Great songs often feel like they are speaking directly to you.

You can feel the pain of watching your ex move on when Adele cries “never mind, I’ll find somebody like you. I wish nothing but the best for you too”.

When Bob Seger sings “I was a little too tall, could’ve used a few pounds“, you are once again trying to lose those awkward teenage blues and get to work on your night moves.

That’s what makes music magical, and it is a big part of what makes rock ‘n’ roll such a cool template for building a better business. Music speaks to you on a deeply personal level.

Advertising guru Roy H. Williams said it well when he said “Speak to the dog in the language of the dog about what is important to the dog.”

It’s a lesson from the Pavlov School of Marketing. When Pavlov talked to the dog he used meat. He spoke to the dog in a language that the dog understood about something very important to the dog.

Speak to the dog = Talk to your prospect, and nobody else. Nobody else matters.

In the language of the dog = Use the words, phrases, and intonations that your prospect uses, not the words and phrases that you use.

About what is important to the dog = Talk about what really matters to your prospect, not what matters to you.

Your marketing ain’t about you.

Your customers don’t use the same industry words and phrases you use.

Your customers don’t care about the things you care about.

If you want to make your customers react like Pavlov’s dogs did, you need to change your perspective and see the world from their viewpoint. You should also order Brand Like A Rock Star right now and start reading it in just minutes (digitally) or order it right to your home in paperback.

There is always room for someone who does the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

Adele proves it every day as her soulful album outsells so much of the fabricated pop music around her on the charts.

And Belgium-born Australian singer Gotye (pronounced Got-ee-aye) is about to do the same with his understated and haunting breakup song “Somebody That I Used To Know“.

There’s no guest appearance from Pitbull. It doesn’t sound like Katy Perry. Good luck finding a Nickelback guitar riff.

“Somebody That I Used To Know” is so simple that it’s complicated. It sounds like nothing else out there, and that’s why the world is paying attention to it.

The business takeaway is that sometimes it pays handsomely to zag when everyone else is zigging.

If you do things just like your competitors do, you’ll be invisible. You’ll be doing the expected, and human beings ignore the expected. We only notice the unexpected.

Think about your drive to work this morning. Did you notice every single highway sign that you saw? Of course not. But had you seen, as Seth Godin wrote, a giant purple cow on your drive to work, you would have paid attention. You would have stopped to take a picture.

Keep in mind that this isn’t being different for the sake of being different. If your “zag” lacks anything meaningful and positive, you might still get noticed… but it probably won’t help you.

But when your business finds that magic combination of a meaningful and positive difference that goes completely against the grain of what is expected in your field, it is usually a branding home run.