Messaging | PrairieSkyGroup

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.

Cognito Ergo Sum* NOT!

If 95% of our thought is unconscious, how do sales and marketing address this in their communications? If we want to change minds, we need to change brains. Even in a B2B marketing or sales world, relying on logical persuasion, features, advantages and benefits is a poor and partial way to get a prospect to buy. Understanding how the brain works, how we think, and how to activate the narratives we want, will make our sales and marketing jobs easier.

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.”

Rationality is Crazy

Reason and logic, while they seem to form the basis of many sales and marketing campaigns, are not sufficient for their purposes. Why? Because we humans are not rational actors. Ninety-five percent of our thought is unconscious and dependent on frames, metaphors, stories and narratives that help us make sense of complex situations.

Lost

Empathy is the identification and the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings, thoughts or experience. It seems to me that one of the things we are lacking in our society, as well as in business today, especially in the relationship between sales and marketing, is empathy. What if we remembered the other person is thinking, “Do you understand me, can you help me, and do I trust you?” Maybe we wouldn’t get lost on our sales and marketing journey.

At Play in the Fields of Business

3M has an unwritten cultural tradition that allows employees to spend 15% of their time working on their own ideas. This is time that managers can’t ‘second guess’ or override. The process, which has been in place over decades, breeds a type of thought leadership and product leadership that has been studied and emulated by many. It also makes the bean counters and upper management uncomfortable because they can’t always measure the immediate result.

Driving Into the Chasm

While crossing the chasm applies to technologies and products across an industry lifecycle, Stocking’s corollary is that it can also apply to a single customer or client. It’s not only the industry or technology that goes through a cycle, individual clients and customers do as well.

If you are concerned about the lifetime value of a client, you have to bring new ideas, services and products to your existing base, otherwise they are going to forget about you and go somewhere else. It’s surprising how often this happens. When it does, you’ll often find yourself driving into your own chasm.

Giving Thanks

Thanking customers and clients for their business is Marketing and Sales 101. But it’s rare when we do it with sincerity. One of the most successful marketing campaigns I’ve been involved with was sending personal thank-you notes to over 1400 customers. The benefits were twofold…

Can Your Pacemaker Take a Licking and Keep on Ticking?

It would be odd to hear a medical pacemaker company say their device can “Take a licking and keep on ticking,” (an old Timex tagline) Or maybe not. It’s something I would want if I had a pacemaker. Alternatively we could say that the device has a mean time between failure of .63 trillion seconds. Which will you remember?

Tag Archive: Messaging