Okay guys, let’s pull over
and see how far we’ve come:
With summer ending — and the return of silence and reprieve from the vicious, marauding hordes of decent kids watching cartoons … playing video games … snacking on the saltiest, fattest, sweetest, junkest of junk food … while staying up far past their bedtimes —
I’m drawn back to the summer when I was five years old and when my family moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Honolulu, Hawaii. The mover packed up our household possessions and Dad, Mom, my infant brother Alex, and I packed ourselves in a gas-guzzling Ford Galaxie 500, and drove from Princeton, New Jersey to Seattle, Washington.
Ever go on a long road trip?
As that five-year-old, I remember looking out at 1000 hours and 3000 miles of fields, yellow lines on black asphault and concrete roadways, guard rails that performed their 65-mile-per-hour weaving rhythm — along with the three highlights of: (1) riding in a stage coach in Dodge City, Kansas, (2) watching ceremoniously dressed native Americans dance (yep – cowboys and Indians in the Wild, Wild West), and (3) staying in a motel that had an indoor pool and this humongously high, heart-pumpingly scary slide.
Every once in a while, it’s good to pull over at a lookout point, get out and stretch your legs, and take a look not only on the landscape in front of you but also back upon where you’ve gone so far.
So, let’s pull over to the side of the road for a minute or two today, get out and stretch our legs, and take a look at the map to see where we’ve been with Mass Persuasion:
We started our road trip in World War II:
Kate Smith was a singer, not a salesperson, who starts selling a commodity available on every street corner, using the same general approach and same general message as everyone else, never mentions product price, features, or benefits of owning this product, yet raises $480 million dollars in today’s money in 18 hours using 65 short messages.
She goes on to build such powerful momentum that she raises $7.2 billion dollars of the commodity over four years. How did she do it? By using a sacred theme to seize the high moral ground, more themes that engaged her audience, consistent communication and building up their trust through credibility (or believability).
You learned:
Through the example of Ally Bank — the trust-based name of a financial division that lost so much trust with their customers that they had to change their name to Ally Bank in order to merely survive — how easily big corporations can and do manipulate and flat-out lie to people so they will believe and trust them – and how easily people let themselves fall for it, hoping that maybe this time the lies are actually true. Suckers are born every minute.
Then you saw:
How the banking industry’s trade association shows everyone that Ally isn’t really trustworthy — Ally is merely using the smoke and mirrors of corporate propaganda. But like all controversies, the uproar dies down and is replaced with a new scandal to draw people’s attention somewhere else, and banking consumers go back to believing Ally Bank is the holy answer to the most foul banking industry.
The propaganda lesson: acknowledge your accuser, return immediately to your sacred theme, restate that you remain on high moral ground in order to serve and protect your customers. Then continue on as usual.
Seize the high moral ground and
capture your market’s attention with themes:
Sacred themes help you seize the high moral ground, where you then bypass comparisons of price, features, and benefits by taking your buyers far above the ordinary world. You offer them ideals that cannot be bought at any price, such as: the kingdom of heaven, the promised land, freedom, liberty, and happiness.
Specific themes (such as sacrifice, competition, participation/community, and personal support) help you build intimacy and connect powerfully with your market by building up tense feelings of unworthiness and guilt, and this tension can only be released by doing the right thing: buying your product or service.
Your market becomes invested in the outcome:
You can capture and hold your market’s attention in the same way a horror movie or an evenly matched national election does: by building up tension, releasing it, and building it again. There has to be the real possiblity of failure, and the person on the verge of failure captures the most attention. Your market will need to find out the outcome (”I just have to see how it ends”) and invests themselves (”I want the good guy to win”).
Focus on the special aspects:
You can turn your commodity into a unique product by focusing on and demonstrating how special or unique the product is or how it’s being presented (in the case of an event-based product launch or release): “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything remotely like this before.”
Use variety within repetition so your buyers
don’t get bored or ticked off:
You need to ask for the sale consistently, but you don’t want to be annoying or monotonous so your customers tune you out. Solution? You use variety within a consistent format (such as telling different stories, then asking for the sale). This breaks down your buyers’ psychological resistance to making their purchase.
Persuasion: good. Propaganda: bad:
Persuasion uses credibility in ways that benefit you through profits and your customers through what your product or service does for them. Propaganda is happy to use that credibility to turn a tidy profit while turning buyers into cannon fodder. Building a relationship by personalizing your marketing communications is crucial.
Snowballing a sales event into $480 million dollars:
You build big momentum — like the promotion for a movie release — by consistently remaining in contact by giving people things that help them (or with movie promotions, that entertain and intrigue them with sneak peeks). Once you launch your product, only use updates that can be viewed as gains or successes. Then use each successful sales event to build momentum for the next sales event.
Credibility: overcome suspicion and distrust:
In our suspicious, distrusting world, it’s important to build trust through credibility. Credibility is how believable you are, and you received loads of specific examples how to use outside, objective, third-party references to build your credibility so people believe you.
Factors in establishing credibility:
Make sure you have no contradictions in your words, behavior, or action. These establish you as a recognized authority and build your reputation or character over time, banish any doubts about your sincere motive to help them, which in turn lead to better sales results.
The key? Take consistent action (which we call The Mother of All Factors).
Consistent action:
Your consistent words, behaviors, and actions over time reduce people’s suspicion and distrust of you and help you overcome the tendency of sabotaging your own efforts of expecting results too soon and giving up too early.
Where you start in building your credibility:
You start by taking action. This will disarm any arguments your audience can have about your motive, contradictions in words, behaviors, and actions, building your authority, reputation, and character — making it easier to produce results.
How to build your credibility:
Instead of being a vulgar “50% off, sale ends soon” carnival barker, consistently and continuously give something valuable away for free. Become a trusted resource your market can rely on.
So that’s where we traveled so far. When you look at it, you can see the key elements in Mass Persuasion.
Back into the car, guys:
Next time, we take a look at how you can put together better offers that your buyers will appreciate more: by treating people as humans rather than ranched human livestock. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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