Yank Their Heartstrings and Keep Pulling

When you run into a friend who is truly passionate about a product, oftentimes he will tell you about all the wonderful features that make it the coolest thing... ever. And second place, he says, isn't even close. However, one question he forgot to answer is why you should even care. Your eyes glazed over with apathy before your friend even had the chance to get to the fifteenth feature.

Why your audience should care often isn't as self-evident as it seems.

Apathy is to sticky ideas what nail polish remover is to glue. So what do the authors of Made to Stick suggest you do about it?

Emotional
People don't want features. They want solutions. They want solutions because they have problems that need to be solved. They need to be motivated. They want to be inspired.

Once you understand this, your task is boiled down to discovering which need you must fulfill in order to get the best mileage. "Milk. It does a body good," gets transformed to the entire "got milk?" television campaign, which at its core is about recognizing that the emotion engendered when you want milk but can't get it is far more powerful than extolling the individual physical benefits of drinking it.

Interestingly, in print, the "got milk?" campaign is primarily about a different human need -- association. It relies on the audience's assumption that cool, pretty, or interesting people like to drink milk, and if they want to be like those cool, pretty, or interesting people, they should drink milk, too.

Is it underhanded? A little shady, perhaps? I always used to think so. After all, there is nothing objectively attractive about the idea that Superman (see image above) may or may not forget to wipe his upper lip after drinking a glass of milk.

After reading Made to Stick, I'm coming to realize that whether or not a fictional character drinks milk and is a little sloppy about it is not the point. These tools, like the credibility principle I wrote about previously, are only as good or bad as the product or service with which they are used.

Don't get me started on Joe Camel. - Cam Beck

Comments

[Lewis Green]

"People don't want features. They want solutions. They want solutions because they have problems that need to be solved. They need to be motivated. They want to be inspired."

And that, my friend, is the secret of successful sales and marketing. Great post!