maybe the wood might give your customers a sliver, or if it’s a metal chair maybe the metal gets really cold or it gets really hot, or maybe the metal will have a reaction to the person’s skin, etc… Those are potential problems. Maybe the padding on the seat is not comfortable, maybe it’s the wrong color, maybe the angle of the back rest is off and people will get back aches.

All of these things, these potential problems, you want to take into consideration. That’s the first step, the product conceptualization. You really want to look at it, identify your potential problems.

Step two is the ‘research’. This is where you survey for those potential problems. You actually reach out to your customers and your prospects and you highlight those potential problems that you first saw and you get their take on it. This will offer you insights into the innovation process and, at this step in the research, you really want to identify the most dominant needs. This will come in play shortly.

Step one was all about identifying potential traps. Now hopefully you are keeping record of your customers’ contact info. What I mean by this is pretty much email. That way you can reach out to them and do your survey. It’s very good to involve them. It does create heightened loyalty. I think that people like to give their opinion in general. I think that if you can involve them you’re creating a two way dialogue and you’re hearing from the horse’s mouth.

And then you know what?

When you DO upgrade or update your product you can go back to them and say, “Hey listen, we’ve heard you with regards to potential problems. We fixed it, and we think that you might like this new one. Here, have a look.”

It’s as easy as that.

We talked a little bit about figuring out your consumers’ needs. There are six major needs – six general needs. They are security, variety, significance, love, growth and contribution. I’m not really going into this one too much. There is a great Tony Robbins’ video on YouTube about these six needs – a really, really good video.

If you can cater to a person’s need(s) you’re going to create connection. And, of course, we’re talking connection marketing so that’s kind of what we want here, right?

Step three is the actual innovation process. This is more than just altering your product or your service, this is the KEY to expansion, to growth and longevity.

If you haven’t done your ‘goals and accomplishments’ step yet you should probably do that. We talked about your legacy and where you want to be 50 years from now, 100 years from now… That’s longevity.

You’re going to have to innovate over the lifespan of the business. You’re going to have to innovate your products and your services to always be catering to groups of people.

Here are six quick ways; six approaches to innovation.

The first is new arenas, you take your technology and you apply to a new industry. The example for this is Honda. Honda started making motorized bikes, then they took that same technology and they put it in cars and now they make cars. They now make lawn equipment too. They used that technology and they just applied it to a new industry.

A second approach would be a new geography. Your product or your service is selling very, very well in North America, but how would it fare to an Asian market or a European market? Can you create a version of your product that would work in Asia or Europe, or something like that?

Approach number three is the industry structure. This is where you can add or you can subtract a middle-man. Let’s say you’re offering a product and you’re buying the physical product from a manufacturer, then you’re bringing it home and tweaking it and then adding your logo to it and reselling it. What if you started doing the manufacturing. If you didn’t outsource that? What if you did it yourself? That’s an innovation to the industry structure.

For the fourth approach, we’re looking at the value-delivery systems. You add a product or a service to a company. Whatever it is you’re offering. If you’re offering a product you would attach a service to it, and vice-versa – if you’re offering a service you attach a product. The example here is Spotify. There was a smartphone company where if you would buy their product (buy their smartphone), they would offer you Spotify free for a year. They were offering a service with the product.

Number five is creating a new product or a new service. This is where steps one and two come into play. Finding potential traps and then inquiring about that will give you a very good launchpad for creating the new product or the new service.

Number six is existing customers. Again steps one and two come into play. This example is car models changing every four years or so. They have updates. They have minor tweaks to certain aspects of the model; that kind of stuff. You’re catering to your existing customers.

Step number four is the ‘segmentation’. This is probably the most important part to pillar number two, which is the cabbit. If you can only apply one change I think that this would be it. We’re no longer talking about blanket solutions, we really want to segment.

I’ll give you a golden nugget actually. Go very, very deep within your segment. This is how you’ll create a genuine connection with your market. You’re not just offering one thing for everyone. There’s no one-size-fits-all.

The deeper you can go within your segment the more connection you’ll create, the more you’ll be talked about. Then when you want to attack a different segment you just tweak the product slightly for them, then they start talking about it and so on and so on. That’s really the basis of the cabbit. It’s to have the word of mouth by offering really cool stuff to the right people.

Step five is what I call a ‘killer promotion’. This is where it’s time to market-test your new product, your new service. You’ve segmented properly, you’ve identified the needs, you’ve upgraded the products, you’ve innovated it.

This is where you actually put it out there and you start getting responses. I preach accessibility first, THEN monetization, which means at this stage (the killer promotion), you basically want to forego profits. If you can get this out there for free, for trial, for beta testing; if you can offer this for your cost, that’s awesome. You basically want to get it in the hands of people.

If you’ve done your segmentation properly, if you’ve done your innovation properly your people will love it and then they’ll start talking about it. That’s essentially what you want, right? T

he cabbit’s goal is to be so remarkable that people are compelled to talk about you.

Finally, step six is the ‘key advertising’. This will work directly with your segmentation step. What I mean by this is that you’re going to prepare your advertising materials according to your segment. The wording, the messaging, will be according to your segmentation. Also, you’re going to prepare the delivery according to your segmentation. Whether it’s LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, Google AdWords, newsletters, media buys, that kind of stuff. If most of the segment is on LinkedIn and they’re not very responsive to banners, you’re going to prepare your delivery according to that. You’re going to invest more into advertising on LinkedIn than you would on banners.

Here’s a quick recap; the six steps to the cabbit (which is pillar number two).

- The product conceptualization: you want to find potential traps or hazards.
- Number two is the research: you want to bring those forward to your people. You want to hear from them what they think.
- Then you move on to the innovation: you know exactly where you can innovate, where you can make it better. There are six approaches to that innovation so surely you can do something very, very good there.
- Once that is done, you’re looking at the segmentation: you want to go very, very deep. You want to get very precise on your segment. Focus on nailing a sliver of the market, doing it right once and then repeating that with a different sliver or segment of the market.
- Killer promotion: get it out there, get it into people’s hands. Accessibility over monetization – you just want to get it out there. You want to get people trying it, you want to get people talking about it. That could even offer you good testimonials.
- Finally, key advertising: you want to make sure that you’re advertising in the right place based on your segmentation, based on your sliver of the market.