“It will cost us $1000 to reach 200,000 people.”

“It will take 6 weeks for us to prefect our customer service and get it right.”

“I like the ad, the tagline has a nice ring to it and it’s designed in a way that represent’s our brand.”

“We have been using this tagline for over 20 years and its what we have been doing.”

But then you must ask: “What does the customer get out of this?”

The promise in marketing are the expectations.

It’s about uncertainty and the unknown. It’s about not knowing entirely whats on the other side until you try it.

It’s about having beliefs beforehand about how something will be or go without actually experiencing it yet.

It’s the framing of something in your mind before it happens to you.

The question of promise, what it does, is it ties the question of “Who’s it for?” and “What change are we making?” together and meets that person where they are at.

It allows you to ask yourself the question: Does my product or service line up with the promise I am making and does it line up with the expectations that have been set in their mind.

Because if there is not an alignment between all of these factors, the promise has failed.

When energies are raised you can either create an aspirational type of energy or an energy that solely energizes.

Aspirational is when the customer feels they need your product to maintain an identity or status.

One that is not primarily aspirational is one the customer rather enjoys but doesn’t feel the tension from identity and status as much.

These are subtle differences but energy knowing these types of differences is what allows you to create brand clarity.

All brands have different types of energies or personalities.

Some are fast and loud, while others are slow and quite.

Some are cost effective and practical, while others are expensive and lavish.

These are the energies of your brand and you need to be aware of them.

The brand energies should work together to raise your customers energy, not take away from it.

Generic marketing doesn’t work anymore.

What’s generic marketing? Marketing I have seen before. Marketing that follows a stereotype.

Simply to many people copy each other in marketing and it leads to mediocrity.

It doesn’t mean you can’t pull from and use ideas that have come before but when it reaches that person it needs to connect with them on the specific level, not the generic level.

The lineup outside the club.

Or maybe it’s the lineup outside a store.

What does the lineup say? Well it depends on the lineup.

Lineups, always are a version of status but it depends on who are in the lineup, the size of the line, how long the line is and what the lineup is for.

If the lineup is for the Apples store new release, they would fall under the category of an early adopter of the mass (yes I know it’s ironic).

If the lineup is mall and for the Louis Vuitton store, then it is exclusive, not early adopter mass.

Each lineup, indicates status to other people and a story in our head about what we stand for.

Through listening and talking one and one with customers, something becomes clear.

They are not customers, they are humans.

They are people with fears, dreams, desires, successes and failures – just like you, they are just a different set.

We over complicate marketing by trying to create a model to understand customers, when really its about understanding how to be human and how to share an experience with someone else through communication.

Marketers have a tendency to want to develop custom solutions, when what is needed is not custom but effectiveness.

Many great brands, people and ideas have gone before us and we can use these are “pieces” for what we are doing today.

Human needs, wants, desires and fears don’t change. What changes is the way we present solving these emotions and how we solve them.

I would spend a lot of my marketing career building custom landing pages, when what all was needed was a simple templated solution.

All it needed to do was not be custom but to remind the person I was influencing of something – and those are two different things.

The thing with custom marketing is that it usually isn’t the effective kind of custom, which is empathetic customization but rather is egocentric customization.

I went to a local burger restaurant today and I noticed something interesting. Not only did the waitress start off by asking me for drinks but when she placed the menu on the table, it was on the drinks page already.

It’s a subtle thing but that’s what marketing is all about. It’s about framing things in a way that makes you think about getting a drink when you never really wanted one.

I enjoy going to restaurants because it is a microcosm for a lot of great marketing insights and ideas. They are constantly doing these subtle things to point people towards a change the restaurant would like to make.

What are you doing to point people towards the change you want to make?

Knock knock.
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You are probably waiting for me to type “who’s there?” because we have been trained to do. In fact, we have been trained to do a lot of things off of initial stimulus like this.
In marketing, we can put in things to an experience to get people to take predictable responses, we just have to understand what stimulus will cause these responses.