Marketing | PrairieSkyGroup

Metaphor 6: The Positive Frame – The Lady or the Leopard

Recent research (O’Keefe & Jensen, 2008) indicates that the negative frame will only take you so far in influencing behavior through messaging. Their research finds that there is a slight positive effect at persuasion for messages that were positively framed. It may be simply that we prefer thinking about the beautiful lady and not the leopard, pleasant thoughts compared to dark thoughts. However, I believe framing in a positive way helps activate the dopamine circuitry in the brain that is associated with positive emotions, happiness and satisfaction.

Metaphor 4: Step Away From the Taco. Dealing With Negative Frames

I once had a competitor say to a prospect that if they bought from us, we would nickel and dime them to death. Of course this is a lousy way to sell, and I would never advocate disparaging your competition like this. But having been presented with this “negative frame” and hearing it repeatedly in the marketplace, I had to do something.

Metaphor 2: The Bark of a Tree Never Tastes Bitter to a Hungry Beaver

When we are children and are held by our parents, we feel warmth (temperature) and learn to associate warmth with affection. What happens in these two cases is that our brains do something called neural recruiting. Two neurons each holding different concepts begin to be connected. The more often that two things are associated together, the more the neurons that hold each of these two things begin to connect or wire together.

Metaphor 1: You Can’t Put a Duck Bill on a Beaver and Call It a Platypus.

One of the key building blocks of thought is the metaphor. It is also a building block in market and sales messaging. Metaphors are actually mental structures in the brain that are independent of language, but can be expressed by language to help us understand something. When we activate innate metaphors in people’s brains with language, we are then communicating with the unconscious parts of the brain and often have a greater chance at influencing thought than conscious reasoning or the use of facts and logic.

The Words We Use

Words are important. For those of you who want to do SEO, or competitive site SEO anlaysis, or just drop those irritating words from your writing and vocabulary, here’s a reminder on Word Cloud Generators.

Marketing and Selling Using Ancient Narratives

We are our stories. It is who we are and how we think. Our brains are wired for stories and narratives. We identify with familiar stories. They evoke emotions and expectations and hope. If you want to sell something, convince someone of your position, or market your products or services, you first need to tell a story. Here’s why.

Segmentation

90% of marketers use only demographics such as company size or SIC code for segmentation. They do this because other forms of segmentation are more difficult. I believe there is a hierarchy to levels of segmentation, and that there are levels that are much more productive than demographics. The hierarchy from less productive to more productive levels of segmentation and from easy to difficult is: 1) Demographic, 2) Buyer, 3) Persona, 4) Behavioral and 5) Narrative.

An Update to Lost: Univeristy of Michigan Study on Empathy

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Forecasting – Why VP of Sales is the Most Fired Position in Corporate America

The reason that the VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America is not because, as you might think, the sales forecast is the single most visible number. It’s because too many organizations and too many VPs succumb to the temptation of having multiple forecasts. The challenging one they think you can make, and the inflated one that no one believes you can make but the one they tell you because they don’t trust you to make the one that is challenging. When forecasting is a negotiation game, everyone loses.

That Giant Sucking Sound

I once had a boss that sent me an email asking me to set up a meeting with him. His office was twenty feet away. Lots of passive aggressive thoughts went through my brain before I realized that in a single stroke, he had embodied the two biggest black holes of personal productivity in contemporary business; emails and meetings.