Stop Selling The Obvious
What people buy is almost never what they pay for. A customer purchases a pair of shoes, but they pay for a sense of belonging. They buy a luxury car, but they pay for status and accomplishment. They buy a phone, but what if they were really paying for privacy?
In an early episode of Better Call Saul, fledgling lawyer Jimmy McGill struggles to sell burner phones. His breakthrough comes not from lowering the price or highlighting features, but from inventing a new customer. He discovers a niche market of people deeply concerned that “the man is listening.” Jimmy isn't selling a phone. He’s selling privacy. He’s selling an identity.
This insight, as The Futur’s founder Chris Do explains, embodies a powerful marketing principle famously articulated by Simon Sinek: Start with Why. “What people buy isn't what they pay for necessarily,” Do says. The transaction is for a product, but the purchase is for a feeling, an identity, or a solution to a deeper, often unstated, problem.
For creative professionals, this distinction is critical. Most designers, videographers, and photographers get it wrong. They fall into the trap of selling the “what.” They sell higher resolution, better lenses, and cinematic quality. They sell art.
Their clients, however, are not buying art.
“They want their phone to ring,” Do states. “They want to pay as little to buy that opportunity as possible and you want to sell art. That's the problem.”
This fundamental conflict between what creatives sell and what clients buy is the source of endless frustration, low prices, and client churn. To escape it, you must stop competing on features and start competing on meaning. You must learn to create a new customer.
The Blue Ocean Imperative
Many creatives hear this and immediately dismiss it as slimy, dishonest, or scummy. They see it as a mandate to manipulate. But this reaction misses the forest for the trees. This isn't about deception; it's about strategy. It’s about a concept the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker identified as a core purpose of business: to create a customer.
And the most powerful way to create a customer is to go where no one else is. This is the core idea behind Blue Ocean Strategy, a concept popularized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Instead of fighting in a “red ocean” saturated with competitors, you move your boat to a new, uncontested “blue ocean” where a fresh pocket of fish awaits.
Do points to a classic business case study, one detailed by the late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma: Honda’s entry into the American motorcycle market.
In the 1960s, the American motorcycle scene was dominated by one brand: Harley-Davidson. Their bikes were loud, heavy, powerful, and expensive. They were built for the open road. Honda’s motorcycles were the opposite.
- They were small, light, and agile.
- They were underpowered by American standards.
- They were designed for the narrow, slower roads of Japan, not American freeways.
The Honda executives spearheading the American launch were failing. They set up shop and tried to compete head-on with Harley-Davidson, but their product was seen as inferior. Sales were abysmal. The project was on the brink of collapse.
To blow off steam on weekends, the stressed executives took their small Honda bikes off-roading into the California hills. The bikes, ill-suited for the freeway, were perfect for dirt trails. They were nimble and fun. People started to notice. “Hey, what are those?”
Almost by accident, a new market was born. Honda had stumbled upon a new use case for their product that no one had considered. They were not selling a cheaper, weaker alternative to a Harley. They were selling a “dirt bike,” a vehicle for off-road recreation.
They created a new category. They found their blue ocean.
“They created a new lane, a new use case,” Do explains. “And almost by accident, they found a new use for the motorcycle that no one else had paid attention to. They moved into a lane that had no competition.” This wasn't about lying about their product. It was about reframing its purpose for a new audience with a different problem.
A Playbook for Category Creation
Creating a new customer is not easy. It is not an idea that strikes you while you roll out of bed. “This requires radical thinking,” Do warns. “This is why it's not so easy to create a new customer. But if you can… that's where you make a lot of money. That's where you own and define categories.”
Once you see the pattern, it becomes obvious. Smart brands do this constantly, often by applying a simple framework known as PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solution. The key, however, is to apply this framework to a new type of customer, not the one everyone else is targeting.
If your sales pitch starts with “Does your video sales letter suck butt?” you are talking to the same audience as every other videographer. The radical thinking happens when you first identify a new customer who doesn't even know they need your solution yet.
Consider the story of Method soap. Co-founders Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan, a chemist and a marketing guy, were looking for a household category ripe for reinvention. They landed on hand soap. The problem wasn’t the soap itself; it was the packaging. The market was dominated by Dial, whose bottles were so aesthetically unpleasing that people would hide them under the sink when guests came over.
The insight was simple: what if people were proud to display their hand soap? They pooled their money and hired famed industrial designer Karim Rashid, who, as the story goes, had just enough budget to design one idea. He created the iconic, teardrop-shaped bottle.
Method created a new category: soap for people who care about interior design. They also used more natural ingredients, but the primary driver was aesthetics. “If they put [the same eco-friendly soap] in the exact same packaging and the same aesthetic [as Dial], I guarantee you it will fail,” Do asserts. They created a new customer by solving a problem the old market leaders ignored.
This pattern repeats across industries.
- Dude Wipes: They took baby wipes, a product for parents, and repackaged them for men. The product is fundamentally the same, but the branding, the name, and the black packaging created a new market of men who wanted a fresher feeling but wouldn't be caught dead buying a product meant for infants.
- Liquid Death: The founder, Mike Cessario, saw two trends: people were drinking less alcohol, and soda sales were declining. He identified a niche of people, perhaps from the punk rock or straight-edge scenes, who were health-conscious but rejected the bland, wholesome branding of traditional bottled water. They created canned water with the tagline “Murder Your Thirst” and heavy-metal-inspired art. They sell water in a tallboy can, giving it the taboo feel of beer with none of the hangover.
In each case, the innovation was not necessarily the product itself. The genius was in identifying a new customer with a new problem and creating a brand that spoke directly to their identity. “We didn't know we needed this until you told us we need this and you've solved that problem,” Do explains. That is category creation.
The Videographer’s Blue Ocean
So how does a creative, like a freelance videographer, apply this? Most videographers get into the business aspiring to be filmmakers. “They want to work on the most cinematic, most beautiful thing,” Do says. The reality is settling for corporate announcement videos and video sales letters for clients who don't care about their artistic vision.
The red ocean is trying to convince a small business owner to pay more for higher “quality” they can't see and don't value. They just want the phone to ring.
The blue ocean requires asking a different question: “Who in this world would pay the most amount of money for videos and I have a steady constant supply of customers for?”
The answer isn't Hollywood. It’s a new and emerging market: established experts and entrepreneurs who are not trying to make more money, but are trying to build authority. These are authors, consultants, and founders making millions who want to become the most influential person in their space. For them, video is the fastest path to thought leadership.
People like Alex Hormozi, Dan Martell, and Simon Sinek are spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on their video content teams. They want to build influence, not just generate leads. They understand the power of video to connect with an audience on multiple sensory levels and require the lowest cognitive lift from the consumer. Building a personal brand is a far more sophisticated challenge than just making a sale, a topic Do explores in How To Build A $1,000,000 Personal Brand.
This is a completely different customer. They are not price-sensitive in the same way a small business is. They are value-sensitive. They are not buying a video; they are buying influence, authority, and legacy. A videographer who positions themselves as an expert in building authority for high-level entrepreneurs is no longer competing with the kid who just bought a DSLR. They have created their own category.
The “Con Man” Objection
At this point, the critics cry foul. “This is everything I hate about the marketing industry,” one comment reads. “Create false demand, creating fake scarcity, leveraging people's insecurities, misrepresenting your product.”
Do’s response is direct: “You live in a fantasy world.”
While predatory marketing practices exist, the fundamental principles are woven into the fabric of human society. Humans are, at their core, meaning-making machines. The things we buy, the parties we vote for, and the beliefs we hold are all part of a story we tell ourselves about who we are. “If I buy this, who am I? Who do I become?” Do asks.
To deny this is to deny reality. Every major brand you admire participates in this storytelling.
- Porsche doesn't just sell engineering; it sells the promise of success and attraction.
- De Beers created the modern engagement ring market with a brilliant marketing campaign that equated the size of a diamond with a man's worth and the permanence of love, with slogans like “A Diamond is Forever.”
- Religion itself, Do argues, can be viewed as a large-scale marketing campaign designed to save your soul, with each one claiming to be the one true path.
“These are all marketing things and it's tribalism,” Do says. “If I believe this, if I say these words, if I wear these things… I belong to a certain tribe of people.” Unless you live in a white room wearing unbranded clothes, you are a willing participant. “You're all complicit in the lie because it's part of your identity.” For a deeper dive, he recommends Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars, which argues that great marketers don't sell products, they tell stories that people choose to believe.
The word “con man” itself is a clue. It’s short for “confidence man.” Their crime isn’t the principle of building confidence, but the use of lies to achieve it. The same principles, when applied honestly and ethically, are the foundation of all great businesses. Understanding the psychology of why people buy is not inherently evil, but a prerequisite for success, an idea further explored in Why People Buy.
The Science of Influence
The principles at play are not mystical corporate secrets. They are well-documented psychological triggers that govern human behavior. Dr. Robert Cialdini’s seminal book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, outlines several of these universal principles, including reciprocity, consistency, and scarcity.
Scarcity is perhaps the most misunderstood. Critics rightfully despise false scarcity, the dishonest tactic of claiming a digital product is “almost sold out.” But real scarcity is a powerful and ethical tool.
As author Daniel Priestley discusses in his book Oversubscribed, every creative business has finite capacity. A videographer can only handle a certain number of clients at a time. “Drigo at any point in time can only work with two to three clients,” Do says, referring to his co-host. “Yet he does not communicate that to his audience.”
This failure to communicate real limitations is a massive missed opportunity. When a potential client knows you only have one or two openings in the next quarter, it creates genuine urgency. There is a real penalty for waiting. In contrast, if you are always available, there is no reason for them to make a decision today. Communicating your real capacity is not a lie; it’s a business reality that leverages the psychological principle that we want what we can't have. Communicating value and capacity is key to attracting premium clients, a strategy Daniel Priestley himself unpacks in Proven Strategies to Attract High Ticket Clients.
Meritocracy Is A Myth
The most dangerous belief in the creative community is the myth of meritocracy. “I think that's a myth that people who don't really understand how things are done” believe, says Do. The idea is seductive: if you are good enough, the work will find you. If you build it, they will come.
This may have worked in a different era. But today, being good is the cost of entry. It is the baseline expectation.
You have to be better than good.
And being better than good means learning marketing and sales. How many truly talented creatives do you know who are struggling to find work? And how many less-talented competitors seem to land the lion's share of opportunities? The world is not a just place where the best person automatically wins.
The world runs on a different, much older principle.
People hire who they know, like, and trust.
If you are not known, you will not get the call. If you rely solely on word-of-mouth, you are being passive. You are letting others control your destiny. To be the master of your own fate, you must be proactive. You must engage in marketing, PR, social media, and promotion. You must choose a platform and a strategy to become known.
Stop hiding behind your craft, waiting for the world to discover your genius. It will not happen. You must learn the principles of influence and apply them within your own ethical framework.
You must write your own story.
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