Sermon From the Mount

I think Seth Godin is a heck of a bright fellow and I especially admire him when he expresses (beautifully) ideas that align with Drumcircle’s worldview.

For example, in his blog today, entitled Facts always win, right?, he writes about how marketers, especially B2B marketers, are far too prone to rely on facts as reasons people should buy their products.

Young man, your presentation on 3/8-inch, high-capacity chisel point staples interested me. But it didn't move me.

Says Seth:

“If you’re selling a business to business service and you can prove that it’s better, that it delivers more value, that it’s cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn’t that mean you will close every sale?”

Of course, we all know it doesn’t work that way. Nobody closes every sale. And there are dozens of fat books and scholarly papers on neuroscience, decision-making and marketing that explain why: they’ll never admit it, they’ll probably never even know it, but even the most spreadsheet-obsessed, abacus-wielding, thy-Likert-scale-guideth-and comforteth-me businessperson will still always buy what feels right rather than what - at least according to the manufacturer - is right (a more neuroscientifically accurate way to say it is that we buy what feels right, then convince ourselves that it is right by looking to all those facts).

The truth is, building a sales pitch solely on facts and product attributes is risky. After all, a competitor can drop prices, introduce a more durable product, incorporate a secret ingredient or win some important industry award. Suddenly you’re in a facts arms race. Suddenly, you’re working hard to “out-fact” your competitors instead of outsell them.

Without even knowing it, Seth Godin captures in four paragraphs the potency of what Drumcircle calls Message Architecture™. It’s an important part of how we help clients move from feature/function/fact-driven, transactional marketing to connection-driven, Emotivational™ marketing.

Stick to the facts. Just stick them on the bottom.

Message Architecture isn't advertising copy, but it has been known to inspire more emotionally engaging advertising copy (click the picture for a larger view)

In almost every Drumcircle engagement there’s a session called an Emotivation Workshop. In these half-day sessions, we work together with our clients (and anyone else they’d like to include) to craft a new, more effective Message Architecture for their products or brands.

These new messages are always constructed from the bottom up, in three linguistic “stories”, like the illustration on the left (click it for a version you can actually read).

As with any good structure, Message Architecture has to be built on a firm foundation. In this case, it’s all the facts and features that make what we’re selling great: we’ve got the biggest, fastest, oldest, newest, freshest, lightest, heaviest, you get the picture.

Continuing the architectural analogy, the middle story is where the work gets done. It’s where we elaborate on the benefits customers derive from all those great features and facts in the first layer.

The top layer is derived from a unique, emotional insight discovered during the course of the project. This insight is the answer to the question “what, exactly, does right feel like?”

Whether our client is selling baby shoes, copier paper or auto service, there’s always an emotional need within the potential purchaser that goes much deeper than shoes, paper or an oil change. The closer we can come to acknowledging and filling that need, the more right our offering will feel.

This is how we’ll out-connect, out motivate and outsell competitors.

This is where we’ll demonstrate that We Understand the deep, emotional need.

This is where we’ll make our offering feel right (if our assignment is to help develop a new product concept, we’ll work together to design the new product so that every aspect of it, from components to packaging to promotion, not only feels right, but is right).

We don’t have feelings about facts. We accept the facts that fit our feelings.

It’s important to keep in mind that, while Message Architecture is built from the bottom up, people perceive and react to it from the top down. We Understand makes people look (“Why, they’re speaking directly to me…), We Can Do Great Things For You makes them pay attention (…and they’re telling me things that benefit me, personally) and, finally, We’re Great gives them reason to believe (I knew I was right to look and listen, after all, look how great these people are!).

Facts, features and functions are important parts of marketing communication. But in Message Architecture and in human psychology, they come dead last in the process of making a sale. And that’s good. Because, if some competitor comes in and cuts your facts out from under you, but you’ve done a good job convincing people that you understand and are doing great things for them, that powerful, emotional connection can buy you some time to build yourself some new facts (if you find you even still need them).