The Buc-ee's Marketing Secret Every Founder Should Steal, According to an Ogilvy Guru

When it comes to marketing a business, founders sometimes focus on the wrong things, says Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. The advertising expert, who has given multiple TED talks and written several books on the marketing industry, is the co-founder of a behavioral science practice at Ogilvy that applies psychological insights to solve business challenges.

Successfully marketing your business ultimately comes down to a handful of factors, says Sutherland, who was a recent guest on the My First Million podcast. He offered these nuggets of advice for founders trying to identify the best way to market their company, including a helpful lesson from Buc-ee’s.

Eliminate Spec Speak

Sutherland says founders too often communicate a product or service’s benefit by focusing on technical specifications rather than the outcomes customers will experience. The nuts and bolts don’t matter, he says. The results do. Sutherland pointed to James Watt, who invented the term “horsepower” rather than focusing on the details of the steam engine.

“An invention isn’t an innovation until it changes behavior,” he said. “The only real measure of the effect you’re having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior.”

Reverse Benchmarking

Competing on a feature-by-feature basis with a competitor is a losing game, says Sutherland. It makes it hard to stand out and the bar is constantly being moved. Instead, he says, founders should improve one thing that their competitors neglect. He calls this reverse benchmarking.

Trillions of dollars each year are invested chasing metrics that customers often don’t notice or care about. But focusing on something small can have huge returns. He pointed, as an example, to the gas station convenience chain Buc-ee’s, which became known for having remarkably clean bathrooms.

“[Take] something that’s bad about the category [and do] it spectacularly,” he said. “That’s what Buc-ee’s did. They basically started with an insight around women’s restrooms. You could have just had averagely clean women’s restrooms. You would have benchmark. No, no, no! They’re like the bloody Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, right?”

He added: “Look at all the metrics that everybody cares about in the category, find a metric that’s been completely and ridiculously neglected, and double down on that thing now.”