Jul 06
8
Personalizing the Pitch
I have been in several meetings over the last week where people have been trying to make decisions. The decisions are normally about how to influence people to buy things. Whether people are trying to figure out how the stand at the trade show should look or what the content in some collateral should be, it all gets down to one thing really. You want to influence someone.
What I find amazing in the meetings that I attend is how much people keep talking about the groups of people that they want to influence – the press, early adopters, technology licensees etc.
No one seems to think in terms of individuals. And often the course of your product's future is really determined by only a handful of individuals.
You can spend a half a million dollars on a stand at the trade show and have tens of thousands of people walk past, walk through, get involved, go away, be impressed…. But of those who are the individual people that are the key decision makers that could make your product successful.
I bet that if you thought about it you could count them on one hand. The truly influential.
When it gets down to it, these are the only people that need to be targeted for the whole campaign. If you can identify them and create a plan that clearly also impresses the other people that pass by, you will get the result that you are looking for. It is about having clarity about this that is important in making decisions on marketing. Personalized selling. It is One On One, One To One.
I remember discovering this years ago when I was in the music business.
It was 1973 and I was coming off my first #1 record – Evie by Steve Wright. It was a huge single and we were about to launch the album. The second single was the title track of the album, Hard Road. The first single was totally brilliant and nothing could match it. But we needed to ensure that we didn't just have a hit single, but had an album too.
So I decided that we would do street posters in Sydney for the second single. No one had ever done street posters for a single at the time so that was a first. I had two simple posters made up. One said, “Steve Wright”. The other said “Hard Road”. Each a different colour. Simple and no call to action.
The only instructions that I gave to the guys who did the bill posting was this: Make sure that there are posters stuck up in Clarence Street and in King St. King St was where my office was and I wanted my boss, Ted Albert, to see the posters. And Clarence St was where the top radio station in Sydney was.
On the day that the posters went up I got the result that I wanted. I was called up by the program director of 2SM. He said, “OK, your record is on the playlist!”
I hadnt even called him to talk about the record. He got the message. And he was the single most influential program director in Australia at that time.
His impression had been that I was seriously pushing the second single – after all I had taken this unprecedented step of putting up street posters to market a single. And he made a decision based on this that was actually hugely influential on the market.
In the music business just like in most businesses there is a purchasing ecosystem that is critical to understand. In the music business the sale of the plastic or the download is where the rubber hits the road in terms of the transaction. But it is promotional airplay that is the key to inducing the transaction.
Everywhere I go I find that people lose sight of the power of focusing on creating messages that are tuned to generate decisions by single individuals whose influence can create the quantum shift required for success.
If you can get very specific about individuals in building a marketing campaign you can really do magic.
Remember ultimately it is not about having a Unique Selling Proposition. It is about creating a Unique Buying Proposition – a situation in which the other person comes to you wanting to buy what you have, rather than the other way around.
The master of the UBP is without doubt Steve Jobs and his team at Apple. They make things that people want to buy. The marketing and sales pitch is minimal. Just by announcing they see demand. Everyone can do this. But to do it requires real thinking time, real care, real passion….. and most companies just don't want to deal with this. They want to create the quick fix, get me a campaign, and get me some visibility and bloody well don't come back until you can report that you hit plan for the month.
And that is why they find themselves in trouble….
Put the passion back into the plan and stop thinking about the things that you are selling and start thinking about the individual that might want to buy that thing.
Would they want that thing you want to sell?
Why would they want it?
Who would influence their purchase decision?
Etc, etc.
These are not difficult things to determine.
For instance – in consumer electronics in the US, I think that Walt Mossenberg is probably the most influential journalist in the US. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. That doesn't matter. Fact is that he writes for the Wall St Journal. So he must be pretty sharp.
But the point is that a campaign that focuses on what he thinks and ultimately is influenced by him and influences him to write something positive would have to be a tremendously useful strategy if you wanted to sell something in that space, wouldn't it?
Being able to focus on one specific person to me makes life so much easier. It also requires incredible attention to detail to get the clarity for this kind of success….
By the way, the second single by Stevie Wright, became a hit, and so did the album. It went platinum.