On Marketing

It is a marketing axiom that the part of the brain that makes buying decisions is primitive. It is driven by basic emotions including fear, envy, pleasure and desire. It is designed to kick in ahead of thought, and therefore its responses are sufficiently predictable for marketers to manipulate them. Marketers know that the act of buying creates a strong fear reaction, and typically this is handled in two basic ways:

• It can be used as a monster that the purchase will slay
• It can be lulled in order to appeal to pleasure, desire, and even reason

Clearly, the more costly your product, the greater the fear associated with deciding to buy it. Business-to-business transactions tend to be costly and that can make it difficult to present the product as a strong enough dragon-slayer. So our marketing strategy may be forced to favor the second approach.

Consider that in business, the results of getting a big financial decision wrong may well be public and professionally ruinous. Because clients come to us for something they cannot do themselves, they know themselves to be ignorant, and every area of ignorance becomes a monster whether or not that is valid.

In my experience, over-educating the client can rebound undesirably, and of course we must protect our professional stock-in-trade—but consider where you can address those anxieties just 10% more or better than your competitors, and thus improve your client’s sense of control. Then make a feature of that in your marketing. And make it an important, visually significant object that you can give to the client at the beginning of the job.

Assignment:

• Identify a viable area where you can enhance your client’s sense of being in control.
• Describe that feature in a single sentence.
• Think about what that feature will look like.

Tags: marketing //