In this conversation, Irwin uses Monopoly to explain how marketing is all about improving your odds of winning, because there is no single magic bullet.
But for those who prefer to read, here’s the transcript below:
Francis:
Marketing is a game of chance, like monopoly.
Irwin:
Yes.
Francis:
Do you want to expand on that a little, what you mean by chance and, you know, playing monopoly?
Irwin:
Yeah. No, I love it and stuff. So I love playing board games with my daughters, in particular, my younger one, Zoe. But Zoe can’t work out why I keep winning in Monopoly. She just can’t work it out and stuff like that. It’s quite funny, but one day I told her the answer.
You see, in the game, in the Monopoly, as much as it is 100% a chance game, there are certain things I can do to improve my odds.
So let’s play a game here with you, Francis, and for those listening. Do you actually know, on the whole board of monopoly, I’m not asking you to be a monopoly connoisseur and stuff, but did you know, oh, actually, do you even know which colors get landed on the most?
Francis:
No, I don’t, No.
Irwin:
So if you don’t know, you will just go for anything and everything.
Francis:
Yeah.
Irwin:
A lot of people will just go for the Mayfair at the end because it’s, you know, it seems like a really expensive one, but that’s not the truth. Statistically, orange has the highest probability of being landed on, followed by red. So orange and red.
How do you know that?
Well, firstly, you need to know which spot probability gets landed on the most. And without getting you to guess and stuff Francis, it’s jail. Jail gets visited the most as a spot. So if you actually look at, and I get, I don’t sound like a statistician or a net, or maybe a gaming nerd, too late. But if I had two dice and I was to roll two dice, do you know the highest probability number that you’d get is chance of rolling? Is a seven.
Or from two dice is a seven.
Seven has the most combinations. The second two numbers are six and eight, followed by five and nine and so forth, so forth. But if jail is the most landed on spot because it’s the most cards that say go to jail, plus, you know, as you go around the board and if you land a double to get out of it, which is a six and an eight. I don’t know if you realize that six and nine are both orange squares.
So not only do you know what the most common spot is, you know where the common places you land. So guess what? If I buy orange and then I level it up because it’s half the price of the other side of the board. So it’s cheaper to buy. I could literally smash you so hard to take you out. Once you’ve taken one person, you can get bigger, the rich get richer and you kill the game. Yeah.
So does that mean today we go out and we just play monopoly? Only go for orange and you’re guaranteed to win?
No, but you are improving your odds and your chances overall. Statistically. And so, like marketing…
Irwin, what is the guaranteed golden way of getting clients. And I’m saying get traffic. Notice I didn’t say which way. It’s the same as in monopoly means I just buy property. Which one Irwin? I don’t know, it depends on your target market, what product you’re selling. But even if we did know those things, I can’t guarantee everything. But I can improve my odds.
And that’s why I think monopoly, that example. And that’s why ConversionCow actually is orange in color. Because I’m here to improve your odds. I don’t know if you really if you made that connection. It’s not.
Francis:
But now I know.
Irwin:
But now you know. My job is to just improve people’s odds. In the same way, when you engage with a marketer and no one’s going to guarantee you leads and sales, they’re just trying their best with the bag of tricks they have, and that’s all we can do.
And so a couple of things I’d love for people to remember, number one, in particular with websites, try different things, A-B test it. But you want to track that data. Number two, there are certain elements that just do better than others. And there’s what I call a hierarchy. So for example, video gets more attention than static image. Static image gets more attention than plain text or text. Big text gets more attention than the little text and so forth, so forth.
And so it’s just knowing how to play all these things, but they work in combination. So I’m not saying this to make our whole website just a big video, but knowing how to prioritize and use what is the right area for the right target demographic is very important. And this is where the 1% of improvement every time comes in 100%. So yeah, that’s it.
