Persuasion is like energy

You can't make energy. No one can. It simply exists. But that doesn't stop physicists and engineers from harnessing energy wherever they can find it and using it to build earth shaking technologies that completely change the course of history.

Persuasion is similar.

You can't persuade people into buying something. No one can. People either have desire or they don't. Marketers, however, have the interesting job of taking desire and shaping it so that people express those desires by buying whatever it is we're selling.

This is an important distinction. If people don't desire what you're selling, you don't stand a chance.

However, people also don't know what they want. None of us do. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Apple made them so damn sexy. But we did want more convenient access to our music, we wanted the status and coolness that an iPod offered, we wanted to tell ourselves a story that we were hip music lovers who could afford to splurge on a tiny device that played music. We just didn't know it.

That's why persuasion is so tricky. You can't ask people what they want, because no one really knows what they want until it shows up, and by that point someone else has cornered the market. You can't just wrap slick marketing around something no one wants, because fundamentally people aren't that stupid. But when you discover an unfulfilled desire and produce a product that meets that desire, even indirectly (like an mp3 player that makes people feel cool), magic happens.

You can't create new markets. You can't persuade people to buy a damn thing. But like a physicist, you can discover new markets and harness desire in a way that makes it seem like you created sales out of thin air.

Ethics and Trust

Ghostwriting: If you hire someone else to take your brilliance, your insights, your experiences, and create written work that you then take sole credit for, that's ok. The writer simply gave you a voice. If you hire someone to do all the research, develop all the insight, use their own experiences, and you still take sole credit, that's not ok. You're lying. More to the point, people won't trust you when you get caught.

User tracking: When users opt-in to your services and you clearly explain that you will track their information for some type of use, that's ok. If you hide it in fine print, sneakily load cookies on their systems, or otherwise avoid asking for explicit permission, it's wrong. More to the point, when the user finds out they won't trust you anymore (if they ever did).

Advertising: There's absolutely nothing wrong with advertising, unless you use nefarious user tracking to better target the ads, intentionally disrupt the user's experience with the ads, or otherwise try to trick the user into being more receptive. When you do any of those things, you lose trust.

Selling to kids: Don't. Sell to their parents. There are laws about this stuff for a reason; don't try to find the loop holes. Seriously. It's wrong and, you guessed it, you'll lose trust.

I could go on, but I'm sure you see the pattern. In everything you do as a business, in every touch point you make with your customers and prospects, ask yourself: Am I earning trust, or abusing it? You can't get away with abusing trust anymore. You might win the law suits, but you'll lose the sales.

It's 10:34 a.m. Do you know where your ad dollars are going?

Measurement. Return on Investment. Cost effectiveness. These are jargon words that business people use to ask one simple question: What am I getting for my money?

In this day and age, where money is tight and consumers are wary, it should be a sin to not be tracking your advertising spending. Do you know where it's going? What works? What doesn't? How much each new sale is costing you in advertising dollars? Do you know where your customers are coming from? What convinced them to buy from you?

There are many ways to find out. If you're advertising online, you can track every click and understand exactly where you're losing them - and fix it.

If you're selling through direct mail, you can measure what geographical locations respond best, you can test different headlines, pictures, and copy - and optimize them based on results.

Similar tests can be done in print, in radio, on TV, in person, and any other form your communication takes. It's simply a matter of identifying all the variables that you have some control over, and testing them.

Is there any excuse for not doing this? Any justification for shooting in the dark, for spending money and just hoping time and time again that it will be effective?

What are you getting for your advertising money? Isn't it time you found out?