Manizesto

Being able to understand both sides of a discussion is the key to developing strong, convincing arguments. If you only understand your point of view, you won’t change people’s minds. And that is true in marketing too.

So in that spirit, I’m going to try something new and different and hopefully innovative here on Manizesto. It’s called Point|Counterpoint. The premise is we’ll hear two different sides to a given marketing topic and see which argument holds the most water. I’ll do a few of these a month and see how it goes.

So stay tuned; and if you have any suggestions on topics to cover, please let me know via comments or at theman at manizesto dot com.

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I’ve noticed when you ask someone a question and the response the person gives back comes in a high-pitched tone, it means the person doesn’t believe what they’re telling you. The higher pitched the response, the more likely it is to not be true and vice versa.

“How was your weekend?”

“It was good.” (This sentence starts in a high pitched tone, then drops a little in tone toward the end). In this case, “It was good” should be understood as “It was NOT very good.”

If they just say “It was good,” flatly, then the person believes what they’re telling you, so it’s probably the truth.

When customers talk to you in a high-pitched tone, it means they themselves don’t believe what they’re saying. The phrase “Okay, sounds good” = “Hmm, that’s not as good as the other guys.”

Also, don’t let the high-tone come from you. Your customers, whether cognitively or not, will pick up on it. That high-pitched response won’t instill confidence or trust. Talk in a tone that portrays professionalism and self-assurance. There’s a reason news anchors talk the way they do.

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Photo by ora_mia

You’ve probably heard this Einstein quote before:

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Now apply it to your marketing.

With your financial goals, with your customer acquisition rates, with your efforts to outshine the competition, with your relationships with clients, with your marketing ratios and with your attempts at innovation, you will not succeed if you think you can keep doing the same old thing.

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My dear, feisty Grandmother Margaret knew a thing or two about incentives and revenge. She was an independent woman, living alone for more than a decade in her large tudor-style home in Idaho. The very thought of having to live in an assisted living center was so repugnant to her that she made sure everyone around her knew her wish and secretly planned revenge on anyone that dared defy said wish.

“I’ll never forgive you,” she would state matter-of-factly on the slightest hint at her kids worrying about her living alone.

Not until her passing did we find out how serious she was.

In her will she included a clause that if any or all of her children ever moved her into an assisted living center or retirement community, they were automatically written out of the will. Fortunately for her children, that never happened, but what a surprise it was to them to find that out! (incidentally, her lawyer said he had never seen such a request in a will in his 20+ career).

In a similar case, a recently deceased Doctor used a strong incentive in his will to his wife:

“[In his will,] Dr. Ivins wrote of his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered. But fearing that his wife, Diane, and their two children might not honor the request, he came up with a novel way to enforce his demand: threatening to make a bequest to an organization he knew his wife opposed, Planned Parenthood.

“If my remains are not cremated and my ashes are not scattered or spread on the ground, I give to Planned Parenthood of Maryland” $50,000, Dr. Ivins wrote in the will.”

With this incentive in place and known by his wife, he was cremated, of course.

Find out what motivates your customers, make sure you can add value, then test them out (I’d skip out on the hidden revenge part, however).

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