With My Mind on My Money and My Money on My Mind
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Being a marketer essentially means you are a public persuader. It doesn’t matter what you are marketing. Buy this product, click this link, link to this blog, etc. You have a goal. To make your market take action, you must gently, but effectively persuade individuals, one by one.
According to The Persuaders, a PBS piece on marketing, the answer sometimes it is so deep that it’s simple. People are motivated for different reasons. To market your product, service, or brand to people, you need to find what motivates them to take the action you desire. A quick look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can give you an idea of different levels of needs that humans connect on. But this is just an abstract. A marketer can get much more human than philosophical graphical representations of our wants and needs.
By dealing with your end users on a primal level, you can evoke something much stronger than a quick hit desired action. You can create a cult of users loyal to your brand or your image, and you can persuade that market quite easily after they love you. Just think of the community surrounding Mac and Ipod etc. Think BMW, Mercedes, Ford. Think Coke, Mountain Dew, Rockstar. Think Guinness. Think of who consumes these products loyally, and the people they are associated with. That community might be a part of you, and can be tapped into.
Marketers often waste their time by dealing in the frontal lobe of their consumers, where complex thought takes place. Deduction, reasoning, doubt, affirmation, math- you can drive customers to buy on these points, but it takes a salesman to win an argument there. We are being marketed to so often that we’re becoming numb to the clutter. People are automatically suspicious of messages now.
Just ask a Digg user about SEO. “Red alert, spammers with bad intentions are infiltrating our community!” Ok so that one is partially true, but not entirely. Some of us are trying to break through the clutter, and by this process we are creating heaps and heaps of more useless garbage that clutter the web, the media, and the world.
Be primal. Be reptilian. Enter the reptilian buy button.
If you appeal to a user on a level that they WANT you to connect with, you have them at your beckoning call. If you are selling a luxury item, you need to unlock the code of luxury to find out what is truly motivating top dollar buyers to buy your product. Here’s a hint, it isn’t price for that one.
Again, think of what Maslow says drives a human. For a luxury item, it’s probably sexual intimacy, respect, esteem, security of the body or something else that is much deeper than complex thought. More than human, these needs are the same things that drive reptiles with their miniscule brains.
It is both easy and hard. It is simple, and complex. You need a mind shift. Think like a 5 year old alien kid who has never been on Planet Earth for a second. Think like your kids. Now think about your product, your company, your blog, etc. How can you be driven to take action?
You can’t convince a kid to click your ad with well thought out text, but you might with an image that they connect with. Instant gratification is not always the key here, but often is. If you hit them with a primal, instinctive emotion, they may connect with you deeper than just the initial click. They make fall in love with your brand, your image, or your culture and you might have just convince a new person to join your cult and buy every new product you launch.
That’s the Reptilian Buy Button. You press it once, and you might have a customer, reader, follower, or a fan for life.
Tags: Advertising, Apple, BMW, Coke, Ford, Ipod, Mac, Mercedes, Mountain-Dew, Reptilian-Buy-Button, Reptilian-Hot-Button, Rockstar
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Leave YOUR Comments!
danimal Says:
January 5th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
you may consider asking female users “do you respond to alpha male-ism” just kiddin. nice post, and i hear the mammal part of the brain is where all our emotions are. brains are a trip
Abhilash Says:
January 7th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Right on, Chris. I have just one question. Let’s just say I wanted to…
“Think like a 5 year old alien kid who has never been on Planet Earth for a second.”
How do I begin? In other words, what are the best ways to get into the minds of the audience? Just trying to flush it out a bit more…
Keep on rockin homie.
Chris Hooley Says:
January 7th, 2007 at 2:26 am
What I mean there is think as if you had no social bias… no idea what was going on. Think primal. Think what really drives you. Flashing lights or loud noises might scare you. Warmth might attract you. Calm voices and soothing images might lull you. If you have ever seen “The 5th Element”, that girl with the red hair is a great example of what I mean. You can see that she is driven on a very primal level… not thinking, just acting on what makes sense.
It is kinda hard to “Think like a 5 year old alien kid who has never been on Planet Earth for a second.” because we are all human and we all think. When you don’t think at all, you can only act on pure primal urges. If you connect with others on a level that’s so primal, you connect very deeply, and strike a nerve and might make a lifelong fan.
You probably connected with a girlfriend or wife on a very PRIMAL level a few times (lol), which made you both loyal and devoted to each other to some extent. This probably made you think differently about her. The urge you each satisfied in each other is reptilian, and your reaction to the experience(s) shared became something deeper.
I am not suggesting that you go out and try to have sex with each person you are marketing to, but instead to try and find ways to connect on a deep level with an audience subset. These connections are what make lifelong fans, if you continue to hit that reptilian hot button that quenches their inner desire, you got em. Often that desire is acceptance, which is probably why social media works so well.
Does that make sense or am I all over the place here?
SnoopBlawg Says:
January 7th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
“I am not suggesting that you go out and try to have sex with each person you are marketing to”…there goes my plan. DOH! J/K. Nice Post Chrizzy!
Pete Wailes Says:
January 8th, 2007 at 3:26 am
I’ve spent a long time trying to bash this into people’s heads to make them write better copy. :)
Laura Alter Says:
January 8th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Hey Chris!
Y’know, this is really good! It’s funny, because I wouldn’t peg you as a writer after first meeting you, but your blog has been great. Keep it up. :)
BTW, I totally agree and I am sure that I lose sight of this a lot. Thanks for the reminder.
Laura
David Wilkinson Says:
January 10th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Well… I’m a 12-year old alien kid. That count?
And to set the record straight, any advert about money-making will appeal to kids of all ages. Just lead them to a page full of CPC ads, with a message at the top saying ‘Click 10 and I’ll give you a gazillion dollars’.
It works. ;)
Techn0tic Says:
January 11th, 2007 at 6:26 am
You inspired me to set up an experiment to compare the compulsive clickability of different button designs. I’ll let you know when it’s done.
Antman Says:
January 11th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Great Post! People are selfishly motivated. It is where that motivation falls that makes us all different and cre8s the challenge to marketers. I would submit that the secondary challenge many folks miss is the link between their effort to cre8 a reptilian buy button and cre8 a reptilian buy “product or service”. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Getting the product right is core to the message they are not separate. Nice post Hooley, I love that name! Thanks!!!!
Brian Clark Says:
January 22nd, 2007 at 7:55 pm
>>You inspired me to set up an experiment to compare the compulsive clickability of different button designs.
I’m thinking you’re being a tad literal here. :)
Great article Chris.
Chris Hooley Says:
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Thanks Brian and Antman :-)
Techn0tic Says:
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:43 am
>>I’m thinking you’re being a tad literal here. :)
I know it’s not the jist of the article, It just inspired me to create something. Now that I’m working on it I’ve decided to put more effort in and make a fairly generic comparison engine to gather data on stuff like this.