Jun
23
Specificity and the Fine Art of Being Wrong
On our drive to and from the nanny’s, there’s one of those signs with the sliding letters. (It’s the same sign we talked about in the great Just Because It’s Lame Doesn’t Make It Stupid incident of 2009.) The owner of the sign is a herbal weight loss place — one of those joints where you consume 800 calories and 43 herbal pills a day to lose weight. Like gyms, these guys don’t sell products, they sell memberships.
Memberships are notoriously difficult things to sell.
For a certain buyer — one who hearts you more than life itself and thinks about you all the time and talks about your products to everyone they can pin down long enough to listen — memberships are AWESOME. Tragically, there aren’t many of those buyers out there. For the rest of us, memberships equal commitment and in our mind, commitment equals bad.
Anyway, for several weeks, the sign has read something like, “Summer special 2 for 1″. I don’t remember the words — they were pretty unmemorable — but the key here is 2 for 1. Buy one, get another one for nuthin’.
Then they changed the sign. (Maybe the Wow! guy started reading this fine blog and learned about split testing.) Now the sign says:
“Ladies! Join today and your man joins free!”
This is the Chuck Norris of signs. (Well, relatively speaking.) It kicks the other sign’s ass all the way around the parking lot. There are a few reasons. “Join today” is an actual call to action, which is nice. (As opposed to just saying that memberships are 2 for 1 which is a simple statement of fairly banal fact.) It also says “free” which still pulls its weight as an attention getter.
But the thing I like most is the specificity.
It’s telling a woman she can bring her man. Not her mother. Not her roommate. Not some gal from college who she has to call out of the blue saying, “Hey! I’m fat! So are you! Wanna go halvsies on a Herbal One membership?”
Nope. Her man.
Most people shy away from this kind of specific offer because they’re afraid it limits their audience. (In this case, to women who feel fat with significant male others who also feel fat, both of whom have considered, or at least heard of, Herbal One.) Small niche, right? WRONG.
Because language and psychology don’t work that way.
See, our mind has a handful of words, phrases and images that it has trained itself to ignore. We become numb to them. It’s like ad blindness. (Ever seen a tagline that reads “Quality business solutions”? Remember what the company was? Didn’t think so.)
We see 2 for 1 and we ignore it because we’ve seen it so many times and in so many different contexts, we have to ignore it. (This is the same psychological process that makes us virtually unconscious of how we drive a car. If we actually paid attention to everything, we’d be so intellectually drained, we’d sleep 22 hours a day.) We cannot pay attention to everything, so we tune you out.
When Herbal One specifically says your man joins free, your brain is forced to think. Do I have a man? Is he fat? Am I fat? Are we Herbal One people? What if I don’t want to bring my man? Could I bring my friend instead? Surely it doesn’t have to be a guy? Nah, it’s probably just the line they’re using. I could just ask if I could bring my friend. Yeah, I’m sure that’d be fine.
It’s a largely subconscious process, but it’s a process.
The people at Herbal One KNOW you’re probably not going to buy today. You probably weren’t going to buy today no matter what they put on their sign. What you are going to do today is THINK. About THEM. You are not going to tune them out. You can’t buy that kind of attention.
(Bonus tip on how to apply this: next time you have a sale, use a weird number. 22% off. 2.5 for 1. Sale ends tonight at 11:51 pm. Force people to think.)
I’ve seen people do the weird percentage numbers off for sale and thought it was kind of strange, but you’re right, it does actually force you to stop and think about it for a minute. And that’s a minute longer than you might have been thinking about that company and its products otherwise. I’ll have to test this out sometime soon.
Hi Naomi, love your Ittybiz and love this blog. I’ve been a reader for about 3 months and I’ve also purchased your How to Launch the Stuff Out of Your Ebook course. Love it. Working on it. Applying it.
So here is my first post on this blog, and yippee, I’m here. Give me a big virtual hug and kiss and call me cool. Back atcha.
This is what I take out of today’s blog post — specificity is good. Bland is bad. I can remember that.
And also to substitute tired and used up sayings like “2 for 1″ for something more creative even if our first intuition might tell us the ad speaks to too small a niche.
Cool, thanks.
Two thoughts:
- We, as humans, are (generally) astonishingly good at pattern recognition. (There are, of course, exceptions; one of my dearest friends suffers from mild prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces; but that’s beside the point.) It’s one of the reasons why the famous “Cambridge” text-scrambling experiment works: our bainrs can mkae snsee out of sgthaptei bcuasee we can rnoezcige the pnetatrs. (I may try that with my next mailing-list email and see how many people unsubscribe in annoyance. ;)
As consumers, we benefit from this: our brains really, really like sorting patterns, and so as soon as we see something that matches a pattern we know, our brain says “oh, I know that one!” and files it away in the That One box. This is good news because it means that we can pay attention to the important stuff instead of the stuff we’ve seen a billion times before.
As marketers, this is bad: we have to find ways to advertise that don’t fall into the That One box, because otherwise people are just going to drive on by, content because their brain is doing its job.
This is half of why you have a swipe file – both because the really good stuff works, and because you can avoid the standard stuff.
- This is not to say that you should get too out there with your pattern breaking. Avant-garde only works for the general public when it goes so far out on the Ridiculous end that it actually comes back around to Acceptable. (See: Googie architecture, Lady Gaga – wait, I’m sensing a theme.)
TL,DR: Great post, Naomi. :)
I think in order for the “Cambridge” experiment to work, the first and last letters have to be correct – that’s the pattern we look for. In your example: “our bainrs can mkae snsee out of sgthaptei bcuasee we can rnoezcige the pnetatrs” I blanked completely on sgthaptei but the rest is fine.
We’re not only good at recognising patterns, we’re very very good at “connecting the dots” even if the answer is wrong. Ask anyone who’s interviewed witnesses to a traffic accident and they’ll tell you about people who have a clear memory of exactly what happened, even though they were looking in the wrong direction at the time! They heard the noise, saw the result and their brain filled in the rest – and as far as they’re concerned, they really DID see it.
The only example of that in marketing that I can think of off-hand was a series of TV ads in the UK for the Mini Metro which showed the end of the “mini” story first and teased viewers into trying to work out how it happened before it was revealed.
I think the major fear of the niche comes from that worry that by targeting someone really specific, we’ll be eliminating everyone who doesn’t meet every single quality of our target audience.
At least, I know that’s been my major fear…
What I’m learning (and trying to not forget) is that the human mind makes connections. So someone can see my message, and as long as they can identify with even just one quality of my target audience, they’re still going to take note.
Sure, the message won’t be as strong as if they identified with all of the qualities, or even half the qualities. But it’s not like they’re going to say to themselves, “Oh, well she helps female small business owners in their 20′s and 30′s who exercise and drink tea. But I don’t like tea, so I guess she won’t want to help me.”*
*This is not actually MY target niche, just an example. Though to be honest, if you don’t like tea, I’m not sure I can work with you. Because how can you not like tea?! Joking… mostly ;)
Hmmm, it’s highly likely that I’m reading too much into this, but when I read ‘your man joins free,’ I thought of marketing to single women, as well.
Perhaps single women will interpret this (subliminally, of course) as “There’s another sign there’s something wrong with me because I’m not part of a couple…I better get my fat a** to this place so I can lose weight and get a guy…”
Just a stab–I have been known to be overly specific at being wrong on many an occassion…!
Naomi, I’m interested in your “memberships are hard to sell” statement. Having just joined the Interactive Offer – which is a membership, and which sold them very rapidly at a fairly high price point, and which basically recommends selling them rather than products – I’d like to hear more about your views on that.
Hm. This bothered me a little; I just reread the post and tried to find the exact section so that I could rebutt (?) it and go WRONG WRONG WRONG right back to you. The thing is, as big, flaming, scary dyke, I could see that sign and think, “Typical.” Negative, right? Offended, disenfranchised market, right?
But that’s probably OK, isn’t it?
As you pointed out, I’d still be thinking about Herbal One. In a few days, I might get over my sense of disgruntlement and grab my own honey. Or tell my straight neighbor. Either way, it worked.
Damn you.
A good reminder that the word “JOIN” was not just a call to action, but the product itself. I saw “2-for-1″ and thought “I don’t need pills” — presuming they sold herbal diet stuff.
Real life marketing lessons for marketing in real life.
*satisfied sigh*
Thanks.
That’s such a great point, and it hadn’t even occurred to me. 2 what for 1 what? :)
Certainly got me to thinking! Maybe I need to take my man…
Hmm.
Excellent points – thanks for sharing them all.
There’s a Vegan restaurant near us with a big readerboard sign in their parking lot. For the last couple of years it has advertised their “Cosmic Colon Cleanse”. Since we’ve never stopped in, I’m not sure if that’s something on the menu or something that happens after you pay your check — but they’ve certainly made an impression on me.
To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he won’t be getting his hands on our colon.”
I’d put heavy money on that not being an OR option, but an AND option they’re selling. Yick.
Still laughing at the image of one sign kicking the other sign’s ass all around the parking lot. I love this blog.
Awesome post, as usual, Naomi. I like how you get these marketing nuggets from the ordinary things you encounter everyday.
This is a good reminder for us to take the extraordinary route to communicating the value of our offer. What a wonderful, real-life example!
It doesn’t hurt at all that the ad is fun and romantic too.
Who else pictured getting all hot and sweaty together?
Oh, right. Like I’m the only one…
Now here’s a great example of when the “don’t make me think” mantra does not apply!
I’ve also used headlines in the negative. Like: “Don’t Read This If You Don’t Want to Know” and “If You Build It They Won’t Come. Unless You Market”
Boo Ya! If Chuck Norris was dead he would come back just to shake hands with the person that changed the sign.
This is such the perfect case of using a tired, rusty, smelly old slogan as 2 for 1 (which works and everyone understands) into a nuclear powerhouse of ass-kicking amazing-ness.
Membership sites on-line are a dime a dozen and the average member only sticks around for 2-3 months. If there is anything that can be added as incentive to keep it moving, such as giving a tip for a future issue, but not revealing it, then you can add a few more months in the kitty.
I believe it’s because it’s something you are not physically involved with, like a gym. Even though most people just ognore their gym memberships, they stay a lot longer because the gym is a physical entity… and gyms are great at pricing deals to keep you on for a whole year.
Wow, that comment was all over the place.
-Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire
Naomi, that’s brilliant. I am a sign maker (really!) I can’t tell you how often customers want The Perfect Blah sign, with zero marketing pizzaz. I am going to print off your post so that I can remember it and use that logic every chance I get.
The psychology of selling is quite complex at one level, yet as you have indicated Naomi too, it can work in delightfully simple & quirky ways. I was talking today with a local furniture and home wares retailer. He was saying that he can have a particular piece of furniture in his store for months sometimes, and no-one will be interested in it at all, it does not sell, even if it is prominently displayed. Then, after weeks of gathering dust, eventually someone buys it. So it might then be sitting by the counter for a day or so, with a ‘sold’ sticker on it, waiting for the purchaser to return and load it in their car. He has noticed then,and only then, that people will frequently come by, want to purchase it, or will ask if he has another piece the same. But not until it has that sold sticker on it… There is something there about “only wanting it, when I could no longer have it.” Weird…..
This is great. I have a friend who’s also a signmaker (hi Marica). He made a huge sign as a joke saying QLD 64 NSW 0 – the score he predicted for the huge annual rugby game here in Australia. It proved such a hit it got in all the local papers and even the national ones with a mention of his business too. I’m betting it pulls in a few new punters from Queensland (QLD) where we live as well – none from NSW of course but I don’t suppose he’d want to help NSW fans anyway:)Best of all though he didn’t even write anything about his business on the sign at all. He just tapped into something that people get very emotional about round here and engaged them like that.
that is the key. Break the spell of the ordinary. I’m going to try this on my email pitch form – (My focus is baby boomers, by the way) – “Boomers – Sign up Free Today – And Your Mon Gets in Free, Too!
Oops, I meant, “Your Mom Gets in Free, Too.” But you probably knew that.
MK
Did you ever actually go in the store and ask how the sign was working for them? That would be interesting!