Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Does Being Best of Omaha Really Matter

Matt: Here’s a question Does being best of Omaha really matter? If you’re like me, you have probably received multiple email requests to vote for local businesses to win the Best of Omaha competition.

Now this is put on by Omaha magazine every year, and I see these giant stickers plastered across nearly every business in Omaha now covering the windows of their storefronts and entry doors. Then there’s the Reader magazine’s Best of the Big O, and those stickers are blasted all over the place, too.

So it’s an honest question. Does being Best of Omaha really matter to customers when customers see these stickers or see a businesses social media post about being Best of Omaha or best in the Big O? Does that really have an impact on if they give them their business?

Today, we’re going to take a look at the age old marketing debate of best versus best known to find out if being best of Omaha really matters at all. Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing simple. The Midwest mindset is helping others

without expecting anything in return. And this is what fuels our passion in every episode.

To give you the marketing tips, techniques, and insights your business needs to not just survive, but thrive. We believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing because marketing is the only way to get more customers, make more money and see your business succeed.

I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, and on today’s episode we are talking about one of my favorite marketing debates, which is better for business, best or best known? Now best versus best known.

Matt: It’s not a new debate. In fact, most people, if you ask them, which would you prefer your business to be the best, the literal, best or the best known and most are going to tell you the best. Obviously, I want to be the best, right? The best is the best and everyone wants the best.

People have this mindset, this belief that if their business is the best, then customers will just magically find them right? Word will spread and word of mouth and everybody’s going to come to their business. They’re going to be making millions of dollars. They’ll be open for, you know, 20, 30 years.

Their kids will take over. All you have to do is simply be the best. That is not how it works. That is the cold, hard reality that most of us business owners find out.

And some never learn. Some never accept the fact that best known beats best every single time. Now, you may be thinking that’s backlash, right? You may be thinking, Matt, you’re crazy. What are you saying?

Are you suggesting that we don’t strive to be the best, that we don’t have the best products? We don’t have the best services? That’s not at all what I’m saying. Of course we want to be the best.

Matt: We want to provide the best quality products, the best quality service. Because that will have an impact. If you’re dishing out a plate of poo, you’re not going to be in business for very long. You can’t be the worst, right? But if we look at this and we take a step back.

And we use real tangible examples of best versus best known. It is clear, without a shadow of a doubt, that best known beats best every time as far as how successful your business will be.

I want to try this real quick. So in one second you have to answer answer this in just a split second. You have to think of the answer to this question.

You have to say it out loud. You can’t think about it. All right. What is the best burger place in Omaha? Boom. One seconds gone. Now, every time I ask this question to people, it’s usually like McDonald’s, Burger King. Wendy’s, maybe. Don and Millie’s. We’ll pop in there.

A local, a local favorite. But then you stop and you think, why did I why did I think McDonald’s? Why did I think Burger King?

Those aren’t the best burgers, isn’t the best quality burger. And I’m sure to some, maybe it is. But I think overwhelmingly we’re going to agree that is not the best quality burger. But McDonald’s is by far the most successful burger joint on planet Earth. They dominate their category, Burger King and Wendy’s.

Matt: They fall second and third. Usually they are not the best burgers.

There are so many local establishments, restaurants that have phenomenal mind blowing burgers. Why didn’t those come to our heads first? Well, marketing is not a battle of products. It is not a battle of who is the best. It is a battle of perception.

All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions and these perceptions, they exist only in the minds of the customer or the prospect. And we call the prospect that is that potential customer. That’s who we want to get. That’s who we want to attract. Perception is reality. Everything else is just an illusion.

How many places do we know? How many burger joints have had phenomenally better quality burgers than, say, McDonald’s or Burger King or Wendy’s?

They go out of business in the first six months to a year. If we’re studying how perceptions are formed in the mind, if we’re focusing our marketing programs, our marketing strategies on these perceptions, you can basically overcome any incorrect marketing instincts that may have popped in your head when you thought, I need to be the best. To win. Now, this is a difficult battle.

Because, you know, customers are frequently making decisions, their purchasing decisions based on perceptions that are second hand. They aren’t even their own perceptions. They’re basing these buyers decisions on what somebody else has told them, their perception of reality. So what did you think of that movie? Oh, it was great.

Matt: We are now going to attach that word great to that movie when we go see it and it’s going to influence our experience. It’s going to influence our perception on that movie.

And whether it’s good or bad, big difference. If somebody tells you a movie is great or somebody tells you a movie is bad when you’re walking into it, then when you don’t have any any preconceived notions or perceptions second hand about the movie.

And it’s always interesting to me, too, when I walk into a movie, you know, using this example, continuing with this, if I see a movie with no preconceived perceptions walking into it, and then I walk out and I’m think, Man, that was a great movie. And then I hear from other people who say,

No, that that movie sucked, that was a bad movie.

And I wonder like, well, did they walk into it with that preconceived notion? And most of the time that is the case that happens. If somebody tells you, oh, man, you got to go to Bob’s Burgers, it is the best burger you will ever have. That is going to influence that second hand perception is going to influence your own perception. So when we look at competitions like Best of Omaha or Best in the Big O, so you have many there’s a few of these different to I think those are the two biggest ones in Omaha.

Matt: This is what they’re tapping into now. On one hand, you have what we just discussed, the best versus best known. You want to be known for being the best, you still want to strive to be the literal best, right? You want to have the best. But if your product or service is good.

And you’re known as the best. You’re going too far. Out succeed your competitors who may be better than you. They may have better quality product than you, but they are not marketing themselves as the best. So we get into these competitions like Best of Omaha, and that’s what they’re tapping into now in Omaha Magazine started this, I think it was a great innovative competition. They’ve won national awards for it.

They don’t really tell us or they don’t really release. Any of the secret sauce. We don’t know how many people actually voted. You know, there are all kinds of rumors. I’m not going to get into sharing them because that’s what they are. They’re rumors. It’s second hand perceptions, you know,

So these second hand perceptions, people share these stories of businesses who come to Omaha and they you know, it’s like a pay for play thing. That is just that it’s a rumor.

So I don’t think we should give it that. We shouldn’t give it that too much weight. But we don’t really know because we don’t know. Like the votes aren’t released publicly.

Matt: We don’t know how many votes are counted. All that aside, I don’t know how much that even matters. Let’s say, for example, they are all legitimate. Let’s say there’s tens of thousands of people voting for these businesses to decide who is the best of Omaha.

How much weight does that actually carry? Now the age old debate, best known beats best every time. However, it can also get watered down to where it doesn’t have the impact that maybe it used to or it doesn’t resonate, or it’s not presented in a way to the customer to where they believe that they are the best.

Here’s the issue. I think here’s really the big underlying issue with the Best of Omaha. Best in the big O competitions is that you see these stickers and they’re giant stickers.

They’re plastered everywhere across every businesses storefront. And you have Best of Omaha, even if they’re third or second, they weren’t actually the best. They put the sticker up Best of Omaha this year. Best of Omaha this year. Best of Omaha this year. Best of Omaha this year.

You can’t even see into some of these stores. They’re just plastered and covered with best, best, best, best. And when you see this all over the place, because let’s be honest, all this really is, is it’s a marketing campaign for Omaha magazine. And I think as a marketing campaign, it’s a genius idea because they’re getting advertisers to come in there and they’re spending money to advertise on Omaha magazine specifically for this competition.

Matt: You know, then don’t suggest suggesting a pay for play at all. But I’m saying, like they they bring people in with this this allure of Best of Omaha and that’s their foot in the door to get those sales to get those prospects to become new customers. Advertise on their magazine.

So I think it’s an ingenious idea. It’s a fantastic marketing campaign on behalf of Omaha magazine, because let’s be honest, you know, we don’t know how many people read magazines anymore. You can say the distribution. We don’t know how many eyeballs see it.

You can’t track it. It’s a very old school medium. So I think this is ingenious how they did this. They put it online and they tapped into a a digital way to market themselves and make themselves first in their own category. They created a new category to be first in. So I accredit them 100% for that. I think it is very, very, very smart and ingenious marketing campaign. But. It has, I think, lost some of its impact.

And we don’t really know how much of an impact it had in the first place. That second hand perception that we hear from other people. It carries so much weight. So much weight. When we see a sticker on the wall, when we see somebody post something on social media, it often is is received by most people with some skepticism.

Matt: And when we start to see these stickers and these posts over and over and over again, nearly everywhere you go. It’s just all over the place. We start to think, well, God, is every business the best of Omaha like this? This doesn’t seem like it really carries much weight.

Again, more skepticism. When we’re talking about the the law of perception in marketing. Which decides. That’s what that’s what allows best known to beat best every time. It is simply the law of perception. When we’re talking about that, it is crucial for you.

And this is the one takeaway I want you to leave this episode with. It is crucial for you to make every single customer experience just that an experience. Too many businesses make this mistake. They just don’t try every single time a customer walks in the door. They’re in a bad mood and they, you know, kind of act like a dick. They don’t treat them 100% like they should. You know, they don’t answer the door.

They don’t answer the phone. When you start to see Google reviews piling up saying, you know, I stopped by, there wasn’t even anybody there. I tried calling. Nobody ever answers. Customer service. Is your customer’s experience. You have to put your you have to put everything into it. Because that is what is going to decide if your best known or best. You could be the best and you could treat people poorly and not even everybody.

Matt: It could just be a small percentage. It could be 1 or 2%. And those people I mean, we all are guilty of doing this when we have a fantastic an incredible experience. We might tell a couple people when we have a shitty experience, we tell as many people as we possibly can.

We are more passionate about telling people about the poor customer service experience we had. We just are. People take to social media platforms and they just bitch and complain

As human beings. It’s kind of it’s kind of what we do. It really is. I mean, it’s not it’s not healthy. It’s not good. It hurts businesses. You know, one star just actually is just half of one star on the Google review. If you if you review a business and just half of one of those star ratings. Is equal to 7% of a business’s annual revenue. 7%. The difference between one star, say, a four star and a five star in the restaurant world is the difference between a restaurant staying in business or going out of business. Now, we can’t control this because some people will come in and they’ll be treated great.

We’ll give them a great customer service experience and they’re just going to be jerks and complain and leave bad reviews and won stars with no explanation. And there’s not a lot, unfortunately, that we can do about that.

Matt: But we have to try every time. Being best of Omaha today does not carry the weight that it used to, and I don’t know how much weight it used to carry. It’s cool for businesses, you know, if everything is what they’ve been awarded for and all the votes are legit and they have tens of thousands of votes and it’s like half, half or more of the entire city is voting and not just a handful of people.

That’s great. Good job businesses. But there’s so many businesses that have put this up all over themselves for so many years, all over their storefronts. It just has gotten watered down. You know, it just has. Awards are the same thing. I mean, you have this it’s an award. You know, businesses enter to win these awards. And we we brag about them. We boast about them. We make it about us. We make it about the business.

And that really misses the entire point because everything we’re doing here as businesses, as business owners, is not about us. It’s about the customer.

The customer is the hero of this story, not us. We are Mr. Miyagi. They are Karate Kid. They’re going to win the championship and we’re going to guide them to that. We’re going to give them a plan. We’re going to call them to action, and they’re going to win. We are not the hero of their story. We’re the hero of our own story, right? We have our own guide.

Matt: We have our own Mr. Miyagi. We have our own Obi-Wan Kenobi. But not we’re not the hero of their story. And so that’s why these awards, I don’t think just overall, universally, they do not carry the weight. We think they do. I see businesses plaster these up on their website. What do customers do?

They scroll past them. How does winning an award speak to a customer? We’re the best. We’re the best. We’re the best. That’s not what they’re going to listen to. That’s not what is going to determine their perception. What’s going to determine their perception are two things their own firsthand experience.

Impacting their perception. But more frequently, it is the second hand perception. What they’ve been told from somebody else, somebody that they trust, a friend, a family member, a co-worker, colleague. So we need to impact as many of those second hand experiences as possible to leave them with positive perceptions. And that’s how we win. So it’s really simple. The takeaway today is make every customer experience an experience, treat them well, go above and beyond. Follow the Midwest mindset.

Help others without expecting anything in return. And that will. Give your business, ironically, the highest return of all. Thanks for joining us here today on Midwest Mindset. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode and we want to help you a step further with our free mission vision planner. The link is in the show notes.

Matt: Click it. You can download it for free. And this is really going to help your business no matter what stage your business is in. I can tell you firsthand I made this mistake the first time around.

There was actually two iterations of two brothers creative the first time around when we were producing the show. I didn’t even know how to spell entrepreneur, let alone that I was one. I did everything wrong. I had no plan. I had no mission, no vision statement. I had no strategy.

And the results were it failed. You know, the TV show did great, but financially it was not a success. I was miserable and it impacted everything in my life from my mental health to my my personal relationships to being able to continue on as a company.

So the second time around, I took a different approach and I did this mission vision planner, and I set one year, three year, five-year goals. I laid out what it would take to actually achieve those goals. What’s that look like? What do you need to be $1 million a year company?

I set my core values and I stuck to them. And this has been pivotal, so important to our success. And I know it will have an impact on yours.

So if you want it, you can download it for free. No strings attached. The link is in the show notes to download our free Mission Vision Planner.