Marketing in Troubled Times: Selling Freedom

If you are reading this blog, you’re shackled by something. (Well, either that or I stole your boyfriend in high school and you Googled me hoping I got really fat.) Pretty much anyone above the age of 17 is not free, and most of the people under 17 aren’t either. You are bound and tied.

There are the usual suspects. Kids, for example, never go away. You’re committed to them for life. Spouses are hard to get rid of. You’re not quite so committed to them — you can stop being married any time — but divorce ain’t exactly something you do between your manicure and your lunch date. Jobs and small businesses take a fair degree of commitment. Then there’s the mortgage.

Then you have the computer you bought on credit. The four months left in your gym membership. The car. The gas. The Friday night with the guys or girls that you can’t really miss even when you want to. You bake cookies every third Thursday for your kindergartner’s classroom snack.

Your mother needs to be driven for a B12 shot on Tuesday afternoons and even if you’re not the one doing the driving, you ARE the one who has to listen to her every Tuesday night about the riveting adventure. Three kids in your child’s class have peanut allergies, so you are committed to not killing them with your child’s granola bar. Ballet classes. New karate uniform. Cable guy coming between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

Is it any wonder we miss being young and free?

You don’t think about it too much because if you did you’d kill yourself. But every now and again you look around at wherever it is you’ve ended up and say, “This is not what I was promised. How the FUCK did I get here?”

When I was a teenager, I imagined what my twenties would be like. I don’t really remember what I imagined because I spent my late teens in a state of drunken avoidance occasionally punctuated by bouts of pregnancy. But I certainly didn’t think it would be this.

I bought a chakra CD recently because I have been spending far too much time with the Havinator, and I had Jamie put it on the iPod I don’t really know how to use. As I was fumbling through the albums, I came to a CD I used to love when I was in my teens. (Garth Brooks Double Live, if you’re interested. And shut up. I don’t want to hear it.) I figured I’d give it a play. You know, for old times’ sake.

Nothing that precedes the words “for old times’ sake” is EVER a good idea.

Two minutes in and I’m crying like a hooker in rehab, bleating “But where did all the FUN go?”

I’m thinking about the times I used to drag the nearest unsuitable companion, dress myself up like the aforementioned hooker, and go dancing until we puked.

I’m thinking about the time we drank so much Jack Daniel’s between recycling days that we decided that instead of recycling them, we should make a piece of furniture out of them.

I’m thinking of the time I got dropped in the mosh pit and lost consciousness and when I came to I was surrounded by bright white lights and half a dozen good looking guys reaching down to pick me up and really and truly thinking I had actually died and this was what heaven was like.

I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how lonely and broke I was, but if I’m honest with myself, I’ll remember that I wanted money so fucking much. I thought money would solve all of my problems. I thought I could have whatever I wanted.

Now I have plenty of money, and I know there’s a lot more where that came from. I don’t have a lot of doubt that I can lay my hands on pretty much whatever I want within a reasonable timeframe. My teenage dream come true, albeit a slightly bastardized version of it.

So yeah, for all practical purposes, I can buy whatever I want. But can I ever get that freedom back?

Probably not, but I’ll pay whatever it costs for the chance to try, and I’m only 27. I can’t imagine what I’ll be willing to pay in 30 years.

Do you sell something that can be translated into freedom?

Freedom has a lot of potential connotations, although it is primarily associated with youth or lack of association. We think back to our youth and remember it as a time of freedom. We think ahead to our future, envisioning a time of freedom. Of course, back then we didn’t feel free, and up ahead we won’t feel free, but such is the human brain. As far as the human brain is concerned, the only time we’re not free is now.

Here are some examples. Use them to think about their implications for your own business.

There is a new pole dancing studio near me. They’re selling fitness and they’re not doing a great job of it. Could they sell me sexual freedom?

There is a very long stretch of time between first pregnancy morning sickness and getting so old you don’t give a shit about sex anymore. There are decades there. And in those decades, women who love their husbands are lamenting a loss. They feel like they will never pleasantly surprise their partners again. We don’t realize how much ego we get out of blowing his mind. But past baby number one, you’re really not going to surprise him with much. He knows all your tricks.

So instead of fitness, what about the promise of pleasant surprise, lust, and admiration? The knowledge that my husband is damn glad he picked me? The awareness that my husband is the luckiest man in the world and he knows it? Send me to the gym and I’ll complain even if you’re paying ME to go. Send me back to when we were first dating and I’ll pay $30 a class without batting an eye.

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My husband couldn’t choose between the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. For all intents and purposes, there was no perceivable difference. Their marketing, while not the same, had the same effect on the market. They were competing on features, maybe benefits, but neither was provoking an emotional reaction.

Instead of selling him on the size of their hard drive, could one of them have sold him the summer he was 12? Could their ads have shown two grown men, clearly brothers, lying on the floor beside a box of Froot Loops, controllers in their hands, engaged in fierce virtual battle?

Could they bring him back to a time when the mortgage, the economy, the death of a loved one, none of them were his problem? They were just magically taken care of and his only concern was whether his mom would find out that he’d eaten the last of the cereal?

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In the internet marketing industry, everybody wants to sell you freedom from paid employment. Show me an internet marketer’s sales page and I’ll show you more yachts than you’ll see at a marina on Labor day. That’s the rallying cry of my industry and people are virtually immune to it from people like me now. But if you offer a different service, they’re not immune to it from you.

As a web entrepreneur, there are a lot of things I’m going to need to succeed. Web designer. Copywriter. Graphic artist. Accountant. Can you, as a service provider, sell me on telling my boss where to go? Can you position your services as that one thing that will make it possible? Can you sell me the promise of waking up at ten in the morning every day for the rest of my life?

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In order to sell freedom, or any of the other emotions we’ll cover, you have to imagine. You have to think. No, scratch that. You have to feel. You need to get in the bath or go to the coffee shop and completely remove distractions. You need to go deep inside your own emotional reservoir and ask yourself, “What stories can I tell? What can I evoke?”

Conjure up your own experiences with feeling this feeling. In this case, think of the times you’ve felt free. Think of what it was like. What did it smell like? Where were you? Who was there with you?

What were the defining characteristics of that situation? (The cereal box in the game console example is a defining characteristic.) What were the symbols associated with those feelings? What are the metaphors?

Go deeper than the things you see in regular marketing. Financial freedom ads always show a fifty-something guy in a hammock, and fifty-something guys are immune to those evocations now. What do you think they’re NOT immune to?

Tomorrow we’ll talk about selling power.

By Naomi Dunford