Romancing the Customer
May 2, 2011
For years marketing gurus preached the key to market growth success was a powerfully articulated sales argument (ASA). Come up with a pithy, compelling way to express what you do better than anyone else, and you will convince everyone they’d be crazy to take their business elsewhere. In other words, you build it, you spin it and they will come – one message to your universe of customers resulting in the ultimate payoff. Perhaps they called it an “argument” because it was meant to be confrontational and definitive. If you want this, then get it here. There’s no better place to get it.
Now Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae, and David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, are waving their arms wildly like flag men warning us away from a closed highway. Don’t even think about going down that road, they say, because there is nobody there.
The universal message is dead, and the road you paved to bring your customers to you is barricaded and fraught with potholes. Your customers are getting picked up in their homes by friendly one-to-one marketers who know more about their customers than you probably know about your closest cousin. And, if things weren’t bad enough, the new industry kings aren’t just kings of their industry; they are masters of the universe — your universe.
Falling in Love: Amazon doesn’t sell best-selling books. Well, they do, but they make more money selling hundreds of thousands of books most of us haven’t ever heard of and a bazillion other things you don’t even know yet that you can’t live without. How? They get to know you after you buy that one book you heard about on NPR, then they start digging into your psyche to create a profile around your likes and dislikes. For the first few months of your encounters, you’re dating. As time goes on, you find you are indeed quite smitten as they dazzle you with a host of products that appear to have been created especially for you. Now Amazon is your soul mate, and you are in love.
If the Shoe Fits: If your passion is shoes, you may have flirted with Zappos, and before long they’re moving from your feet all the way up your legs, your waist and beyond, outfitting you from head to toe. And while they’re at it, they’ll show you cookware to match your shoes and makeup that won’t smudge if you sweat wearing the running shoes you have to buy after you cook cheesecake in your new pan. So, what possible articulated sales argument could they come up with? They are selling you.
What they’ve got is an articulated sales agreement. (We marketers like to salvage our acronyms)The agreement is a commitment to love, honor and outfit you as long as you remain true to your profile. That means, you have to trust them enough to be honest about your likes and dislikes, needs and desires. That’s a pretty tall order. How do they earn your trust? One purchase at a time. One friend of yours at a time. They are twittered, facebooked, googled, binged, my-spaced, e-mailed and blogged by people you know or don’t know, but eventually might know.
It’s About Belonging: So now what? You can’t be Amazon or Zappos? Probably not. But you can be something else. What you can’t do, in the words of Seth Godin, is pour fudge on meatloaf and call it a sundae. Meaning, that you can’t take your existing product and business model and try to shove it thorough the online shopping window. What you can do is realign or even re-define your product or service and create a community around the needs and desires you believe you can fulfill. Amazon, Zappos and thousands of other companies who have engineered marketing success with the online generation have masterfully tapped into the top three tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: problem solving and acceptance, esteem and respect by others, and belonging. It’s not easy, but it’s simple.
Next time: How to Make Maslow Marketing work for you.
