We are all like that.
More to the point, our customers are all like that. You are excited about your product. They are not. You extol the virtues of the whiz-bang features you have put in with so much effort and expenditure. They stifle a yawn. They too are time stressed. And jaded. And as attention becomes an ever-scarcer resource, they cease giving it to you.
What should you do? What can you do?
Dramatize your product. Present it in a way that grabs your prospect by the throat and compels him to pay attention. Make him look at you, know about you, talk about you, experiment with you. Keep doing it.
One way you can do this is by being shocking, by pushing the boundaries of what is commonly accepted. This is not something I recommend but, as a marketing professional, I know it works so I draw it to your attention and leave it to you to make the moral judgments.
Benetton did it by such devices as portraying interracial dating, nuns in sexual situations, etc. Calvin Klein does it by using precocious models in various states of undress. Sometimes this technique can backfire as happened when Calvin Klein had to withdraw its “heroin chic” advertisements due to widespread public condemnation. But the controversy drew such publicity that sales soared so I am not sure whether to classify the campaign as a success or a failure.
My advice is to stick to less offensive methods of dramatizing your product. Take car wax: a boring product guaranteed to bring on the yawns and the glazed eyes. How would you market car wax? By extolling its features, its ability to get rid of scratches and lend a shine to your automobile? Who cares?
It is more than a decade since the car wax infomercials ran but practically everyone I talk to remembers them clearly. I bet you do too. Remember the guy pouring gasoline on the hood of the car and setting it on fire to show how good a job it did of protecting the finish? Lots of people remember. Lots of people bought lots of car wax as a result of that demonstration. They spent an entire half-hour watching a long commercial about car wax. A boring product like car wax. That’s what dramatizing your product can do.
Take another example: Krazy Glue. Are you excited about a superstrong adhesive? I’m not. But it did catch my attention when a helicopter picked up items like an elephant and an automobile using a hook stuck on with Krazy Glue. And yes, I did buy some eventually. That, again, is what dramatizing your product can do for you.
Does this work for technology? Yes, Jessica, it does.
One way technology firms have used the technique is by pushing personalities, the larger than life chief executive. Remember Katrina Garrett and the striking pose she adopted in advertisements for CrossWorlds software? You may snicker, but it got her truckloads of publicity. More important, it got her meetings with virtually any CEO she wanted to meet. It also got investment banks vying to get her business and enabled her to raise tens of millions of dollars on very favorable terms. Similar things happened with Kim Polese (Marimba) and Candace Carpenter (I-Village). If their products were comparable to their marketing they would be behemoths today.
It works for men, too. Take Vivek Wadhwa, the CEO of Relativity Technologies. The guy is everywhere: Fortune, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Business Week and scores of other publications. He is deliberately outspoken, cultivates reporters, expresses strongly contrarian but well thought out opinions and gets lots of ink. I know companies 10 times the size of Relativity that have not obtained a tenth of the exposure. He too gets in to meet, on equal terms, CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies who are already predisposed to do business with him.
Okay. So you’re camera shy and 50 pounds overweight and just don’t want to be an outsize personality. Can you still play the dramatizing game? Yes you can.
Try dramatic photographs. Do you sell security software? Scour photographic databases to find a picture of a SWAT team nailing a terrorist or intruder. Have one posed if you can’t find one. Come up with a memorable headline, something like “We are every bit as effective in nailing the intruders who break into your system,” and go from there.
Do you sell supply chain software? Excavate your client records till you unearth the story of the seriously ill patient at a major hospital who would have perished of her illness if it had not been for your timely delivery of the hard to get drug. Get photographs of her before and after. There is always a story, a compelling story that will keep readers waiting for the denouement with bated breath. It is your job to find it. And tell it.
There are other things you can do. Try unearthing shocking statistics, such as: “The average company throws away $xxxx every week!” Show a picture of what this amount can buy. Your product, of course, helps this company to stop throwing this massive sum away.
Try dramatic slogans, headlines or statements. Something like, “Computerland Declares War on Clones.” This one, by a retailer, packed the stores and cleared out inventory so fast that it had to issue rainchecks to scores of customers. This particular technique is so important and effective that I will devote separate columns to it in future columns.
Get the picture? It’s your company, and it’s your job to make your product so compelling that your customer does not yawn. Use your imagination. Hop to it and see your sales soar.
Prof. Srikumar S. Rao is Louis and Johanna Vorzimer Professor of Marketing at Long Island University, New York. Write to him, with comments, and questions on marketing at: rao@corp.siliconindia.com. si
