Motivational speakers use a variety of psychological techniques to pump up listeners’ enthusiasm. This helps them sell books, CDs, subscription-based web services and (sometimes expensive) consulting/mentoring services. Successful speakers deliver on their promises. If you really follow their success prescriptions, you most likely will succeed. Of course few do. It is hard to change habits and when the aura of the dream of a new life fades out into the reality of the present, we find ourselves right back where we were in the first place.
In truth, most of us have great trouble
breaking free of our comfort zone. If we grew up in a certain environment/class/community, we rarely shift in direction. Sometimes we have good or bad luck. This is why immigrants are a special category of people (and potential clients). They’ve uprooted themselves and their families and pushed them far from their home to different cultural and economic environments. The result can be great success and achievement or great crime/dysfunction especially for their spouses and children.
The importance of (very) early childhood influences cannot be understated. I haven’t read statistics to confirm this, but if you scratch beneath the prison population, you will probably find that an exceptionally large percentage of the criminals failed to bond as a baby with their parents. It is highly risky for well-meaning adoptive parents to accept anyone but a baby five or six months old or less (and they should check the ‘home environment’ of the foster care-givers to ensure adequate nurturing beforehand.) Later adoptions, even in to the best homes, often end up tragically.
These observations are not universal. Some people live till they are 90 years old and they drink and smoke too much and engage in otherwise risky behaviour. Others have every advantage in environment, love and living conditions and fail miserably either because of internal dysfunction or health problems.
I share these observations because when it comes down to marketing, you most likely will do what you have always done because you are conditioned to behave a certain way. Change is difficult, especially if at the beginning it doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of immediate gratification or benefits. I continue to observe that most of my business’s clients waste their money on marketing even though I’ve determined to differentiate my business from our direct competition in that we deliver far more than we promise (in selling advertising) than virtually any other construction-related media publisher I know.
(As an example, consider the upcoming July 8 Construction Marketing Ideas Webinar. It includes a free copy of my Construction Marketing Ideas book if you register by June 30 but is 100 per cent free if you’ve purchased even one display ad in any of our publications in the past year. We’ve sold several tickets to the Webinar but I haven’t given one free one away yet — and I’ve certainly reminded our clients several times about the offer.)
(This leads to another marketing irony. By offering the extra services which few of our clients use, our business is actually much stronger than our competition because the underlying respect for our clients remains in place. Our employees appreciate these values and undoubtedly our clients — even if they decline to accept our offer of additional free resources — feel more comfortable working with our organization. Accordingly, we’ve outlasted many of our competitors.)
Then how can you apply these insights in your marketing? Well, if people behave certain ways and are reluctant to change, you can indeed apply psychological techniques to get them to do what you want them to do — yes, you can “manipulate” them through effective psychological management techniques. Effective marketers, in fact, make it their practice to study mind-sets and figure out how to get people to move from their existing space to yours.
You can also look at yourself, where you need to change, and then figure out how to apply these insights to minimize the risk and pain of change and achieve better results. This is the premise of my marketing philosophy and a key concept in my book. You need to do what you love doing (and where your natural talents lie) to succeed in business and life, so you should apply your marketing in conjunction with these strengths. In my book, I advocate you connect with client-focused associations and then apply your strengths within the association culture. You’ll have fun — and attract many leads and clients — that way.
The fact is: You aren’t likely to change no matter what you read or hear here or elsewhere, and the people out there, either in the consumer or business-to-business space, aren’t likely to change, either. But to succeed in marketing you need to “change” at least enough people to cause them to do business with your organization. And if you aren’t already achieving success in that regard, then you will need to change yourself! In my book and Webinar, I do my best to show you how to “change” without really having to change to be someone you aren’t.
