You buy a new CD by a favorite group. You bring it home, play it, and feel disappointed: one good song on the whole disc.
You play it again. Hey, that other song sounds good, too. And you love the first one. As time goes by the number grows. After six listenings, the CD may become your favorite.
What has happened?
Familiarity breeds attraction. The more you hear something, the more you like it.
The more you see someone, the more you tend to like them. R.F. Bornstein and two other psychologists demonstrated this in a 1987 experiment. The researchers subliminally flashed onto screens photos of the faces of several people -- so quickly, in fact, that when interviewed later and shown the photos again, none of the subjects could recall ever seeing any of the faces before. Yet the more the person's face was flashed on the screen, the more the subjects liked that person when they met later.
Familiarity breeds liking.
Consider another example. Anyone anywhere can buy stock in one of the seven Baby Bells, the regional phone companies created by the breakup of AT&T. In choosing one of those seven stocks, a prospect could read volumes on each Baby Bell, from earnings per share to decades' worth of press releases and new stories.
With all of this information available, and with their presumed desire to invest in the most promising Baby Bell, what do investors do?
They pick the Baby Bell in their region.
These investors have no inside information. Denver investors know no more about their local Baby Bell, Qwest, than Qwest investors in Dubrovnik.
These investors are not relying on information. They are buying based on familiarity. The Denver investor sees Qwest's name on billboards, signs, trucks -- a dozen places. When she decides to invest, she buys Qwest not because its future looks better, but because it's familiar. She feels she knows Qwest, though she knows little about it. Her knowledge comforts her.
Brands build familiarity -- and business.
Get known.
-- excerpted from What Clients Love
Meeting with the Boss and her associates.
Your audience includes four people: the Top Dog and three associates. Who should you address? Who must you win over? The associates. The Top Dog knows she is Top Dog and doesn't need reminding. Her associates, however, feel like subordinates. If they are typical subordinates, they think they deserve their boss's title and the fawning that goes with it.
Because associates are sensitive to any hint you consider them underlings, you must make each one feel important. Address the boss too often and everyone -- the associates and the boss -- will decide you are a shamless bootlicker.
Treat associates like bosses
and bosses like associates.
-- excerpted from What Clients Love
iPod's advertising must be working. I now own four.
That's not counting, by they way, the iPod Mini I gave Cole for Christmas and the iPod Shuffle I bought Christine just for fun.
We're far from alone, as you know. Apple sold almost five million iPods during the most recent quarter. Since the device's introduction, Apple's stock price has tripled.
How do they do it?
When we reflect on this phenomenon, we will remember the advertising. This campaign may take its place alongside Volkswagen's in the 60s and Absolut's in the 90s as the three most effective of the past 50 years.
As it turns out, these campaigns share something in common: a shape.
For Absolut, it's the distinctive short-necked bottle. For Volkswagen, the curvy bug. For the iPod, it's the simple white outline of the device. Apple's marketers, possessed of a seemingly special awareness of cultural trends, realize this is the Era of the Eye. So the star in their simple campaign is the device against a black silhouette of its user, in turn against a single bold color background.
That's all. Sometimes the ads have words -- perhaps they all do -- but I obviously don't notice them. Neither do you.
Thinking of this, I now recall the fourth great campaign of this period: Marlboro cigarettes. The product doesn't star this time. Instead, it's a single iconic image, repeated every month for decades: the Marlboro Man. It's easy to dismiss or even condemn the product featured. No one, however, can deny the remarkable impact of this Leo Burnett campaign.
Finding the single central image is not easy. Merrill Lynch came close with its bull, but a bull is a complex image and not clearly an image unique to that company. If anything, the town of Pamplona owns that image. If it doesn't, the New York Stock Exchange does.
But Absolut's bottle, the iPod's simple white body, and Volkswagen's three-hump design are uniquely theirs. By making those images the star of every advertisement, and staying on that message relentlessly, these advertisers revealed something important about how we -- and your prospects -- think.
We think with our eyes.
On the Lighter Side
-- Among the greatest writing of the past 30 years: the script for Lily Tomlin's The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe. Perhaps more moments of brilliance than anything written during this time. True credit goes to the often-overlooked writer, Jane Wagner.
-- Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?
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Harry Beckwith is the best-selling author of Selling
the Invisible, which has been named one of the top
ten business books of all time, with over 675,000
copies sold in 14 translations. He is also author of
The Invisible Touch and What Clients Love, which
have sold over 275,000 copies in 13 translations. He has been a keynote speaker for 14 Fortune 200 annual sales meetings and the National |
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Speakers' Association convention, and has made presentations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is
cited regularly in national media including CNN,
The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur,
Crain's New York Business and numerous
American, European and Asian newspapers. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Harry resides in Minneapolis and is the father of six. |
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