Use your customer's language so they can HEAR you

"... all I need is some cigarettes, a little food, and my HBO..."

-Anonymous gentleman on downtown #1 train, NYC

Well you certainly have to respect a guy who knows exactly what he wants. I wish I had his level of clarity...

I heard the above quote on the 2 train this morning during my work commute down to the World Financial Center, and it really slammed home a point that Sam Horn makes in her wonderful book, Pop! The key insight is to use your own customer's language in your marketing communications. Rather than playing around with formal-sounding or hip-sounding terminology, listen to the actual words that come out of your customers' mouths.

What do your customers say or think to themselves when they're in a situation in which they would benefit from your product (or service)? What do they say or think when they're enjoying the benefits of your product? What words do they use to describe the product to their friends?

Why pay an expensive copywriter or worse, try to write the copy yourself when you have thousands or millions of customers doing the writing for you already? And remember, perhaps the easiest way to gain access to the language of your customers is via the web - blogs, discussion boards, etc.

If you want your copy to sound real and resonate with your prospects & customers, what better way to accomplish this than to take the words straight from the horses' mouths?

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Wilton Stentz, the Yoda of online marketing...

All marketers know how important successful communication is - whether you're trying to build brand awareness, maintain the loyalty of an existing customer base, or influence key decision makers at work.

The Law of Association
While there are several core 'laws' that underlie successful communications, few are as crucial and as powerful as the law of association.

The law of association is based on the solid yet simple notion that in order to communicate effectively with anyone, you need to work with the material that already exists inside of their heads. Al Ries & Jack Trout underscored this premise in their classic book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

The law of association is particularly powerful when you are introducing something new to people, especially when it is complex, hard to "size up" or hard to visualize. Through using what is already in people's heads, you can instantly communicate in a manner that is both clear & compelling.

Who the heck is Wilton Stentz?
Let's use the title of this article as an example of the law in action. Now you probably don't know who Wilton Stentz is, but you most certainly know our friend, Yoda. Let's imagine that Mr. Stentz is a wise & experienced online marketing consultant who lives in Zurich. Now I could simply say these very words to you and you would be able to comprehend them; whether you would really hear them & remember them is a different matter. But when I look into your mind to identify something that represents wisdom & experience in a rich & visually compelling way, I come up with an association that immediately brings Mr. Stentz's attributes to life. When Wilton is compared to Yoda - in an instant - you "get it".

"It's the Rolls Royce of..."
To touch upon a few additional examples, you've probably heard the law of association used with respect to a a famous luxury automobile brand. Ever had someone tell you, "It's the Rolls Royce of... so-and-so"? Or, how about the brilliant use of the law by baby toy manufacturer, Baby Einstein? What parents don't want their children to become as brilliant as Albert Einstein?

Looking at current events you can see the law of association playing out in the presidential primaries on the Republican side. Just have a look at what Fred Thompson has tried to do, attempting to associate himself with former President Reagan. Perhaps it was a clever idea; however, one requirement that Fred seems to have overlooked is that the law requires there to be real integrity behind the association that is made. There is no substitute for this requirement, nor will there ever be.

The law of association has a rich and varied set of applications within communications, and I look forward to exploring them in future posts.

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Just ask your mom!.. and save all those marketing research dollars

I'm convinced that some marketers have gone out and spent $250,000 on marketing research when all they really needed to do was pick up the phone and "call mom".

It's not that spending lots of money to watch what people say & do behind 1-way mirrors isn't interesting, it's just that the entire process of conducting research can take forever - and is often overkill given your business objective.

This is where your mother comes into play. Or your father for that matter. Or your friends. Second cousins. Your garage attendant. And the guy who you buy flowers from at the corner.

The truth is that you're surrounded by people who can provide you with a wealth of input regarding the products & services that you manage, market and develop. Not utilizing these incredibly valuable resources would be a profound & deeply limiting oversight.

Now I'm hardly suggesting that you bank the global commercialization of a new product on a five-minute conversation you had with your dog walker. But I am suggesting you utilize the people around you to gather quick, "real", no-cost feedback & insights about consumer needs, your products, your company, competitors, etc.

You can also gain great insights by simply paying attention to what people around you are talking about. Take your mom, for example. What's top of mind for her these days? What appear to be her biggest 'stressors'? Are there any themes you can tease out? How about your neighbor with the newborn? How have the tone and content of your conversations changed since he became a dad?

When the need arises, I want you to turn your day-to-day interactions into one giant marketing research lab. Put on your research goggles and engage the folks within your world. They have so much to give and are often more than happy to provide you easy access to their thoughts & opinions.

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Innovation via your inner consumer voice

All of us walk through the world with our own mental filters... our filters determine what we pay attention to and what we block out... when I walk down the streets of New York with a certain friend of mine from college, I notice all the dogs that trot past us... he notices the different architectural styles that imbue the many buildings ... for him the dogs are invisible... for me, the buildings.

However, there exists a quiet world which we both share. One all of us have in common, yet often pay little attention to... our inner voices. Those little whispers. So faint that they often go undetected. So what does this have to do with innovation? Everything.

Marketers must learn to hear their own whispers
For consumer-based marketers especially, it's essential to develop a refined ear. One that can tune into our own little day-to-day whispers -- particularly those whispers that relate to the products, services and consumer needs that underpin our businesses. It's through listening to these whispers that deep insights & innovation come bubbling up to the surface.

We all know that consumers do a notoriously poor job of communicating their unmet needs. Much of this is because most people have not developed the capabilities for tapping into their inner voices. And despite the many tools & sophisticated approaches, marketing research continues to have difficulty drawing out those unmet needs. This is why the onus falls on marketers to cultivate their own consumer inner voices.

Whether you're maniacally thumbing through a magazine in an unsuccessful search for the front-page article, or trying to figure out how to place an order at the funky new sandwich shop on your block, learning to "listen" to your day-to-day thoughts & feelings can provide tremendous opportunities for innovation. As I mentioned above, this is particularly relevant & powerful if you are also a consumer of the very products or services that your company sells.

Innovating around your inner consumer voice in the shower
Let's take a brief example of innovating around one's inner voice... there I am a few weeks ago taking my nightly shower before I go to bed. As I look down at the soap dish I notice that the soap is completely worn out - a thin slab of what was once a thick, meaty bar of glycerin. This situation is one that I have probably experienced hundreds of times in my life and yet not until a few weeks ago did I come to register the discomfort it creates. The soap was too small to be effective for washing yet it still has some useful life left. What I typically do is grab a new bar of soap and leave the old bar to slowly decompose in the soap dish, creating a soupy, soapy water concoction in the dish. For whatever reason, I cannot bring myself to simply throw away these tiny bars of just-about-unusable soaps.

It was only then, when I had acknowledged my discomfort, that I was able to think up ways to innovate around this discomfort which had remained dormant to myself for so long. Standing there in the shower I came up with a few decent concepts. One such concept was a contraption for tossing unusuable soaps into, which after getting filled-up with soaps, would act like a molding vice, mushing the soaps together, and producing a brand new bar of soap. Viola! While perhaps not a patent-worthy concept, that is besides the point.

The opportunity for innovation in the above example stemmed directly from becoming mindful of a mundane, everyday experience that generated displeasure for me, albeit not one of the 'life or death' variety. However, in today's modern world, with most of our basic needs already met, much of the opportunities for innovation lie within this 'valley of the subtle'; hence the need for marketers to refine their inner consumer voices. It is one of the key capabilities for marketers to develop in order to better identify opportunity areas for effective innovation.

Some of my favorite books on innovation

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) 

• The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

• Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas

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Marketers & the "us vs. them" illusion... take 3

Another helpful tool for marketers to use to further undermine the "us vs. them" illusion is as easy as a few Google searches and a couple of mouse clicks.

Open your web browser, hop onto Google or your favorite search engine, and track down some discussion boards or social networking sites that pertain to your industry and read away. You'll gain instance access to the voice of the customer, free of charge... no need for focus groups or expensive surveys.

Now, of course, I'm cognizant of the bias factors involved in this approach (e.g., reading the words of a self-selecting population). I would never suggest that a marketer take what she hears on some discussion boards and draw firm conclusions about customers - their current concerns, needs, friction points, etc. However, it's a heck of a solid way for generating hypotheses that can then be validated quickly using relevant market-research technologies.

Start doing this immediately. Block out 30 minutes a week on your calendar for "cruising" industry-relevant discussion boards. It's such a small investment, which over time will pay you back major dividends.

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