My friend Pri Pankhania makes documentary films about people while they are still here to tell their own story, so their families can hear their voice long after they are gone. The Open Journal, he calls it. He started it in the silence after his mother died, when he realised he had thousands of photographs of her and not a single recording of her telling him who she actually was. I built the brand and the pricing around that. Go and read it, openjournal.studio, and you will not spend one second wondering why it matters. Everyone who sees it agrees. It is one of the clearest cases for a product I have ever put my name to. And it still sells more slowly than something that good has any right to. That puzzled me for a long time, because I had built the one thing I usually blame. The clarity was there. So I went looking for what we were actually competing against, and it was not what I expected.
The competitor you never see
Here is the mistake I was making. I assumed that when someone doesn't buy, they have said no. So I kept sharpening the case, the way you do when you think you are losing an argument. But we were not losing an argument. Nobody who booked a call ever said the films weren't worth it, or that the story didn't land, or that £2,250 was too much for something their grandchildren would still be watching in fifty years. They said something much harder to beat. Not right now. Maybe after the summer. When things are a bit calmer. Let me talk to my brother.
That is the competitor you never see on the board. It is not the cheaper rival, and it is not the phone in their pocket. It is not yet. And not yet is undefeated, because it never actually turns you down. It moves you to a later date that keeps not arriving, agrees with everything you said on the way out, and leaves you feeling like you almost had it.
No is a decision you can answer. Not yet is the absence of one, and you cannot argue a person out of an absence. — on the competitor you never see
Important always loses to urgent
There is an old distinction that explains the whole thing. Important is not the same as urgent, and almost nothing gets done until it is urgent. The gym membership. The will. The difficult conversation. A parent's story on film. All important. None of them carry a date, so all of them wait behind the things that do: the invoice due Friday, the school shoes, the holiday that has to be booked this week before the price goes up. Your meaningful, generational, once-in-a-lifetime product is not really competing against other films. It is competing against a boiler that just broke. And the boiler wins, every time, because the boiler has a deadline and your film does not.
For The Open Journal there is a crueller layer underneath that. The one thing that would make it urgent is the very thing the customer cannot bear to look at. The honest deadline on filming your mother is your mother. Everyone knows this somewhere, which is precisely why they flinch and book the call for after the summer instead. The product's natural urgency is grief, and you cannot build a sales process on asking people to picture the worst day of their life. I have written before that most hesitation is about belief, not price. This is the case that sits on the other side of that. Here the belief is total, and they still don't move.
When justifying it more backfires
Then there is the part that genuinely unsettled me, as someone who builds brands for a living. My instinct, when something this important sells slowly, is to make the case for it harder. Say why it matters, and say it louder. But watch what that actually does. The more you frame a thing as profound, sacred, once in a lifetime, the heavier the decision becomes, and heavy decisions are the ones people most want to feel ready for. Nobody feels ready to sum up a life. So the very craft that makes the work undeniable can also make the choice feel too large to make on an ordinary Tuesday. It is possible to justify something so beautifully that you talk a person into agreeing with you and out of acting. That is a strange sentence to write about my own work. It is also true, and pretending otherwise would have cost us more.
One thing to do this week
So what do you do, if you are sitting on something important that the calendar keeps beating. Two things, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why you need both. First, stop justifying and start dating. The value is already understood. What it lacks is a deadline, so borrow one people can actually face. Not the death of a parent. A ninetieth birthday. A new grandchild who should meet their great-grandmother on film while she can still hold them. An anniversary, a retirement, the year someone finally slows down. Attach the thing that has no date to an occasion that does, and shrink the first step until it costs almost nothing to take. Second, and this is the harder truth, some things are simply slow, and the error is expecting them to be fast. A decision about a family's memory is not an impulse buy and never will be. If the yes is structurally a long, considered one, then the failure is not the sales process. It is the forecast. You build for the clock the thing actually runs on, and you stop treating a normal six-month deliberation as something broken. Both of those are positioning decisions, not marketing ones. What are you really selling, who is really buying, and what is genuinely standing between the two. That is exactly what the Brand Clarity Workshop is built to untangle. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500 fixed. Book it at kevaltanna.com/workshop.