George Dickel might have the better beard. But I was looking for a different customer.
My beard is a great example of resonance marketing.
When looking for product-market fit, I see a lot of entrepreneurs who mistake a strong signal for resonance. Here’s how that worked with my beard.
In 2014 I started dating again. Before my first marriage, I’d always kept a beard. My first wife didn’t like the the flavor savor, so I’d been clean shaven for long enough that my current circle of friends only knew me with a five o’clock shadow.
Single again; I decided to get back to my roots and grow my beard.
To my dismay, so many women I knew gave me a hard time about it. “Oh, Andrew, you look so good clean shaven. Now that you’re back to dating, you really should shave that thing off.”
By this time, I was already deep into my career as an innovation, design, and entrepreneurship professor of the practice. I decided to put my title to work.
I ran an informal experiment by introducing myself to as many women as possible. I chose to take a fairly honest approach. “Hey, I’m recently single again and I’m trying to decide, beard or no beard. What do you think?”
Ninety out of a hundred women said, “No beard.”
That’s a strong signal.
But the signal didn’t resonate. There was a second variable I was measuring while performing this experiment. Before I walked up to the women, I made a mental note. “I feel attracted to that woman.” Or, “I’m not really interested in asking her out.”
As it turns out, ninety out of ninety women who said, “no beard,” fell into the “I’m not interested” category.
Nine out of ten women who liked the beard fell into the “I’d ask her out” camp.
If I’d followed the strong signal, I’d have been setting myself up for divorce number two.
The job wasn’t done. There are beards. And there are beards. And just like in resonance marketing for a business, the key is to keep on iterating the story over and over again to test for feedback.
There are lots of styles of beards, and many I already know I don’t like. The magician. That’s a tight beard with sharp lines. The mountain man — full, bushy, looks like you wrestle bears for fun. The stubble — perpetually three days in, the “I’m too busy being interesting to shave” vibe. The goatee — a commitment to looking like either a jazz musician or a villain in a 90s thriller. And mine? I’d call it the “professor emeritus” — salt and pepper, slightly disheveled, suggesting I’ve earned the right to stop caring what the 90% think.
I’m joking.
The marriage wasn’t actually on the line over facial hair. But the principle underneath the joke is real.
The DiMeo Unfiltered method of resonance marketing is pretty simple. Get up from your desk and go talk to people. Do stakeholder discovery. Listen to as many people as you can. Seek advice. Start to figure out what the unmet need really is.
All of this can be found in the best practices from the worlds of Voice of Customer, Need Statement Development, Jobs to be Done, Outcome Driven Innovation, and good design in general.
The key difference that I’m doing here has to do with real honest brand identity. We are what we say we are. We make a promise and keep a promise. But then, is that promise true to the maker? When people, and the companies they create, stray from their mission, vision, and values by following the strongest money signal, that’s when things have the potential to turn into those big bubbles that are destined to burst ... or in my case, a marriage destined to fail.
My beard is, after all, part of a much bigger story about strong signals and a lack of resonance.
And to be honest, this story was never about my facial hair. It’s the story to remember about much larger stakes. Sure, marriages apply. But I’m really talking about people’s careers and millions of dollars in funding.
I mentor medical innovators. Sometimes the markets they are raising their grant funds around don’t justify a venture investment. They are positioning their technology for the money. Early on, it’s for the non-dilutive funding.
When they move from research to translation, often times, the venture capital needed to get over the valley of death isn’t justified by the market size. If they continue to follow the money, they often get signals to enter a consumer market.
By the time I meet them, what I can tell right away is that they really don’t know what they’re more passionate about. The problem they’re solving or the technology they’re working on.
It’d be as if I cared more about the style of my beard than finding true love.
A stretch of an example? Maybe.
My warning stands. Just because there’s a strong signal, doesn’t mean it resonates with your soul.
DiMeo Unfiltered is my back of the napkin publication featuring half-baked concepts, works in progress, blog-like posts, and personal opinions. This space is raw, authentic, and self-published.
Thank you for reading.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew
