The last two posts (here and here) were about the importance of creativity in marketing – how to get someone’s attention and keep it long enough to make your idea stick, how to persuade them that you can add value to the buyer’s journey.

Once you’ve communicated your creative idea with the goal of getting and keeping someone’s attention, how do you know it’s working?

It’s easy to get feedback if you are talking directly with another person. They nod their head in agreement, they tell you when they don’t understand something, you can ask questions to check in with them.

You know what their needs are (they can tell you directly), you know whether you are adding value (they can let you know if the information is helping them), and you know what type of person they are (from the visual and verbal feedback you are getting).

But when you communicate with information on your website, feedback is much more indirect. When a person visits your site, there’s so much you don’t know.

• You don’t know what the person’s needs are or even if they know what they want.
• You don’t know what information they need at this stage of their buying process.
• You don’t know what type of person they are.

This is where a structure works in combination with creativity to support your marketing and sales activities. A sales process that matches your customer’s buying process. Personas that match the type of person they are. A site architecture that adds value to the visitor by making it easy for them to find the information they need.

How do you know if your structure is working?

• Measure your actions so you have a quantitative history.
• Analyze the results to see relationships and how results change.
• Understand cause and effect so you can make changes that will improve results.

Structure is how marketing departments establish the context that lets creative people be successful. Structure is what lets you experiment, learn what works best, and constantly improve the value that marketing brings to the customer.

Does this take away from the need to be creative? Of course not. It simply puts the creative focus on adding value to the customer.

In the last post I suggested that the creative core of marketing is to get someone’s attention and to change their mind. That post was about how to get someone’s attention. Now let’s look at how to keep attention long enough to change a person’s mind.

Why do you need to sustain their attention? Because you are asking someone to listen carefully to your idea and to consider how you can add value to their life.

People may be open to your ideas, but if those ideas aren’t presented in a way that keeps their attention, you are going to lose them.

How to keep their attention?

Everyone loves a mystery. In fact, once we get started on one, we can’t resist their pull. Ever found yourself watching a ‘B’ movie at midnight, wishing you could just go to sleep, but waiting until the end of the movie because you had to know the ending?

What is it about the mystery that keeps us captivated until the end? A mystery is a “higher level of unexpectedness” according to Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick. In the last post we looked at how the unexpected can get our attention. With a mystery you can keep people’s attention by taking them on an unexpected journey to an unknown destination.

This journey works to keep us engaged because we want to know how it ends. In fact, we have to know how it ends. We can’t help it, our minds were made that way.

Cognitive scientists explain that we have to know how it ends because we need to fill gaps in our knowledge. As soon as we identify a gap, we are compelled to get the information that will fill the gap. We are all infovores.

We watch the rest of the sporting event because we want to find out who wins. We finish the puzzle because we have to see how it fits together.

But how does this work in marketing and sales, especially for complex products and services that are sold to another business? It hardly seems like there is any mystery there. You’ve got something that will meet the needs of your potential buyer, you explain the facts of how it adds value, and they decide whether to move forward and make a purchase. Right?

Well, no. No matter how much value you believe your product adds to buyers, they won’t pay attention until they believe there is a gap in their knowledge.

The key with the gap theory is to open the gap. It’s only when a gap is open that you can rescue the audience by closing it. Before jumping into the facts of how you can add value to potential buyers, create a gap in their knowledge.

To create a knowledge gap, start with information that your audience knows already. Then point out what they are missing.

Here’s an example. (I’m making this up.)

“Google runs large data centers in many cities in the U.S. But did you know that their servers use 50% less power than in the average data center?”

Here I’ve been told something I know, but then a gap was created. Now I have to know why they use less power.

Once the gap is created, take your time in closing it. In fact, don’t close it until the end. Take the reader on a journey, dropping clues periodically about why these data centers use less power. Unpack the story gradually; don’t give everything away up front.

Now we’ve come to the second reason why creativity is important in marketing. It takes creativity to generate the unexpected idea that will get a person’s attention. And it takes creativity to take the person on an unexpected journey that will keep their attention.

But is creativity in marketing enough to be successful? If not, what else is required? I’ll explore these questions in my next post.

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:

1. Identify the central message you need to communicate – find the core.
2. 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?
3. 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.