Jonny & Lucy > Benedict & Martin
👉 please don't hate me for this if you're a Sherlock fan...
A few years ago we had the unusual situation of two Sherlock Holmes series playing at the same time. The BBCs Sherlock and CBSs Elementary.
And since Kathy is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan we absolutely had to watch them both.
Here’s the strange thing…
I thought the BBC show was better written, cleverer, more innovative. Maybe even better acted.
But I found myself caring more about what happened to Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock and Lucy Liu’s Watson than I did about Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s versions.
It puzzled me for a long time. I wondered whether something about the way it was written made them more appealing characters. But I don’t think so.
Was I more a fan of the actors? Definitely not - it was probably more the other way round.
In the end I realised that the biggest reason I cared more about the characters in Elementary and was more interested in what happened to them was simply familiarity.
There were 154 episodes of Elementary and just 13 of Sherlock (with a full 2 years between each series of 3 episodes).
Jonny and Lucy were in my home over 10x as often. I knew much more about them and all the other characters in the series. They felt much more rounded as people and more like friends.
I’m not saying it was a better show. Just that over time I came to care about it and the characters in it more because of that familiarity.
The regular consistent good of Elementary overtook and pulled away from the infrequent brilliance of Sherlock.
And even if you’re a huge fan of the BBC show I’m going to encourage you to be more like Elementary than Sherlock in your marketing. Because it’s a lot, lot easier to become a preferred choice to work with through regular, consistent good marketing than the occasional bit of brilliance.
The challenge - as I’m sure you’ve found - is how to keep up that consistency.
I used to think the key was hard work and disciplined habits.
But more recently - and especially as I’ve had less and less time available for marketing myself - I’ve come to realise it’s actually about making things easy for yourself.
Knowing the 20% that will give you 80%+ of your results. Using templates, shortcuts, prompts.
In fact, I genuinely think that having less time available for my own marketing has made me a better marketing teacher because now my courses are ultra-focused on making it easy for you, rather than trying to teach you everything under the sun.
And if you join us in the Unsnooze Your Inbox course on creating effective and engaging newsletters that’s exactly the approach we’ll take.
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How to structure emails so they get opened, read and acted on
How to persuade in emails: the long game and the short game
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