How your customer’s world view changes everything!

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”
Seth Godin

When we try and sell a service, a product or an idea, there’s a sure way of making sure that the idea we want to get across actually hits home. It’s a way to overcome cognitive bias by using framing

Let me explain,

when you offer a vegan burger to a meat eater they are going to put up resistance, they will say I’m not vegan, I’m not into that kind of thing, and you are going to lose the sale.

Now imagine that you don’t call it ‘The Vegan Burger’ but instead ‘The alternative burger’, the responses you get will be different.

It might be ”it sounds too weird”, or it might be ”whats ‘The Alternative Burger’ it sounds cool” so straight away you filter out those who see them selfs as alternative free thinking, both vegan and meat-eaters.

Now try calling it ‘The Healthy Burger’ again you will get some people who see them self as healthy and some who want to be identified as healthy, and you will lose those who see burgers as a treat and identify anything healthy as negative.

So do you see the point when the same burger is framed in different ways you attracted different customers with different worldviews who all seek the to create a world that conforms to their beliefs.

Now in the example above the same people choose to either buy or not to buy the burger based on the story that surrounded the burger and how it made them feel it had nothing to do with the actual product!

This lesson is useful when trying to convince anyone of buying a product.

Because the lesson is –

We can’t sell a product that doesn’t conform to their viewpoint of the target audience.

Even if we try to educate them of the benefits,
studies show that the more people are shown information pointing out the benefits of something they don’t believe in the stronger that belief gets.

It’s not logical, but its undoubtedly right take conspiracy theorists for instance. They will listen to a youtube with no scientific background just some cool story (us against the world) over 1000 scientist every day of the week, and the same is real for selling any you ideas, products or services you might have.

Maybe you’re trying to convince your nan to eat vegan, and you’re showing her pics of animals being abused, but she was brought up on a farm and believes the story that animals are here to serve humans, so it’s making her viewpoint more determined.

Now try supposing she goes to the Dr who she has been taught to believe and respect and he says she needs to eat plant-based to reverse her diabetes!

Guess what, now you try offering her a plant-based meal plan in a beautiful cookbook with no abused animal pictures on it, and she’s going to be more than happy to join your supper club because now it fits in with her world view!

But how do you scale your product you don’t want to sell to your nan?

Well let us go back to the burger example, you might be thinking I don’t want to market my vegan burger to meat eaters or healthy eaters because it’s neither and that would be a lie.

It might be a burger designed for students after the pub and that is just fine, making sure you understand their worldview (cool and different from mainstream society ) is the key.

So you call it the Frisky Burger and students buy it.

And IF you ensure that it’s also a great tasting burger, those vegan students will tell the meat-eating students who will tell their outside of university friends etc. and before you know it, you are selling a lot of trendy vegan burgers to a whole bunch of people from different walks of life with entirely different worldviews.

Make me care. Please. Emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care.”
Andrew Stanton