My high school guidance counselor was right, about one thing.
When I was a junior at Aragon High School in San Mateo, CA, Mr. Franceschi called me in to talk about college. He asked me to name a handful of schools I might like.
“Stanford,” I said.
Here’s the real reason why: A few days earlier I’d seen a front page story in the San Mateo Times reporting a student strike at Stanford. I don’t remember the reason for the strike. I do remember the aerial photograph of rooftops full of people. Naked people.
I wound up going there. Twice.
But Mr. Franceschi laughed when I said Stanford. “No way, kid, your grades aren’t good enough.”
I don’t remember feeling offended, and agreed to a battery of tests to figure out what sort of career I might be interested in, a process that he believed might help me choose among the Cal State University campuses or, if I was lucky, a University of California school.
His assessment: My interests and abilities matched up most closely with sales executives and ministers.
I thought, “Those can’t be more different.”
Well, he was right. It took me years to realize that both are about delivering messages designed to influence behavior. Consider the job title “evangelist” that started showing up on Silicon Valley business cards in the 80s.
What made me uncomfortable back then was the stereotype of preachers who push doctrine and warn of punishments. The stereotypical salesman pushes information about features and provides incentive by lowering price. Neither approach is either personal or positive, and both generally fail in the long run.
As it turned out, my business career took me pretty close to that sales executive role Mr. Franceschi posited. I’ve done brand marketing and business development, in big companies and startups. I’ve literally gone door-to-door selling when I started my own publishing company and I’ve also spent millions on television advertising trying to get people to buy another bag of Fritos.
Regardless of the medium, whether it’s social network marketing, television advertising or guerilla marketing, I learned early to ask, “Will my message break through the marketing clutter to get attention and change behavior?”
More important than the medium is the message. Does it communicate a benefit from using the product or service offered? Does it suggest some understanding of the prospect’s real situation? In those cases where the desired change in behavior might be complex, does the communication offer an easy way to begin?
Same with preaching. I’m not super religious, but there have been times in my life when I’ve attended some sort of church service, ranging from High Catholic to Buddhist. The messages that resonated, and the ideas I internalized, came from priests or monks who could talk TO me, not at me. The best was a Buddhist monk, who made me laugh when he started laughing about the insanity of anger. “Anger serves no useful purpose whatsoever. And if you respond to an angry person by getting angry yourself, all you’re doing is throwing gasoline on a fire.”
That monk’s core teaching was about compassion. Compassion is all about putting yourself in the other person’s situation. In the case of an angry person, that person is generally suffering. So rather than react to the anger, seek to understand the suffering. You can sometimes find a way to reduce that suffering, and thereby reduce the person’s anger. Both of you benefit.
The parallel with marketing is being customer-centric. Put yourself in your customer’s situation. Seek to understand the wants and needs (and, yes, their pain).
Then build your business strategy around that.
