Even if there were no devil,
we would need to invent one
We all need a devil:
- A devil helps us define ourselves and know who we are by defining who we are not …
- A devil helps us define what we want by what we do not want …
- A devil helps us run toward something by giving us something to run away from
A devil helps your customers discover and focus on what they want:
We all need ways to help our customers weigh, assess, and evaluate when offering our products and services. The most powerful way to help them is to compare. Without having something to compare to, it’s very hard to make a decision:
“The processor has a clock speed of 2.93 GHz and a 4 MB cache.” Is that fast? Slow? Good? Bad? Necessary for what I want? Unneeded? Overpriced? A great value?
The devil serves that purpose of comparision, especially when your customers are unfamiliar with your products or services:
- Ask people what they want, and most of them can’t tell you specifically.
- Ask people what they don’t want, and they’ll describe all of it easily in the finest detail because it’s based on their unpleasant past experiences.
All people, including your customers, know more about what they don’t want than what they do want.
From a marketing point of view, what makes the ideal devil?
The ideal devil is a single person or group: in our current Great Recession, who is our devil? The financial industry that created the global meltdown, especially the profiteering large financial institutions, such as Bank of America and Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, and AIG. And when we need an individual rather than an institution, convicted pyramid schemer Bernard Madoff serves as our devil incarnate.
The ideal devil is a foreigner or whose experience is so alien from our own: For example, consider the alien world where Goldman Sachs paid out bonuses per employee averaging $620,000 for 2006 … $600,000 for 2007 …$700,000 for 2008 … and $715,000 in 2009. Do you or your customers share this kind of experience, or do Goldman Sachs employees truly live a totally foreign world?
The $800-billion-a-year healthcare sector players — with its Big Pharma, Big Hospital, Big Physician, and Big Insurance industries — also serve as wonderful devils in the healthcare debate.
And so do the energy sector participants, with Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Gas as the devils in the global warming debate.
In general, the rich and powerful make for wonderful devils in marketing because their experience is so different from our customers’ experiences. And they subject us mere mortals to pain and misery so they can enjoy more of life’s riches.
The ideal devil exists in the present, is everywhere, and is all-powerful: Like the air we breathe, the devil is everywhere. Every difficulty and failure is work of the devil, and every small success is a triumph over his evil plotting.
But be careful in your marketing: Taken too far, it leads to conspiracy theories about unseen shadow organizations deciding how the world really operates. Even if such a worldwide conspiracy is true, many people will back away from what you have to say. (The successful X-Files TV series built itself on this conspiracy theme, but it’s sold as entertainment and not serious political theory.)
The ideal devil is one we admire and occupies a position above us: It’s easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad: we can’t hate those we feel superior to and look down on. But we can hate those we admire. Our enemy must be bigger than and occupy a level above us.
The devil:
Can’t live with him. Can’t market without him:
Carefully choosing a devil, then cutting away his good parts until he is a mere caricature made up of only the worst, is vitally important in you being able to communicate your marketing messages quickly and powerfully. You need to show your customers something they can run away from.
A devil cuts through the communication clutter like a hot knife through butter by helping your customers focus on what they don’t want. And all people know more about what they don’t want than what they do want.
We all need a devil, personally and as marketers.
But it’s not because we want to run away from what we don’t want and be free of this devil.
In fact, people don’t seek to be truly free at all; they seek to be free from responsibility for their own lives. Which we’ll look at next time.
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