What Most In Business (and even Marketing) Don’t Know

 

OK … This is going to get pretty deep … Are you ready?
Then, let’s go …

 

All of us alive today, with no exceptions, grew up in an era where almost all the Advertising you have ever seen or heard is a product of the era of the brand-builders. Over time, we have all become conditioned as to what constitutes a good advertisement. We learned the fundamental pattern for what to put into a commercial. We learned about slogans and jingles and being funny. We learned that, in Marketing and Advertising, the outside perception no longer must reflect the inside reality. Let me state what I say regularly when talking about Marketing & Advertising strategy and success.

 

Everything you have ever learned about generating leads and
growing your business is wrong. And now you know why.

 

And because of this new breed of Advertising, jargon has now started to dominate ALL Marketing and Advertising. Think of jargon as words or phrases that are drearily commonplace and predictable … that lack power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition … and that are nevertheless stated as if they were original or significant. In Advertising, you see and hear jargon (and platitudes) all day.

Since businesses only have 30 seconds to try to convey what makes them special, they lump everything into jargon such as “largest selection”, “most professional”, “lowest prices”, “highest quality”, “best service”, “fastest”, “most convenient”, “largest in the state”, “more honest”, “we’re the experts”, “we specialize”, “works harder”, “gets the job done right the first time”, and “been in business for 1,000 years”.

Now listen, I am not saying that you should not be those kinds of things. Those make up the foundation you want to use to build your inside reality on. But consider this. If my Marketing says that I offer high quality and great service, isn’t that drearily commonplace and predictable? Doesn’t it lack power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition? Isn’t it nevertheless stated as though it were original and significant? Does my inside reality, what really makes me good at what I do — does that really shine through? Can you tell specifically what makes me valuable to the marketplace when I say, “highest quality” or “best service”?

You simply cannot describe, demonstrate, exhibit, reveal, or display your inside reality using jargon. It is impossible! And unfortunately, the result is an outside perception that you are no different than anyone else. There is absolutely no distinction, no separation, and no differentiation. You just flat-out can’t make your inside reality and outside perception match up when you use jargon like this.

 

Most businesses discover that they run high on the jargon meter. You may find that your inside reality, excellent as it may be, is nowhere to be found in your Marketing messaging. It is all but lost in a sea of jargon and completely invisible to your prospects. Is this making sense to you? Is it evident that this might be a problem for you now, and a tremendous competitive advantage if you could figure out how to fix this for your own business?

I can show you how to fix this. I explain how you can follow a very simple process (Equation), and when you do, you will eliminate jargon forever. I teach how to become a communications powerhouse, make your outside perception become an excellent reflection of your inside reality, and finally help you to begin to get the results from your Marketing that you should be getting.

 

This Equation has four main components …  

The first component is to Interrupt. This is simply the process of getting qualified prospects to pay attention to your Marketing. This is often accomplished by affecting the prospect emotionally. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it is a lot more difficult to pull this off in real life, unless you understand what marketing is, and what it’s supposed to do.

The second component is to get them Engaged. Once the prospect is interrupted, it is critical to give them the promise that information is forthcoming that will help them make the best decision possible or, in other words, facilitate their decision-making process. This is also best accomplished on an emotional level.

The third component is to Educate. Once you have interrupted and engaged them, you must give information that allows them to logically understand how and why you solved that emotional problem. This is accomplished by giving detailed, quantifiable, specific, inside-reality-revealing information. This turns the corner from an emotional sell – remember … you interrupted and engaged them based on emotional hot buttons — to a logical sell. This is easy to do if you just follow this Marketing Equation.

And the fourth and final component of this equation is The Offer. Now, they have been interrupted based on problems that are important to them emotionally, engaged by the promise of a solution to that emotional problem, and they have examined the educational information that makes your solution to that emotional problem real and believable.

 

So, the last step is for you to give that prospect a low, or better yet, NO risk way for them to take the next step in the sales process.

This can be accomplished by offering a free marketing tool, such as a report, brochure, seminar, audio, video, or something similar, that educates them even more, so the prospect feels in complete control of the decision-making process. This Equation follows the formula for what Marketing is supposed to do in the first place. In fact, at this point, you can simply say that Marketing’s job is to interrupt, engage, educate, and offer.

I discuss often, that if you want to know why Jane Doe buys what Jane Doe buys, you have got to see the world through Jane Doe’s eyes … Well, I would submit to you that if you wanted to know what Jane Doe sees, you better first understand how Jane Doe’s brain works, how it processes information, and makes decisions.

To understand this process, there are 3 major concepts that I teach. Three concepts that no one else in the world of Marketing understands, but three concepts that will make all the difference in the world in your Marketing’s effectiveness and, more importantly, in your company’s profitability. It is about how the brain actually works when it comes to visualization and Marketing. But as I said, that is an entire lesson all in itself …

 

 

So, what does all this have to do with Marketing then?

The short answer is everything. Understanding what wakes people up so they pay attention is what’s going to get a Marketing message past the “interrupt” stage and onto the “engage” stage. And when we engage our prospect, we have just increased our chances of selling to them by 1000%! This is going to solve the problem that every other Marketer has not been able to figure out, which is not just getting them interrupted but also getting them engaged, not just finding any old activator, but finding the right activator that is in everyone’s brain.

Any idiot can simply interrupt people, in fact, that is VERY easy to do. The so-called Marketing gurus do it all the time. They prefer to use activators that are based on things that are familiar and unusual because they are the easiest to pull off.

Have you ever noticed how many kinds of animals you see in advertising? That’s because animals are familiar and likable, and the idea is that those animals will interrupt you by poking your conscious brain when they’re detected by your reticular activator (long story cut short). Aflac has the duck, Geico has the Gecko, and Coke has its polar bears. You constantly see dancing elephants, talking dogs and finicky cats.

All these animals have good interim value based on their familiarity. That is also the major reason that big advertisers use celebrities: familiarity. And what about activators based on unusual things? Well … that is what creativity is all about. Creativity’s main purpose in Advertising is to dream up something so weird, so strange, so shocking, so unusual that it’ll snap you out of “downtime” and into uptime, otherwise known as “interrupt”. But here’s the key, here’s what no one else seems to understand, and is crucial.

 

Once the brain is activated, once it has been broken out of “downtime” and into “uptime” alert mode, it wants to be engaged. So, it immediately and subconsciously searches for additional, clarifying information. The brain wants to know, “Hey! What’s this all about? How does this affect me? Do I need to do anything about this?”

 

Literally on a subconscious level, the brain goes on a fact-finding mission. The bottom line is the brain wants to know, “How is this important and relevant to me? Should I allocate any conscious bandwidth to this?” So, it searches for additional facts. If it finds them, it will become engaged. If not, it will quickly revert into “downtime”. I call these important, relevant issues “hot buttons” …

Now, here is the key point in all of this, and one that none of the big ad agencies understand, but one that you need to know in order to make this all work for you.

The “activators” that are used to interrupt the prospect must be based on a relevant hot button. If not, the prospect will momentarily be interrupted, but will quickly revert from “uptime” back into “downtime”. This is what I call “false uptime”.

Have you ever heard someone call out your name in a crowded room? That IMMEDIATELY interrupts you because your name is familiar. But when you turn around to see who it was that was calling you, you realize, “Oops, they were actually calling out to someone else with my name”. Your name is an activator, but because in that situation your name was not important or relevant to you, it did not engage you. You quickly reverted right back to downtime. That is called false uptime.

 

This happens in Marketing and Advertising all the time …

 

Most Marketing interrupts, but it does not engage. Just like Tiger Woods and and the Buick commercial: He’s famous, and you like golf, so it captures your attention; it interrupts you. But when you find out that it is not based on anything that’s important to you, when there’s nothing relevant, nothing that solves some problem that you have, you quickly revert to downtime.

You have been conditioned to believe that, as long as you’ve interrupted the prospect, that’s it! That is good enough! The job is done. But you must realize that if you only interrupt the prospect, that is only one fourth of this crucial Marketing Equation.

This is one of the things that almost no one understands, and one of the main reasons everything you have ever learned about Marketing is wrong.