Are You Communicating Or Telling?
“The single biggest problem with communications is the illlusion it’s taken place.” George Bernard Shaw
“It’s an educational sale. People need to learn about this product.”
I’ve heard this “educational sale” bit more than once, typically as the justification for long, detailed product descriptions and reams of marketing collateral (Yikes! a 40-page “white paper?” A 5-page brochure? Professor? Will this be on the final?)
Providing information that people want, in the format in which they want it isn’t the same as telling them. You may think you’re perfectly, crystal clear…and the listener or reader is lost in the mud.
Certainly, you should always provide lots of data about your product, for the people who want and need it, but you shouldn’t force people to listen or read before they can buy something…or expect them to want to do so. There are many customers who really don’t care that you’ve got - for example - a billion lines of Lionel code, built on an open source platform, with fully redundant widgety-wackets that will process bitty bites at 45M fippity-fops per second, all while transmogrifying backup flippy filets at 256 key bit encryption, with multi-level disapparation. (Yep, that’s all gibberish - which is exactly what many product descriptions sound like to someone outside the industry.)
Customers want to feel good about spending their money with you. Will it make their life easier? Their business more profitable? Will they look good to their neighbors? Will they not get fired? Will they feel good about spending all that money?
P.S. I’m still totally in love with my $600 vacuum and think it’s worth every penny. See above re feeling good. I wouldn’t, however, have bought it if all I had done was visit the Lindhaus web site (or read the brochure). Terrible design, worse navigation, lots of words, but…what does it do??? Which model would I want? Why is a vacuum cleaner worth all that money??? And so on…
Tags: marketing, communications, marketing communications, marketing troubleshooting
View the Blog Roll
August 6th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
This is especially true if you want to have that customer return and buy from you again and again. In other words, when you want to create a relationship between your company and the customer.
Communicating means not only speaking their language, but being able to listen as well.
You. Must. Seek. Feedback.
BTW, Mary, if you shift your paradigm so that you treat household dust as if it were a furniture preservative, you wouldn’t need a $600 vacuum. You’d only vacuum twice a year and could just use a $99 piece of dreck like I do. And I bought it in 1992:-)
August 6th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Hmmm…so if dust is a preservative, what’s cat hair?
Unfortunately if I didn’t vacuum I’d soon disappear from view…;-)
September 25th, 2008 at 10:47 am
[…] Related Post: Are You Communicating Or Telling? […]