What need does this book fill? It fills the need of big-business managers who are about to ram some change down the throats of their employees. It makes things much easier on everyone if the employees are trained, or better-yet, brainwashed, into believing that all change is good, and that it’s THEIR fault if they have a problem with it.

Step 1 in the change process? Buy 1000 copies of Who Moved My Cheese? Set-up study groups. Get everyone talking about the positive impact change can have. And, just when they are good and ready for it, BAM—hit them with massive pay cuts, layoffs and corporate restructuring.

The point is that even those big-business managers have a need. They need their lives to run a little more smoothly. They need to face less friction. But there’s more to it than that. Because the millions of people in the world who WORK for the big-businesses also have a need. They need to feel good about an otherwise desperate situation. Johnson meets those needs with a feel good story about mice and littlepeople.

That’s the magic – Johnson solves BOTH people’s needs here… the purchaser, and the reader.

And he does it so effectively that the sales of this book dwarf some of the most well-known business books around. One of the best and most popular business books of all time—E-Myth— it has sold just over one million copies.

Who Moved My Cheese? has sold 25 MILLION. Wow.

That’s extreme success.

And it only comes by first finding the true need of your market. This is where a lot of marketers make their biggest mistake, and it’s our next insight.

As I hinted in the backstory, this book is not for me… it’s for someone else. It turns out, there are a lot of someone elses out there who need this message, delivered this way.

I may hate this book. But other people LOVE this book. They think differently than me, and if I ever want to reach them with a product or service, I won’t be able to do it by designing a product, service, or marketing campaign that would work for me.

It’s a natural temptation to want to sell something that we ourselves would buy. It’s a trap. But isn’t that what we so often tend to do? To succeed in any marketplace, I’ve got to think about who I want to sell to. Is it soccer players? Upper-level managers? Medical equipment sales reps? The point here is to focus on the group of people who you want as your market. Focus on what THEY need, not what YOU need. There are major differences between you and your market. One of those differences has to do with critical thinking, which we’ll look at next.

There’s a skill most entrepreneurs have. It’s called ‘critical thinking’. Unfortunately, it’s not a skill most PEOPLE have.

This is why Dan Kennedy says “The Majority is Always Wrong.” It’s also why 25 million copies of this book have sold. There are people out there in the market for this book who LOVE it. They rave about it and pass it on to everyone they know.

So, we need to remember that it’s those unthinking masses who make up the vast majority of big markets out there.

What you need to know when you’re selling to them is

• Most people ‘feel’ their way through life.
• They focus more about the vision – the dream – than the reality. And,
• When they think they’re thinking, really they’re just reacting, demanding, or ignoring.

You want to reach a mass audience? Leverage this insight.

Appeal to people’s emotions. Create something simple – so simple you can’t believe anyone would want it… and then everyone will want it – think ShamWow.

OR – do the opposite. Create something amazingly complex and powerful – something only a few people will even understand. Either way is fine – just don’t mix the two. I’m guilty of this quite a bit. I try to make really complex problems simple. But simple people didn’t care about the problem, and sophisticated thinkers need something more. But I’m learning, and that’s the point.

Now before you start thinking that you’re better than everyone else because you have the skill of critical thinking, and many people don’t, let’s knock us all down a notch with the next insight.

Sometimes you might feel that to appeal to the masses you need to dumb things down so much that you’re no longer adding any value. But you are adding value.

To avoid copyright issues, use a NEW story and new language to do so – and then the wisdom is YOURS. It’s New.

Seth Godin does this all the time. He takes an age-old sales and marketing technique, gives it a new name, tells it in a new way, and has a massive impact in the world.

This book is a great example. The message “Change happens, get over it.” is not new advice. It’s not even very deep advice.

The insight here is something my manager told me during my first year at Microsoft—never underestimate the power of stating the obvious. As small business owners, we miss the obvious way too often. We get so wrapped up in what we are doing that we forget the things we already know. In the heat of the moment, we act on emotions rather than knowledge and wisdom. So, we smart people need to hear the obvious just as much, if not more than, everyone else.

There are two big reasons this is important.

1. Accepting this insight allows us to create entry-level educational products with confidence knowing that even though we’re stating the obvious, we’re adding value. People need to hear obvious.
2. Adopting and understanding this insight allows you to truly be humble in spite of your gifts. No matter how much we know, we are always forgetting to apply basic lessons at just the wrong time.

We’ve heard it all before, but things happen and in the emotion of the moment, we are not leveraging our critical thinking skills when we should.

That’s one of our Action Items for this week. Be humble seek out accountability groups, read books, form a Mastermind group, keep learning and improving.

The best thing about this book is title.

It is iconic. It is a brand.

If they named this book ‘How to Handle Change’ it would not have been a success.

If they named it ‘Change Happens, Get Over It’ it would have been good for a laugh in the checkout counter, but it would have flopped.

Instead, they picked the perfect title and branded it. There’s a Cheese movie, Cheese hats, Cheese t-shirts, Cheeseconferences, Cheese cd’s, dvd’s and for heaven’s sake, there’s even Cheese Post-its!

But borrowing the insights from Words that Work brief and our Branding brief, they achieved the Holy Grail. They OWN the big business change-management space – and I predict they will for decades to come.