Your Customers Are Not You

I've been doing a lot of research on advertising and marketing. In the process a friend of mine from LDS Business College's Self Reliance "Starting and Growing My Business" class suggested I take a "free advertising class" and take a close look at all the mail that comes to my house and dissect the strategies of the advertisers that have targeted me.

What are they doing well?

Which pieces of mail am I likely to open?

Why am I drawn to some parcels and not to others?

Which mail do I look at right away and which go on "the stack"?

I have also been checking out the newspaper advertisements, billboards, TV ads, want ads, garage sale signs, other signs etc. There is an old phrase, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I have learned much about good and bad advertising. One of the main principles is that your customer does not care about you. They do not think like you. They do not know what you know. They do not have the same needs, wants and desires as you. But if you can draw their attention and let them know that you can give them what they need, want and/or desire, you will never go hungry again!...I digress.

A graduate student named Elizabeth Newton at Stanford University performed a study in 1990 about tappers and listeners which I think applies. Try this at home!

Ms. Newton divided a group of human guinea pigs into two groups "tappers" and "listeners". She asked to tappers to choose a familiar song and tap out the rhythm on a table for the listeners to guess. Before the listeners guessed, she asked the tappers to predict the probability that the listeners would correctly guess their song. Out of 120 tapped songs, listeners guessed only three correctly (2.5%). Tappers had predicted a success rate of 50%.

Think of that! The tappers conveyed their message effectively 1/40 times, but guessed that they would convey their message 1/2 times! Does this every happen when we are marketing?

We hear the tune of how awesome our product or service is. We think about all the time and work we put into thinking of a name, a jingle, a meme. We think of all the ways we have made ourselves better than the competition. Then we tap out our message and the customer does not understand or care.

When we advertise we need to make sure that we are not being like the tappers. We should not play the message we have chosen. Instead we need to tune into the song our customers are tapping and fill those needs--not the needs we think they need filled, not our needs. Then we will be able to create simple, effective marketing strategies and campaigns that reverberate with our customers and highlight the ways our products and services meet their needs. Not what we think they should need, and especially not what we need or want.

If we play the game of tapping out our marketing message, we will likely have a success rate similar to Newton's tappers about 2.5%. If we instead tune into what our customers want. We will be tapping out a song they already hear and our success rate can be much higher than 50% with our target market.

Try the game this way. Have a listener hum a song, then begin tapping out that song on the table. See if the hummer can figure out what you are tapping. What do you think the success rate will be now? Let's play tappers and hummers. In this game everybody wins!

Now go figure out what your customers want and advertise that! Listen to them and they will hear and understand your message loud and clear!

Addendum: While I was in the processes of writing this post my (Italian) wife told me that McDonald's had run an ad in Italy stating that Italian kids like Happy Meals more than pizza. While this may be true, it's not a song that they want to hear!

Quiz: Recently in preparing an exercise class I heard some statistics that the class can help elderly people avoid falls. This is a measurable fact. We may even hear an old person say they don't want to fall and are fearful of falling (the class also decreases fear of falling). Should I run an ad that says "ATTENTION OLD PEOPLE: come to my exercise class so you can avoid falling!"?

No! That is not the song they are singing. If it is, it's not the song they want to hear. They don't want to be called old, they don't want to exercise and they don't want to be reminded that they might fall.

How 'bout this: "Mature adults come try this new class! You can stay independent and healthy while meeting new people!"

I'm sure you can come up with an even better message. Leave your comment below to improve the above advertisement!

100 Things To Do On a Free Day

100 Things to do on a free day in no particular order, repeats allowed:
1. Pre school
2. Play with my kids
3. Science experiments
4. Take my wife on a shopping spree
5. Learn to fish
6. Go golfing
7. Fly to my brother's house and go golfing with him/them
8. Learn to fly an airplane
9. Learn to fly a helicopter
10. Sail
11. Learn Spanish
12. Learn Chinese
13. Read a fiction book
14. Read to my kids
15. Have my kids read to me
16. Rent/buy rollerblades and go rollerblading
17. Miniature golf
18. Cook lunch
19. Cook dinner
20. Do laundry...is that a free day thing...I don't get around to these things on other days-Support day?
21. Learn to Sail
22. Play the song Sail while sailing
23. Go sailing with my wife's grandmother and say "look I'm sailing...I sail"
24. Watch What About Bob on a boat even though I think I like it about as little as my wife's G-ma
25. Play guitar
26. Have my wife teach me to crochet
27. Go to the zoo
28. Go to the temple
29. Have a picnic
30. Fly to NC and play a board game with old friends (not old ones, but old ones you know?)
31. Learn to scuba dive
32. Plan a vacation for another free day (or is that a support day or delegate thing?)
33. Read
34. Sleep in
35. Breakfast in bed
36. Kiss my wife
37. Give my wife a massage
38. Get kissed by my wife
39. Go for a long walk
40. Eat cake
41. Go get a maple bar and a slurpee and figure out how to mail them to NC
42. Read the newspaper
43. Go to an estate sale
44. Go to an auction
45. Play football
46. Play soccer
47. Play basketball
48. Play volleyball on a real beach
49. Go to the beach with my kids
50. Build sandcastles
51. Lie on the beach
52. Learn to surf
53. Surf
54. Go someplace warm and exotic and surf
55. Go visit my cousin in NY and surf in cold water
56. Surf in the surf tee hee.
57. Visit a rainforest
58. Visit a national park
59. Visit a state park
60. Learn Dvorak (typing)
61. Lean Dvorak song on piano
62. Learn to play piano
63. Learn a piano concerto and duet with my wife and teach my oldest child a song on piano and invite people over for a concert with brownies
64. Make brownies with my son
65. Help my mother clean out her basement
66. Ride a horse
67. Ride my brother's horse
68. Golf
69. Eat delicious food
70. Eat delicious food in Italy
71. Hang glide
72. Climb cliffs
73. Go spelunking
74. Write a book
75. Do a crossword puzzle start to finish
76. Make a crossword puzzle with fun words like spelunking and galoshes
77. Write a song
78. Write a song and play and sing with guitar/piano with high school best friend
79. Eat Pringles
80. Go on a campout without pre-planning (prob with my kids) a la my high school self with two besties (not with my kids then..)
81. Row
82. Explore an island
83. Draw with sidewalk chalk
84. Golf with my Father-in-law and Brothers-in-law
85. Learn to fish
86. Shoot a gun
87. Get really good at archery
88. Take up fencing again
89. Poke someone with a sword (with safety gear)
90. Plan a bank heist scenario
91. Write an action novel with a bank heist scenario
92. Shoot the bull
93. Camp in a tee-pee
94. Make (have made) cowboy and Indian costumes and get laser tag equipment and play cowboys and Indians on real horseback
95. Before doing above research if laser tag equipment could harm horses. If so, do above with broomstick horses with kids instead of adults
96. Plan and act out zombie scenario for my brother-in-law's birthday
97. Watch Bones with my wife--all day
98. Pick a new show to watch with my wife
99. Play video games including retro ones
100. Watch old timey horrer movies with bro-in-law

Idea from Work Less, Make More: Stop Working So Hard and Create the Life You Really Want by Jennifer White