26
February
2020
What Are Your Customers So Scared Of?
Your business-to-business campaign clearly explains the advantages of your product. Your sales team has demonstrated the ease of operation, heuristic design and how it fits into your customer’s process. You’ve checked every box the decision maker needs to make an informed, rational, solid business decision.
Still … nothing.
Why does it take so long to make what you know is the obvious choice?
Sometimes as marketers we lose sight of who’s making the purchase decision … and how. Our target customer may be an owner, operations manager, a manufacturing VP, a design engineer or some other business decision-maker. These are professionals who can be counted on to evaluate benefits, lifetime cost and ROI, and they surely use these metrics to explain their choices in the board room.
But your customers are not just rational economic actors: They’re human beings. And people can’t help but make decisions with their emotions first.
In addition to your customers’ business needs, how will going with your offering affect her or him personally? There are some questions that never get asked out loud.
Sure, maybe it does everything you say, but am I going to have to fight with shipping to take advantage of all those features?
Is my family going to forget what I look like while we’re switching over?
Of course, it can be adjusted quickly and easily, but am I going to be taking calls from the production floor all weekend?
All the research in the world is no substitute for understanding your audience as real-live people. There’s a good chance your decision makers are worried about more than their business. They’re worried about their jobs.
And their lives.
If your marketing can answer the questions that never get asked out loud, you can win their hearts.
Their minds will follow.
19
February
2020
Of Boat Shows and Burning Man
Author:
Daniel Lally
Despite an era of digital connectivity and easy access to information, there’s still no substitute for real-life experience. We all want to see the elephant for ourselves.
Or the dual-outboard 900-horsepower pontoon boat as the case may be.
That’s what we saw a couple of weeks ago as our Client Renfro Productions raised the curtain on their new edition of the Ford Cincinnati Travel, Sports & Boat Show. A consumer show for outdoor enthusiasts presents the easy paradox of requiring attendees to be indoors and surrounded by tens of thousands of other people who also prefer solitude and open spaces.
And yet they came.
For 63 years now, this show has curated the top experts and equipment for fishing, hunting, boating, powersports, adventure travel and more from across North America. But just as important, it brings together enthusiasts, giving them the opportunity to share their knowledge, experiences and secrets.
Despite all the technology, people will always want to be around people like them. We are naturally attracted to others with a shared experience (family holiday gatherings excepted). That makes the crowds of other outdoor enthusiasts a feature.
Every year around Labor Day, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, tens of thousands of people who share a different sort of common identity come together to build a city that lasts only eight days. Artists, performers, self-expressionists, individualists and myriad other non-conformists travel hundreds or even thousands of miles just to spend a week with their own tribe. Most (ahem) of what they do in the desert could just as easily be done at home.
And yet they come.
To belong to something they feel a part of.
Like people do.