No amateurs here!
Thanks to Nader Cserny for the image.
Gravity is not just a good idea…
it’s the law.
So what? So what that all scientific data is on one side of an issue? So what if your service is half the price and better? So what if your candidate will govern better or your environmental solution is better than your competitors?
Truth is not marketing (though sometimes marketing with the unvarnished truth is a great story), and humans are far more likely to engage and embrace and believe marketing than they are to believe the truth. Check out this article from today’s Washington Post: Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate.
This is brilliant story telling in that it resonates with what a lot of people want to hear. It fits their worldview. It allays their fear of the unknown and resolves internal conflicts.
Of course it’s not "true." Of course it’s not "science." That doesn’t mean the idea isn’t popular and it doesn’t mean the idea won’t spread.
The brilliance of the story is that by asserting that there’s a debate over something, you create that debate! Say it often enough and stick with it long enough, and in fact you create a debate that wasn’t there before.
Please don’t misunderstand me. This is not a post about the origin of life. I really don’t want to hear from anyone on this topic. The thing we need to learn as marketers and consumers of ideas is this: this is marketing writ large. This is about telling stories, setting agendas and changing the way people feel. It has nothing to do with facts.
I changed my mind yesterday
…Actually, I changed it a lot.
As alert readers know, I’ve been holed up all summer, working on a new project that will debut this fall. We’ve got an exceptional team of people, and the invention process has been refreshing, fascinating and completely energizing.
Yesterday was the second day of a marathon 11-person meeting. We started at A and worked our way all the way to Z, considering the features, strategies and stories of everything we’re building. And I watched myself change my mind, not once but quite a few times.
I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, when I change my mind something chemical happens. I go from one mental state to another and I can feel something flip. What’s interesting (and particularly relevant to you and to your customers) is that a person can easily insulate himself from this flip.
It’s very easy to walk into a conversation with someone with the intent to persuade, but not to be persuasive. If the person you’re talking with (or marketing to) sets out to not change her mind, it’s very unlikely that any other outcome will occur.
Last week, I flew to Buffalo. The flight was full and I was on standby. It was a cheap flight and I really needed to get to my meeting in Buffalo. I decided it was worth $100 to get on board. And all I needed to do was persuade one person to give up their seat and I’d be fine.
New airport rules don’t make this easy, but it turns out that if someone ahead of you on the standby list gets on the plane but decides against it, that’s permitted. So I camped out and waited for the standbys to get called.
First person, about 20 years old, obviously a student, gets called. The next flight out (for which she has a ticket) is in ninety minutes. “Hi,” I say, calmly taking $100 in cash out of my pocket. “I’ll pay you $100 to take the next flight—the one you’re already on—so I can take this one and make my meeting.”
Now, my guess is that this woman has rarely made $65 an hour to read a novel. But that’s precisely what she turned down without a thought. She smiled, said no thanks and got on the plane.
The next two guys to clear standby had precisely the same reaction. I didn’t get on.
My guess is that I could have offered $1,000 and it wouldn’t have mattered.
Why?
Because for an hour, the people on standby had been imagining/visualizing/praying that they’d make the earlier flight. They had fallen into the human trap of believing that mental effort can impact external events. And when the thing they’d been dreaming of happened, they were sold. There was no way a short conversation with me would change their mind. Not because my offer wasn’t good, or my presentation was deficient or I wasn’t credible. No, because they’d already decided and they weren’t open to changing their mind.
This phenomenon is absolutely critical inside your organization. There’s no point whatsoever in having a meeting designed to elicit change if the attendees are insulated against changing their minds. Assuming you are surrounded by co-workers who are willing to try, it’s essential you go through exercises designed to loosen up the flip muscle.
Ironically, the setting and tone of a conference room work to create precisely the opposite effect. Business meetings (and sales calls) are custom-made for failure. People walk in and are reminded (in an overwhelmingly Proustian way) that this is the place to stand your ground, this is the place where good arguments carry the day and build careers, and weak-kneed flip-floppers hurt their careers. When was the last time you changed your mind in a conference room?
My recommendation? As a group, start by changing your (everyone’s) mind about something astonishingly simple, obvious and unimportant. Establishing a pattern in which people flip (no flopping, just flipping) is the first step to creating an atmosphere where things actually get done.
And what about outside your organization? How on earth are you going to sell something to someone when you don’t get to meet them, don’t get to pick the conference room, don’t have the leverage to insist on change?
Well, you can argue against human nature or you can follow a two part strategy:
1. sell to people in the mood to flip. Pick an audience that for all sorts of external reasons is open to changing their minds. Example: people who just moved to a new town, just started college, just got a new job, just bought a new car. The value of these groups is well-known, but still underestimated. People who are reading a magazine about new ideas are a lot more receptive to new ideas than those rushing to catch the commuter train to work…
2. Start a cascade of small flips. Apple argued for years that people should abandon the Windows platform and switch to the Mac. It’s better. It’s faster. It’s cooler. It’s proven. No dice. Mostly because Windows users refused to even consider switching. BUT, when it comes to music, getting someone to flip to an iPod from a walkman was a lot easier. And then, gradually, as people open up to flipping the other electronics in their life, Apple has a voice in that conversation.
Sometimes, people who come to my blog come with the intent of changing their mind about something. I’m hoping I can get you to change your mind about changing minds. If you’re one of those folks who’s predisposed to flip, ask yourself the following questions before you try to persuade anyone of anything:
Is this person in a situation (emotional, professional, even architecturally) where they are pre-disposed to flip?
And
How can I get them to make a tiny flip? And then another one?
Being right isn’t the point. Being right and being persuasive don’t seem to matter much either. Being right, being persuasive and being with the right person when that person is pre-disposed to change their mind… that’s when things happen.
The long life of a great idea
Chris Anderson has done a fantastic job of taking the germ of an idea and building out his idea. It continues to get better and better. Is there a field of discourse where this approach to ideas isn’t the future? The Long Tail: Shorter, faster, smaller.
A picture might be worth 2,000 words
Here are two:
Thanks to David Schwartz and Oyvind Solstad
The new normal
Atkins destroyed Wonder Bread.
Now Atkins is gone. All in less than a decade.
It took ninety years for sliced white bread to go from healthy to evil. It took less than ten for the low-carb business model to fall apart.
The only thing you can bet on is change. Find the cow and milk it. Almost all organizations spend their time and energy looking for security and stability. This is nonsense. The only security you have is in your personal brand and the projects you’ve done so far. Atkins Nutritionals Goes Belly-Up – Forbes.com.
overheard in the elevator
I ran across my friend Rick’s post: The Post Money Value: Memo to Dell – Jeff Jarvis does matter (thanks, Alex for the ping). Rick points out that blogs have an increasingly large voice in the consumer conversation about brands.
This will last as long as bloggers don’t "act powerful" and as long as consumers seek unfiltered insight into how they spend their time and money.
Did you believe?
Andrew Tonkin, via Boing Boing, points us to Transsexual Shaving Cream.
Admit it. You believed. It is fun to believe. Believing makes you feel good.
Now, it’s not as easy to believe anything, is it? That’s a bummer.
The magic word
No, it’s not "please."
It’s "ego."
I meet a lot of confused marketers, and the primary cause of their confusion is that they believe that money equals motivation.
They believe that people will choose the best value.
That people will buy what they need.
That the best products and services will spread because they deserve to be talked about.
That employees can be persuaded to do things by paying them more and that consumers will buzz something if you reward them with cash.
This is true. Every once in a while.
It’s true for people who deep down equate money to ego. This tiny subset of the population really and truly keep score via cash. They are rare indeed.
We’re constantly on the lookout for someone’s real motivation. We don’t understand why someone would volunteer at a charity or take a lower-paying job or recommend a cool new CD or post something on their blog. "What’s in it for them," we wonder. Here in the world capital of capitalism (yes, I just made that up…) Americans have fallen in love with the idea that money can feed the ego.
Almost all the time, that’s wrong.
Since this is a post about ego, let’s talk about… me. I smiled the other day when I read a review of my blog. It said
(paraphrasing) "Like many authors, Godin blogs to sell more books."
Wrong. Actually, I write books so that more people will read my blog!
I don’t blog to make money. I don’t run ads on my site. I don’t even blog to win awards. I blog because it pleases me to see my ideas spread. I like it when I see people talking about one of my ideas–without even mentioning where the idea came from. That means it’s the idea that spread, not my brand. Which is the whole point.
For me, anyway. Not for you or for her or for him.
And that’s the tricky part about marketing to ego. Everybody feeds their ego in a different way. The art is in telling a story that matches the ego-outlook (what I’ve called a worldview) of your target audience.
The next time you’re in a meeting and someone pulls out a spreadsheet, realize that you’re about to hear about money/value = ego. That’s fine. But what about everyone else? Ignore the rest and they’ll feed their ego somewhere else.
But it’s only a commodity…
Michael Cirrito shares this picture from his local gas station. Do you need fresh flowers when you buy gas? Of course not. But you might want them.
The fluid, the gasoline itself, might be the same everywhere you go, and no one is going to pay extra for that. What they are buying is the experience and the attitude and the little things that they might not even consciously notice.
The important thing about this picture isn’t that flowers = success. The lesson is that trying to be different, trying to create an experience that counts… the effort is what matters.