Sell the hole, not the drill

Last week I was on a stage. A white page. A black circle in the middle. Nothing else on it, not even a caption, and for a second the room goes quiet while people wait for the chart to load. But that’s the whole slide.

I was presenting on how to revive iconic brands, and this is the slide where I stop talking about brands for a minute and talk about a man in a hardware store on a Saturday morning.

He has driven there. He has parked. He is standing in the power-tools aisle deciphering torque settings and battery life and whether the chuck is keyless. He is going to walk out with a drill.

He does not want a drill. He wants a hole. Specifically, he wants the shelf his wife asked him to put up back in March to be on the wall by Sunday night. The drill is a means. The hole is the purchase.

Theodore Levitt said it first and better, that nobody wants a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole, and I have worn it down to six words for the stage.

Here is the principle underneath the circle. It is easier to sell the solution to a problem than it is to sell a product. Any product. Put a drill on a shelf and it competes on its specification against every other drill on the shelf, and the buyer’s reference point is the cheapest one that will probably do. Put a hole in the buyer’s head first and the drill stops being compared to other drills. It is compared to the cost of the problem.

That second comparison is where margin lives. A product is priced against its competitors. A solution is priced against the problem it removes. Which means the money is set not by how good the product is but by how big, how real and how uncomfortable the problem is in the buyer’s mind.

If the problem is small, vague or not theirs, you cannot charge much for solving it, however clever the drill.

So the job divides in two. Understand the hole in the customer’s life precisely. Then make that hole real, known and concerning enough that only your drill will do. The first half is research.

The second half is what most people mean by marketing, and the industry learned how to do it in a meeting room in St. Louis over a century ago.

In 1921 Gerard Lambert, newly in charge of the family pharmaceutical business, sat a company chemist down with a book of press clippings and asked him to read out what Listerine was good for. Listerine at that point was a surgical antiseptic. It was also sold, with varying conviction, as a floor cleaner and a dandruff treatment. By Lambert’s own later account the chemist read in a singsong voice until he reached a clipping from a medical journal and a word Lambert had never heard. Lambert stopped him. What is halitosis? Oh, said the chemist, that is the medical term for bad breath.

Everything that follows came out of that exchange. Lambert had found his hole, and it had three qualities the hardware-store buyer’s never will. It was a condition you cannot detect in yourself. It was one that everybody around you can detect and nobody will mention. And it now had a Latin name, which made it sound like a diagnosis rather than a description. If a doctor has a word for it, it is real. If you have never heard the word, you may have it without knowing.

Then Lambert and his copywriters did something Levitt’s hardware store never needed. They made the hole emotional. The most famous advertisement, from 1923, showed Edna kneeling at her bureau with the wedding clothes she would never wear, under the headline that outlived the campaign: often a bridesmaid, but never a bride. The copy did not tell Edna she had halitosis. It told her that halitosis “never announces itself to the victim”. Her friends knew. The men who stopped calling knew. Nobody would say. Other executions ran the same structure through the office and the nursery: are you unpopular with your own children?

And then, because this was a business and not an art project, they measured it. Lambert flooded test markets in Iowa and Maine with advertising, withdrew it, and tracked how long the anxiety lasted after the messages stopped. He pledged to raise the ad budget each month by the same percentage that sales rose. Revenue went from roughly $115,000 in 1921 to more than $8 million in 1927. The advertising budget went from $100,000 to $5 million. The formula did not change. The price did not change. The bottle did not change. The only thing that changed was the size of the hole.

By 1926 the trade press had a name for the genre, “the halitosis style”, and copywriters were coining conditions by the dozen: bromodosis for your feet, homotosis for your under-furnished home. One contemporary tribute said the campaign had made the morning mouthwash as important as the morning shave. Read that line as a marketer rather than a historian. A copywriter reordered the bathroom routine of a nation. Not a discovery. Not a better product. A problem, named.

Here is why the circle matters more now than it did when Levitt wrote it down. The things we go to market with have become complicated. A technology platform bundled with a data service bundled with a managed team. A marketing-services offer that is “integrated, data-led, AI-enabled, full-funnel”. A product with eleven features that each took a year to build and each deserves, the engineers feel, its own slide.

Complexity pulls every deck towards the drill. The more there is to describe, the more describing there is, and the capabilities slide swells until it is a list of torque settings. I have sat through enough of these from both sides of the table to know what the buyer is doing while you read it out. She is trying to work out which hole in her life any of it fills, and the deck is not helping, because the deck was written by the people who built the drill.

The hole on a chief marketer’s desk this autumn is not “orchestration” or “a unified data layer”. It is: I have to grow next year with eight per cent less, my board has stopped believing the agency’s numbers, and I have perhaps two more quarters to show it working. Name that, precisely, in her words, and the eleven features sort themselves into the three that matter and the eight that are drill bits. Fail to name it and you are selling a product, and products get compared on price.

The thing that has shifted since 1921 is not the structure. It is the cost of finding the hole. Lambert needed a chemist, a clipping and a lucky afternoon. The limiting factor on this technique was always identifying the latent anxiety and the word for it, and a system that can read the whole market’s self-doubt at once removes that limit. That is a tool for finding a problem that is real and for inventing one that isn’t, which is one more reason the line has to be held by a person.

A product is priced against its competitors. A solution is priced against the problem.

The circle on my slide has no diameter marked on it. The hole is never the same size twice.

So take the last thing you sold, whether that was a deck, a page, a pitch or a proposal. Did it name the hole, or did it describe the drill?

Brandflow is written from the client chair, the agency chair and the founder’s chair, which is three different views of the same hole. Read twice weekly by over senior marketing and agency leaders every Monday and Thursday: brandflow-marketing.com.