There’s an old saying and I don’t know where it came from and I’ll probably quote it wrong. It’s a piece of advice about how to structure speeches. It goes something like this:
First, tell them what you’re going to tell them.
Then, tell them.
Then, tell them what you’ve told them.
You could paraphrase the above as: always assume your audience isn’t paying attention.
I think it’s pretty good advice, whether you’re giving a speech or marketing a product. Even when they’re looking right at you, people’s thoughts are often far, far away – as far away as Mars is from Earth. If you send out just one probe, it might get lost in space, or burn up in the atmosphere, or crash in the mountains. Better to send out two or three probes and hope one makes it to the surface safely.
Sadly, a marketing career based on repetition, repetition, and more repetition can get a little…well, repetitive. As one of those fancy-schmancy tea-drinking corduroy-wearing “creative” types, I get bored with writing assignments that merely require me to rearrange last week’s sales pitch. Haven’t I explained StepRep often enough? Can’t I move on to something different?
This week I’ve had a few “rearrangement” assignments sitting on my desk, and I’ve been having a hard time getting into them. I’ve been trying to come up with a different angle. A friend of mine called up and left me a voicemail where he outlined an analogy he thought I could use. I’ve paraphrased him quite a bit, but here’s what my friend had to say:
Remember the popular girl in high school? It didn’t matter what she did – it didn’t matter how boring her life was – people couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend, or crashed her car. Maybe she just chipped a nail. Somehow, whatever she did, no matter how mundane, word got around. She was at the center of the conversation. People flocked around her.
Meanwhile, the uncool kids wandered the corridors, feeling invisible and isolated. Their tastes were a little more obscure – they were into opera, or poetry, or model trains. Without hangers-on to gossip about them and spread the word about what they were doing, it was difficult for the opera buffs and the poets and the model train enthusiasts to connect with one another.
What the popular girl had, what the unpopular kids lacked, was brand name recognition. In effect, gossip did for the popular girl what billboards and TV ads do for Coke: made her ubiquitous. If you’ve got an appetite for a soft drink, the word Coke is never far from the front of your mind. Maybe if you stopped to think about it, you’d decide that you’d much prefer a bottle of Boot Hill Sassparilla. But you don’t stop think about it. The waitress asks you what you’d like, and you name the first drink that comes to mind, and Coke is it.
Now, ubiquity is not something that can be acquired on the cheap. Coca-Cola spends a fortune keeping its brand in the public eye. But you probably don’t want to be Coca-Cola. You’re content to be Boot Hill Sassparilla – provided that the people who like sarsaparilla know where to find you.
StepRep can’t make sarsaparilla as famous as Coca-Cola. But if you’re a sarsaparilla maker, you can use StepRep to help ensure that people see your brand when they’re searching for sarsaparilla.
StepRep can’t make poets as popular as cheerleaders. But if you’re a high school poet, you can use StepRep to help build your brand name recognition within that small circle of high school poetry fans.
There! That’s a pitch I haven’t tried before.
I feel refreshed.
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PS. I tried Boot Hill Sassparilla on a visit to Santa Fe a few years back, and thought it was pretty good. I think it’s local to the southwest – you can’t get it where I live. I hope they’re still making the stuff.
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