Do You Really Know What You Are Selling?
Reaching the Highest Level of the Marketing Hierarchy
What are you really selling?
This is the most fundamental question in business and one that most people get wrong all the time including marketing professors.
Selling a Product
Those who have not even taken a marketing class will tell you they are selling a product or service. If they are selling a toaster they will try to sell it on all the features that this toaster offers. If they are selling accounting services they will showcase the skills of their accountants and their deep breadth of knowledge.
But anyone who has had some exposure to marketing will tell you that is categorically wrong. They will tell you that an effective marketing strategy does not sell a product or service. An effective marketing strategy sells a solution to a problem.
Selling a Solution
The reason many tech companies fail is because they get hung up on selling cool features and designs without considering why anyone would want them. Engineers are so taken by impressive technical feats that they assume that everyone else will share their enthusiasm. This is why we have a number of complex blockchain companies that have no market because no one other than the engineers really understand their purpose.
Whereas a product designer is product facing, a marketer should be people facing and ask what problems are being resolved for a group of customers.
This is why virtually every startup slide deck starts with a slide describing the problem, then a slide with the solution, and only then explains how the product achieves this solution.
Selling the solution rather than the product is certainly a step in the right direction but it is not what really makes a marketing campaign great.
Merely selling a solution does not allow a company to differentiate itself. Every plumber in a city is selling the same solution: a fixed sink. The real giants of marketing go beyond this to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Selling a World
Headphone manufacturers sell a better way to listen to music. Beats is different in that it is selling an identity. By being associated with Dr. Dre, Beats are informing customers that their product will allow them to identify as part of hip hop culture. The quality of the headphones is less relevant than what owning the headphones says about the person wearing them.
Identity is defined as the attributes that a person needs to be part of a group. Lifestyle is the series of actions taken by someone in furtherance of their identity. But in both cases you are selling a world beyond the product itself, a world that has its own culture and values.
Let’s take a country club as a example:
At the product level a country club is a place to play golf, tennis, and cards.
At the solution level a country club is an answer to the problem of a stressful work life with little opportunity to develop community of like minded individuals.
At the identity level a country club is how someone can communicate that they are wealthy and traditional. The country club lifestyle of sipping Martinis after a round of golf are the actions one can take to reinforce the desired identity.
Don Draper from the TV show Mad Men was a superior ad executive because he understands the principle that you are selling a world beyond the product itself. This allows a company to transcend from being merely a solution to being a brand.
But there is a level of marketing beyond this and this is really what I want to talk about in this article. Any company that adopts solution marketing is on the right track and those that adopt world marketing are at another level. But very few understand the apogee of marketing.
Selling an Emotion
The reason humans take any action is ultimately because of how the action makes them feel. We try to maximize positive feelings and minimize negative feelings. That is pretty much life.
Every product or service we purchase is because we believe it will make us feel a certain way. We buy a luxury car because we like the feeling of comfort. But we also buy it because we like the feeling of being special or superior. So every solution we seek as well as every identity is in pursuit of an emotion.
Even feelings that may be unpleasant in the moment, such as working sleepless nights to complete a project, are really aiming for a more favorable feeling down the line, such as feeling meaningful and accomplished.
So the really perceptive marketers look beyond product, solutions and identity to the underlying emotions that those things offer. They are the base layer that everything else is built upon.
Every marketer needs to peel away the layers of the onions until they get to the emotions that customers are really seeking when they purchase a given product. To do this we need to understand what creates an emotion and how each emotion is different from another.
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Emotions Deconstructed
An emotion can be defined by the following equation:
Emotion = Sensation + Story
Try the following experiment: Consider a time that you felt scared. You may have been in an airplane that was experiencing strong turbulence. The physical sensations you felt probably included an elevated heart rate, heightened awareness, and dilated pupils from increased adrenaline as well as a rise in cortisol that made your muscles jittery.
Now imagine that you were feeling these same sensations but without any context. You are not on a turbulent flight but sitting on your couch yet you feel the exact same symptoms. Since there is no story associated with this feeling all you have is sensation. These very same sensations may be perceived completely differently when associated with an alternative story.
In this example the story that co-exists with the sensation is that you are 30,000 feet in the air in an aluminum tube that is shaking violently. But if the story was that you were getting married you would associate those sensations with excitement instead of fear.
The purpose of this experiment is to show that stories are a very important part of defining emotions. Since marketers can manipulate stories easier than physical sensations, this is the tool they can use to elicit a specific emotion.
Stories can initiate ignite specific sensations out of thin air. We experience this every time we watch a well made film. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that art is stories that trigger sensations.
All the hormones and neural connections required to generate any sensation already exist in our bodies at all times. But a given sensation is not initiated unless the appropriate code is entered and that code is a story.
When someone falls in love they feel a unique sensation as various hormones and neural pathways combine to form a specific harmony. All those hormones and neurons were already in your body the day before you met that special person. But it is the story that created a “password” of neural connections that triggered the sensations.
Marketing Alchemy
Just as an alchemist makes gold from lead, a marketing alchemist creates emotions from stories.
When developing a marketing strategy the question you need to ask is: What story would be most effective at triggering the desired sensation you want to deliver? In this respect the marketer is an artist trying to elicit a feeling from a story.
The objective is to find a customized story that will unleash the desired emotional response. Targeting general emotions like joy, pride, or excitement is not specific enough and will not draw the association between what is being sold and how the customer feels. However, a first step in narrowing down the ideal story is to determine the overall category of emotions that are the best fit. We can break this up into three categories.
Identify the Emotional Category
There are many emotions but positive emotions usually fall into one of these broad categories:
Pleasure: This how we feel when we eat something delicious, engage with someone we’re attracted to, or experience an exhilarating event. The neurotransmitter most closely associated with pleasure is dopamine and we are usually seeking a short term gratification when pursuing this feeling.
Purpose: This feeling is generated when we have a sense of accomplishment and meaning. Serotonin is usually associated with this emotion. We pursue a purpose even though it might result in unpleasant experiences in the short term. Unlike pleasure, purpose is an emotion that plays the long game.
Community: We enjoy a sense of community when in the company of people that make us feel safe, valued, and relevant. Our community can include family, friends, partners in a common endeavor, or a group with shared interests and values. Oxytocin is the hormone mostly associated with social interactions.
If you are selling a candy bar you are ultimately selling pleasure. An educational product is primarily selling purpose. A social club is mostly selling community.
But the majority of products and services are selling a hybrid of emotions. Our country club example from earlier attracts members by promoting pleasure (from playing games and enjoying luxury) as well as community (by playing those games with like minded people).
Find Tension in your Product
Our positive emotions do not exist in isolation. They come to life in contrast with an opposite emotion. The juxtaposition of the two creates tension followed by resolution. This dynamic is one the most powerful felt by humans. It’s in all our art, our personal relationships, and the challenges we undertake. In fact, most of our lives are a series of tensions followed by resolutions.
It is important to identify where tension and resolution exist within your product or service. Typically this brings us back to a lower level of the marketing hierarchy: the problem/solution duality. As we discussed earlier, the classic marketing approach is to consider how our product offers a solution to a problem. In fact what is happening is our product offers a resolution to a tension experienced by the customer.
How to Use Emotional Marketing
The importance of the top tier of marketing does not mean you should stop evaluating at the other tiers.
We should still consider the lower tiers in conjunction with a study of the emotions we want to create. By doing so we can check that our tiers 1, 2 and 3 strategies are on the right track.
Emotional marketing allows you to study your marketing strategy at the atomic level. It would be like reviewing code at the machine language level to ensure that it is sound throughout. Like a mathematical proof, emotional marketing allows you to validate the approach taken at the lower tiers of marketing.
Every product is really just a mind altering drug. An emotional marketing strategy ensures that your drug is potent and effective.
