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Friday with Phil - ROE #21 Face the Facts

Some marketers believe you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. If a statement sounds good, they don’t care if it doesn’t really say anything of substance. Their job is to sell the sizzle and let someone else worry about the steak. Marketing is all about creative license; let the bean counters worry about the facts.

Rainmaking marketers believe otherwise. To them, facts constitute the backbone of a good story. Without them, stories are amorphous and blob-like. Facts provide stories with the ability to stand on their own and, in the process, transform puffery into profundity and drivel into differentiation.

Rainmaking marketers understand that you market emotionally but sell factually. Here’s the how and why.

A common theme woven throughout the “52 Rules of Engagement” is that people make purchase decisions based on emotional connections and how the product or service makes them feel (or how they anticipate the product or service will make them feel). Interestingly, however, people often rely on facts to help justify the purchase decision. Think of it as a form of rationalization. You fall in love with the redesigned Audi TT and have to have one. You love the way it looks and handles, and the way you feel when driving it. That’s the emotional connection. In addition, however, it gets great gas mileage for a sports car (so it’s environmentally correct), has all-wheel drive (so it’s safe), and even has a back seat (so it’s practical). You’ve now created a solid fact-based foundation to support your purchase decision. You’ve satisfied both your emotional and intellectual needs. All that’s left is to sign the paperwork.

As with all elements of communication, a hierarchy exists among facts. The more precise the fact; the more powerful its effect. Precision sells and engenders confidence. Whereas politicians are often faulted for being wishy-washy, it’s extremely rare that anyone would be called out for being too precise in their communications. Precision creates understanding and strong visualization. Say the word “car” and nothing in particular comes to mind. Say “Porsche” and distinct imagery immediately appears. Say “red Porsche Boxster” and you can be sure that you and your audience are seeing the exact same thing.

Facts also provide a context to help people understand a vague concept.

 

The Apple iPod, for example, comes in a 160-gigabyte version. On its own, a 160-gigabyte hard drive constitutes a fact; however to someone like me, it has little meaning. It sounds huge, and I assume I can load it up with every song I own. Besides its generic “hugeness,” I have no context for assessing how amazingly large the iPod hard drive is. Apple understands that and tells me the iPod can hold 40,000 songs. That’s a pretty good factoid in itself, but Apple goes one step further and tells me, I “could drive from New York to San Francisco twenty-five times and never hear the same song twice.” Now that’s huge. It’s also the kind of factual sound bite that captures people’s attention and sticks in their memory.

The best way to reap maximum benefit from factual statements is to provide a supporting visualization of the fact. Going back to the iPod example, 40,000 songs is a hard image to visualize, whereas a cross-country road trip is something most of us have daydreamed about. Words and pictures reinforce each other and make the resulting message extremely powerful. Canon perfectly exploits this approach with ads for their cameras and lenses. Canon positions itself as “the number one choice of professional sports photographers and photojournalists” and the “official camera of the NFL.” Whether by plan or luck, the telephoto lenses on Canon cameras are white rather than the traditional black of their competitors. As a result, instead of just stating the percentage of sports photographers that use Canon equipment, the ads depict actual photographers at work on the sidelines of actual games. These images show a sea of white lenses only rarely interrupted by a black lens. This visual is seen not just in Canon ads but is also repeated and reinforced every time the television camera captures a player scoring a touchdown or running out-of-bounds because, invariably, there’s a white-lens-sporting photographer right there to catch the action. Canon has created a situation whereby their paid advertising generates a ton of free advertising. And just as Nike has the swoosh logo that says Nike even when the name is not spelled out, Canon has the white lenses that reinforce its position as the camera of choice even when its name is nowhere to be seen.

The power of the iPod and Canon examples derives from specificity and precision. Unfortunately, most of the marketing we experience is of the “new and improved” variety (i.e., when you have nothing to say, say it pretty and say it loud). The AMC chain of movie theaters offers the perfect example. AMC expresses its competitive advantage via this tagline: “Experience the difference.” Despite the fact that AMC probably paid a brand consulting firm many thousands of dollars to develop this positioning, it would be hard to imagine a less engaging and less meaningful tagline. What’s truly sad, however, is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office lists eighty-eight other companies who have filed trademark applications for that very tagline or some slight variation. In addition to movie theaters, “Experience the difference” serves as a trademark for dental floss, jewelry stores, kitchen appliances, cut flowers, and wax candles. A tagline that can be used with so many different types of products cannot, by anyone’s definition, be unique or compelling. “Experience the difference”

cannot help people visualize the benefit of visiting the respective movie theater or buying from the candle maker. It is puffery at its worst. And it needn’t be that way. If any of these companies truly offer a distinguishing experience, they should tell the customer what the difference is. Don’t let them guess. Tell them. And by telling them, you create a more receptive mindset that will more quickly recognize and appreciate the difference. Coyness has no place in marketing. Coyness doesn’t sell. Facts sell.

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Phil Fragasso is the author of the engaging new book Marketing for Rainmakers: 52 Rules of Engagement to Attract and Retain Customers for Life, and a good friend.  Phil has over 25 years of marketing experience in high-tech and financial services, and now serves as President of I-Pension LLC, an innovative investment advisory firm. Prior to his current position, Phil was chief marketing officer for Rydex Investments and Columbia Funds.  His marketing career began in the computer industry working at Honeywell and Wang.  Here are links to Phils' web site and to his book on Amazon.com.

Posted August 22, 2008
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