All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

Hearty, charbroiled, grilled au gratin

The National Restaurant Association has you pegged. Or at least pegged into one of four categories. It turns out that people who go to restaurants have one of four worldviews, divided equally among "Adventurous, Health-Conscious, Carefree and Tradtional". And each group wants to hear a different story.

One group looks at strawberry baked alaska and wants to hear more because they've never had it before. The next person at the table would never ever consider ordering it for exactly the same reason.

Unscientific research published by the group goes as far as talking about which words work best with each group. Today's quiz: match the four words below to the group that'll go for it:

GROUND   FRIED   RAW   INFUSED

That one was easy (they were flipped, first to last).

Let's try one that's a little subtle:

WILD   STIR-FRIED   HEARTY   HOMEMADE

Still not so hard (they were in the order of the groups). What's salient here is that the very same dish could have been described with any of these four words.

Different audiences demand different lies

We spent March talking about stories. Stories are repeatable shorthands--ways to make it easy for your audience to understand your idea and share it.

In April, we're going to shift gears a little bit. We start with this question:

Why are Republicans several times more likely than Democrats to drive Ford 150 pick up trucks? And why are Democrats dramatically more likely to drive Hondas?

The Times reports the story today in detail, but they don't get at the useful construct.

What we do know is that politics should have nothing to do with what you drive. But it does. The reason it does is that politics affects your worldview. Your worldview is the set of assumptions and biases and instincts you bring whenever you examine something new. And if your worldview doesn't match a story that a marketer is telling you, you ignore it.

Your brain is lying... but to who?

People have a funny reaction to the placebo effect. It seems unfair, almost, that a medicine or treatment that "doesn't really do anything" should work. Take the Respirate blood pressure trainer, pictured at left. All it does is help you become conscious of your breathing. It's clinically proven to reduce blood pressure.

"You mean," the skeptics say, "that all the device does is trick you into breathing differently?"

Actually, there's more to it than that. It works because it helps you focus on your mechanics and takes your mind away from other things that are having the opposite impact on your blood pressure. It works because it allows you tell yourself a story about getting better, about living slower, about breathing.

The placebo effect works, and it's proof that stories are at least as powerful as the real stuff.

A most expensive lie

I just got back from the New York International Auto Show. They've scaled way back on the buxom blondes, but there's still plenty of lying going on.

A car, after all, is an extremely expensive device with a fair amount of utility. But that's not what they sell at the show. The going price for utility is $15,000 or maybe $20,000. Figure $25,000 if you want a Prius. What they sell at the show are cars that cost many times that, or cars (like the one being hawked at left) that are totally cool but not particularly useful.

Unless you define "useful" to mean, "useful at making me feel sexy and young and filled with energy." Because that's what they're selling and that's what we're buying. The fact that it can also get us somewhere is slightly irrelevant.

But Whose Lifetime?

Phil Yanov sends us this great fine print lie.

Link: The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster.

    Transfer Fee: If you wish to transfer your Subscription to a different Sirius Receiver during the term of a prepaid subscription or committed subscription period, we may charge you a transfer fee of up to $75.00. You may not transfer a lifetime Subscription to a different Sirius Receiver.

The bottom line: Sirus sells you a $500 "lifetime subscription" that applies not to your life or even Sirius' life, but to the life of the radio itself. If you want to buy a new radio, tough.

Let's think about this lie for a second. Why on earth would you want to alienate the most loyal, highest spending customers on your list?

Scorecards

For a long time, Metro North  lied about their ontime record. According to their policies, a train was "on time" if it got in less than six minutes late. For a harried New Yorker, six minutes is a lot, especially on a 25 minute ride.

So Metro North bragged about their ontime record and it didn't jibe with user expectations. So consumer happiness was quite low.

What did Metro North do? Did they work hard to train engineers and upgrade machinery to make the trains run on time? Nope. They chose an effective marketing tactic instead: they changed the schedule.

By adding a few minutes to every ride (on the schedule) they are telling a very different story, setting different expectations. People aren't going to avoid the train because now the schedule says it's going to get in three minutes later, but they are going to smile more when the train gets there when they expected it was going to get there.

Not pregnant, just old

Rob Walker has a great piece in this weekend's Times magazine

Link: The New York Times > Magazine > Consumed: Smooth Move.

"Last year, sales of StriVectin, which costs about $135 for six ounces, reached $64 million in department stores, more than any other skin-care product, according to N.P.D."

$20 an ounce!

The key to the product's success is that the product refuses to tell you what other people are using it for. The box intentionally mirrors a pharmaceutical product, and you'll note that all the messaging is about stretch marks. Yet most people who use it use it for wrinkles. Part of the story here is that misusing the product is part of its charm. That buying a super expensive, industrial strength product for one problem is a great way to solve a different problem.

My favorite part is the latin translation of "stretch marks". That probably really boosts sales in ancient Rome.

Do you believe blondes?

Who is this woman? Does she work at Sales Genie? Is she a customer? Does her excellent hairstyle and tailored suit have anything to do with the quality of these mailing lists?

Of course stuff like this works. Of course it's a lie. It's something that customers (of both genders, apparently) respond to.

Coffee Lies

It's hard to remember back when a cup of coffee for a dollar was considered extravagant. When I was in college, my partner and I ran a coffee shop in the student center. We sold coffee for 50 cents and cleared thirty cents a cup. And sold thousands of cups a day, all outsourced.

Of course, no one buys coffee today. We buy an experience. We buy a story and the way that this story makes us feel. It's a complex story, involving smells and tastes and the sound of the shop and words and more.

I've started a collection of bad photographs of coffee store menus. Here's my first one.

The lesson? Your menu (whatever your menu is, and yes, you do have one) is at least as important as your beans or your bread or your spreadsheets. Not because I say so, but because your customers demand it.

What happens next?

After everyone is safely in the ambulance, the accident scene people (and the lawyers) show up. They bring cameras and tape measures and little devices that measure tread wear and stuff. All so they can prove what happened.

Of course, if three people see an accident, there are at least three descriptions of what really happened. It doesn't really matter what you can prove. What matters is the story I tell myself.

Smart lawyers win cases where the facts don't back them up. That's because smart lawyers know how to tell a story that people will want to believe. It's a story that makes a juror feel competent and ethical and satisfied. It's a story that has very little to do with the facts and a lot to do with the lies we insist on.

i think most marketers spend way too much time worrying about their version of the truth and not enough time be authentic and telling stories about what they're up to.