My mouth is a dental paradise. Not for me, mind you, but for legions of dentists and orthodontists over the years, whose houses my mouth has helped renovate and whose children I helped put through school.
The cause of all this accidental largesse? A quirk of genetic fate that left me without six of my permanent teeth. On the one hand, that meant I only had two of four wisdom teeth (yay). On the other, I’m the begrudging owner of three bridges, two permanent retainers, and a dental implant filling the gap where an adult tooth should have been (boo). And if you’re doing the math, yes, that means I still have one brave baby tooth holdout—30+ years after it should have fallen out. (It wears what I call a “tooth hat” to bring it in line with the rest of my mouth. I am literally holding on to my youth for as long as I can.)
For many years, all this dental drama left me less than dedicated to other parts of my oral care. I mean, I brushed my teeth, but flossing them always seemed like one extra step, and really, hadn’t I been through enough? (I never said I was rational about this.)
Cleaning after cleaning, the hygienist would tell me to floss. She’d tell me that it would mean the cleanings would be shorter, less painful, you know the drill—pun not intended. And cleaning after cleaning, I’d agree, do it for a little while, and then eventually drift back into the habit of brushing, but not flossing, and the whole cleaning and lecture cycle would repeat.
Until one day. (And yes, this all does have something to do with standing out—hang in.)
One day, a hygienist told me something that literally changed my flossing behavior, instantly and forever.
She told me to floss first.
“But, wait, aren’t you supposed to floss after?!”
“Yes, but you’re not flossing at all. Flossing before is still flossing…”
Yeah. Couldn’t argue with that.
And then:
“And really, once you floss, can you imagine not brushing?”
No, no I couldn’t. My nightly brushing habit was well-established. I wasn’t suddenly going to stop doing it just because I’d flossed before. Not to mention that flossing reminds you of all your brush can’t get to, no matter when you do it (yuck).
What made her suggestion so brilliant (and habit-changing) was that it was so unexpectedly obvious.
- Unexpected, because flossing first went against the flossing canon—that flossing is what you do (or don’t do, in my case) after brushing.
- Obvious for the reasons she gave me: (1) before-flossing was better than not-flossing and (2) before-flossing not only wouldn’t cause not-brushing, it was likely to lead to always-brushing.
And so I started flossing first. 10 years ago. And I haven’t had a cavity or a “floss more” lecture since.
Wouldn’t you want that kind of adoption of the new approach your idea or offering represents? I’m guessing you would. Pretty badly.
The answer, as you’ve now guessed, is for your idea or approach to be unexpectedly obvious.
When an idea or approach is unexpectedly obvious it achieves two critically important things:
- It surprises people, which separates it from the pack of other possibilities.
- It makes intuitive sense to people, which means it aligns with what people already agree is true with themselves or the world.
For example, one of my clients, MOLG, is working to eliminate e-waste—to reduce the amount of old electronics that end up in landfills and all the dangers their presence there represents. When we first started working together, they described themselves this way:
We use robotics to disassemble and reassemble electronics like laptops and servers to make manufacturing more circular and sustainable.
It’s fine. You get a sense of what they do. But it’s not yet unexpectedly obvious why their approach is better than another.
Here’s the after:
We help companies eliminate e-waste by using automation to design recyclability into the entire life cycle of a product, right from the beginning.
And a sexier version:
We help companies meet their sustainability goals by using automation to design how the end of one product’s life becomes the beginning of another.
Either version of their “strategy in a sentence” represents their Core Message—the minimum viable explanation of what the company does and why customers would care. The Core Message presents a company’s idea or approach as an unexpectedly obvious answer to their audience’s most urgent and important question. (It’s the equivalent of my hygienist saying, “If you want to avoid these agonizing cleanings [urgent, important question], floss first [unexpectedly obvious answer].”
Usually, a Core Message isn’t enough on its own to drive action or change. As stated, it’s just an assertion—“if you do X, you’ll get Y.” But before we humans will actually do “X,” we need the story we’ll tell ourselves about why doing X makes sense for us. Just as I had to understand not just that flossing first would solve my problem, but why it would—intuitively.
MOLG has to make the same kind of case—their Core Case—for their prospective customers. It’s in that deeper explanation that both the unexpectedness and the obviousness of their answer become even more clear:
- Unexpected, because most e-waste reduction efforts focus on what to do with something after it’s already been discarded. To have a product that addresses e-waste at the beginning of a product’s lifecycle, as well, is unexpected. And yet the opportunities to intervene exist all along the arc of a product’s life (which seems obvious once you say it—but that’s the point: most people don’t say it).
- Obvious, because, as we articulated it, “You get the results you design for.” In other words, if something is designed to be recycled, it can be. But if it’s not…it can’t. Again, obvious, once you hear it.
Once prospective customers hear it, they usually can’t unhear it, especially if reducing e-waste is a major part of meeting their sustainability goals. That’s been true for MOLG: even before we’d finalized the language in the message, they were able to close a major deal with one of the country’s largest computer manufacturers.
This is why “unexpectedly obvious” is my gold standard for ideas and approaches, especially for startups, and the standard that I’m always working towards in my custom message design work.
Too often, though, those ideas and approaches are just obvious (“I’ve already seen or heard this before—not different”), or just unexpected (“I’ve never heard of this, but I don’t understand what it is or why it’s better than other options). When your idea or offering doesn’t stand out, or you don’t get the buy-in you’re looking for, it’s usually because your message is missing one or both elements.
So that’s my challenge to you: What’s your unexpectedly obvious answer to an urgent, important question your audience is asking? Send me an email and let me know!
Please note that many of the links are affiliate links, which means if you buy a thing I link to, I get a percentage of the cost, and then donate it to charity.
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