And Best is Bad
Every husband and wife knows this: human beings are not rational.
Knowing this is critical to being a good marketer, but only if you understand a related point:
Humans are irrational -- but in ways you can predict.
Consider, as evidence, the good/better/best/paradox:
Three miles south of downtown Minneapolis, turn right on Lake Street, and drive almost nine-tenths of mile, and look right to see a famous site: the restaurant that once served the best breakfast in the world.
Until January of this year, the Calhoun Grill promised you just such a meal, on a banner in front of the restaurant the width and height of semi-truck. Driving up to the Grill, you expected to see lines of people standing in the cold outside.
But there never were lines outside -- or inside -- until lunch. Starting around noon, however, you had to give your name to the greeter...and wait.
Why didn't people want the World's Best Breakfast, but craved a lunch the restaurant owners did not even advertise?
Decades ago, advertising legend David Ogilvy observed that marketers spend too much time trying to prove they are the superior choice. "You can accomplish far more," Ogilvy observed, "simply by convincing people that you are positively good."
Ogilvy never explained his comment or offered proof, and many people reading it paused, furrowed their brows and moved on. But Ogilvy was right. People want positively good. Telling them you're better than your competitors actually repels them -- partly because you claim is immodest, but also because it reminds them they have a choice.
What do we do when we have several choices? We become paralyzed. Choices make us worry about making a bad choice. As every good clothing salesperson knows, show a man a nice pair of black shoes and he will buy them. Show him four nice pairs, however, and there's a good chance he will leave empty-handed.
Researchers at Stanford discovered this too. If they offered grocery store buyers the choice of one or two strawberry jams, the buyers picked one. Given multiple choices, however, they chose none.
Doctors behave identically. They will recommend one proven medication 72% of the time. If they have multiple options for that medication, however, they actually prescribe nothing -- nothing -- 52% of the time.
Presented with several good choices, we make no choices.
This explains why "best breakfasts" and other claims of superiority backfire. "Best" means "among many," and makes you fear making the wrong choice among many. The more options you face, in fact, the more fearful you become -- which is why many of you haven't replaced your obsolete, frustrating, and provably crappy DVD player.
The inexperienced sales or marketing person asks you to compare; the effective ones remove any basis for comparison. They don't sell you that theirs is better; they show you theirs is different.
The new salesmen touts "We're the better law firm." The experienced one emphasizes, "We're not a law firm. We're a specialty Intellectual Property practice."
We're not investment managers, the experienced head of business development insists. We're a family office.
We're not a cola, Seven-Up insisted. We're the uncola.
We're not a computer, Apple stressed. We're the uncomputers, the machines for people who hate computers.
We're not a coffee shop, Starbucks stresses. We're "the third place," the place you gather when you're not at work or at home.
Tell me that you're better and you ask me to compare you to others.
Tell me you're different, and you stand alone.
Decades ago, buyers at Macy's Department Store in New York ventured into the storeroom and discovered enough terry cloth to dry off Manhattan. They immediately began considering how they might liquidate this excess: two for one, free gift with purchase, Special This Week Only!
But the problem with all those strategies is that each involved selling towels -- and towels in department stores are more plentiful than shells on beaches. With so many towels to choose from, a towel buyer is more likely than not to choose the wrong one.
Fortunately, a Macy's employee named Bernice Fitzgibbon knew that she couldn't sell "better towels." But she could sell "untowels"; a form of terry cloth so different that the term towel simply was not apt.
These were not towels, she told New Yorkers in these memorable ads. They were "blotters," the oversized towels popular in Europe that served a different purpose.
Why buy just another towel from among many when you could have a blotter?
Why indeed?
Macy's blotters flew out the downtown store as if they had heard someone shout "Fire!"
So as a great breakfast suggests and a blotter proves, better isn't good, and best isn't better -- as irrational as that seems. Only different is better -- and it's much, much better.
Martha's Vineyard
"I was walking along the beach, minding my own business, when all of a sudden -- wham, I got hit by this enormous Q-Tip." Your mind was strolling through that sentence, actually filling in some of the words -- "business," for example -- and you had already filled in the word "wave" when suddenly, a Q-Tip hit you.
It jarred your brain to a stop. Stopped, a brain pauses to continue to consider what stopped it -- in your case, Q-Tip. The added time you spent considering the word meant you recorded the word in your memory, and increased the possibility you will remember the word Q-Tip tomorrow. As we learned in school -- when we'd remember what we'd read three times but forgot almost everything we read just once -- the time that you spend processing a piece of information increases your chance of remembering it.
This is why we recommend unexpected language and unusual names. They make minds stop to consider -- and record them in memory so that these names become familiar to them. And buyers routinely choose the product or service with which they feel most familiar.
But not all unusual names are equal; in fact, many are useless. Consider a product called Uvona, for example. That's an unusual word -- you've never heard it before -- but that doesn't mean you will remember it.
Uvona's problem is that mnemonically, it's lousy. It's not musical enough to activate people's auditory cortexes, where sounds get recorded in memory. And because people cannot picture a Uvona either, the word doesn't engage their visual cortexes, where a similar process of recording takes place.
As a result, Uvona literally goes in one ear, hangs around for a little longer than most words, and flies out the other.
Yes, you remember names similar to Uvona, like Nissan and Mazda. That's not because they are good names; it's because the companies behind them have enough money to publicize those name several times every day -- on television, print ads, outdoor boards, and the cars themselves. Give any word that much exposure and people will remember it for the same reason they learned how to how to spell Mississippi, or perhaps as a better example, Geography -- George Elliot's Old Grandfather Rode a Pig Home Yesterday. They learned from repetition.
Can you repeat your name so often that your key prospects feel totally familiar with you?
If you can't afford those multimillions, surprise people. Memories love a good surprise -- like a Q-Tip that smashes into them on the beach, an Apple that's a machine rather than a fruit, and a copy shop that sounds like a good place to try something kinky.
Be odd, be unexpected,
be different.
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Harry Beckwith is the Director of Beckwith Partners, an internationally regarded branding
and marketing firm. His classic trilogy on marketing a service -- Selling the Invisible,
The Invisible Touch, and What Clients Love -- has sold over 900,000 copies
in 22 translations, and the first book has been named one of the ten best business and
management books of all time. He has been a keynote speaker for 14 Fortune 200 annual sales meetings and the National Speakers' Association convention, and has made presentations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is cited regularly in |
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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 with his wife Christine Clifford Beckwith. He is the father of six children. Beckwith Partners' clients include Wells Fargo, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft and Target as well as many venture-capitalized startups worldwide. |
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