He told Warren Buffett the secret ingredient to products guaranteed to sell in good times & bad…

It’s the holy-grail of product positioning.

It’s not easy to uncover.

99.9% of products fail miserably to deliver it. I can guarantee you will only uncover it after a long, arduous search.

Warren Buffett said selling products with this quality “Is like selling needles to addicts.”

BUT … if you find or create a product with this simple-to understand quality you’ll not only have no problem selling it, you’ll quickly corner your market.

You’ll have a bullet-proof product your competition will simply be unable to match. And the ONLY way you’ll lose market share or revenue is if your entire market dries up and disappears.

Your sales will boom in good times and remain solid and steady in the worst of times (the examples below continued to sell like hot-cakes during the Great Depression – the greatest historical measure of what sells in hard times.)

What’s more; not 1 in a 1,000 entrepreneurs or marketers can name that element.
Frankly, I’d be surprised if 1 in 10,000 could name it.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who is one of the greatest business minds of the last 100 years didn’t know it. He needed an information marketer, a publisher to explain it to him.

The man, Walter Annenberg, owned Triangle Publications which was crowned by not one but two products with this holy-grail marketing quality.

This is the man who dreamed up Seventeen magazine & TV Guide.

One of those two products had the magic quality for guaranteed product sales – the other was just a brilliant product.

Can you guess which as the bullet-proof product?

I’ll give you a hint, the second holy-grail product Annenberg published was the Daily Racing Form – the single most comprehensive source of information for handicapping horses.

It sold 150,000 copies a day – even during the Great Depression.

Annenberg, summoned a younger Warren Buffett to his house once to pass a message through Buffett to Kay Graham of the Washington Post.

In his authorized biography, Snowball, Buffett recalls Annenberg starting in on “essentiality”…

“There are three properties in the world that the quality of “essentiality.” They are the Daily Racing Form, the TV Guide and the Wall Street Journal.”

Buffet explains. “What he meant about ‘Essentiality’ was that, even during the Great Depression he saw the Racing Form being sold for two and a half bucks a day in Cuba… If you were headed to the racetrack and were a serious handicapper, you wanted the Racing Form. He could charge whatever he wanted, and people were going to pay for it.

“It’s like selling needles to addicts. So every year Walter would go in and saw, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, how much should I raise the price of the Racing Form this fall?”

99.9% of products on the market lack “essentiality.”

But anyone who’s ever discovered or designed a product with that quality became a billionaire or close to it.

Take Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York.

Do you know how he made his billions?

Right, with an “essential” product – the Bloomberg Machines – the digital “Daily Racing Form” for Wall Street –it connected and delivered all of the essential information any serious Wall Street trader needed in order to trade.

If you were trading without Bloomberg’s machine you faced the same danger of trying to bet on horses without the racing Form – you were at a fundamental disadvantage to everyone you’re betting & trading against who had the “essential” product.

You couldn’t win without them. The essential product became the portal through which you had no choice but to walk through if you wanted to succeed as a trader or as a horse handicapper.

The TV Guide was Annenberg’s OTHER “essential” product –though with a different take.

You’re TV Guide became the portal through which television watchers knew what there was to watch & when – and fulfilled viewers insatiable need to emotionally connect with and “know” the stars, stories and behind the scenes goings-on of the television business.

So what is ESSENTIAL to the people in your market?

What is the fundamental portal they need to walk through in order to succeed in the context of your industry?

If you can answer that question you’ll start to open up opportunities others will never see until it’s too late.

This concept also lets you figure out the hot-spots in your market –even if you don’t have a product that can become the ONLY “essential” source for your clients you can use this principle to discover the white hot selling spots in your market.

Think of individual day traders- they NEED a trading platform in order to place trades efficiently. Online entrepreneurs NEED Traffic, web hosting, etc as the basic costs of entry.

Find the essential center of your customer’s buying decisions and suddenly the reason behind product success & failures often become clearer.

When you look at failed products in your market or your business look at how “close” to the essential center of your market the fundamental product was.

You’ll find the losers are almost invariably several steps removed from that essential center because the closer you get to it, the easier it is to sell.

In the internet marketing space if you track the products that sell the most they are almost always “traffic” related because that is the white hot center of the market. It’s an essential need for every internet marketer.

So every “new,” “sexy” traffic-related product that comes out is easy to sell. Then all the copy-cats come behind and still do reasonably well for awhile because of the essentiality of traffic in this market.

Step up your product marketing game with this little insight.

John Newtson

P.S. Google is another story of “essentiality” – by becoming the search engine of choice advertisers have no choice but to involve themselves with Google. Essentiality is the cornerstone of Google’s billion dollar digital empire.