When you think of marketing, what comes to mind? Most people would think of advertisers on Madison Avenue fashioning the next campaign. Or the publicist with a big rolodex, able to draw on contacts in the media and spin a compelling story. Or perhaps the imaginative trade show display that everyone talked about in the hotel bar that night.
What is it about these creative efforts that makes them so important in the realm of marketing? So dominant that some people think marketing consists only of these creative ventures?
First, let’s step back and ask ourselves “what is the primary function of marketing?” Definitions refer to ‘satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process’, a process that ‘identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements profitably’.
Somehow these definitions, though correct in an abstract way, fail to capture the essence of marketing. What exactly happens in this “process that facilitates an exchange”?
At the core is this: First you have to get the attention of a person. Then you have to hold that attention long enough to change a person’s mind.
Getting a person’s attention
Getting the attention of a person is not easy. Each of us is preoccupied with our own concerns. Our attention is mainly on the object of our current goal. We are constructed to ignore most of the sensations that are not relevant to our safety or the current focus of our mind.
And sensations bombard us all day long, especially in our modern social world where so many vie for our attention.
But, like a deer in the forest or a bird on a fence post, something unexpected is more likely catch our notice. Our mind has to respond to the new impression until we determine that it poses no threat. Our mind can’t help but be drawn to a new or surprising event.
Yet even most surprises fail to really capture our attention. Our mind immediately tries to guess whether it has seen this before, whether it is something that can be dismissed easily. The guessing machine realizes “Oh, I’ve seen that before” or “I already heard that story.” And the mind returns to where it left off before you distracted it.
To create an idea that is new and surprising and unexpected, one that will capture a person’s attention. It takes people who can create new combinations of images and sounds and words. People who will experiment and try something different. People who will take risks. These are the creative people that populate agencies and marketing departments everywhere.
Connecting to your core message
The Heath brothers point out in their book Made to Stick that the creative marketing people who succeed are the ones who connect the surprising idea to the company’s core message.
For a business, it doesn’t help to get someone’s attention with surprise if the unexpected result isn’t connected to what your company has to say. Think of all those Superbowl ads from dot-com companies. Yes, they were surprising, but they didn’t relate to the company and we were left shaking our head in disbelief at the waste of money.
Here’s the process the Heaths recommend for using the unexpected to get people’s attention and make your idea stickier:
- Identify the central message you need to communicate – find the core.
- Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message – i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?
- Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Refine people’s guessing machines in a way that shows how you can add value, value worth paying for. This means you have to keep their attention. And that is the subject of my next post, how to keep a person’s attention.
Some other related posts you might find useful:
About David Crankshaw
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