A short while ago, I wrote a post discussing one of three key marketing principles discovered and well-documented by the Eureka! Ranch (Overt Benefit). I’ve gotten a lot of feedback since, and thought it would be worthwhile to complete my review of all three principles as we should all have them at the forefront of our minds as we undertake our work.

The second principle speaks to the skepticism that all of us feel when confronted with marketing.  Let’s face it… life experience has taught us to believe little of what we hear from marketers.

For this reason, strong statements of benefits – no matter how compelling – fail to move people to action without the help of REAL reasons to believe what you’re saying.

The benefit is what your offering.  The reason to believe is HOW you’re going to make good on the promise.  We simply have to provide both.

As I watch the marketplace today, I find that this issue – the real reason to believe is the greatest weakness of new business concepts.

To convert the excitement ignited by the overt benefit into actual sales, people demand that we provide persuasive credibility and evidence that we (or our product/service) will perform as promised.  With customer confidence at an all-time low, giving compelling reasons to believe a marketing message is AS IMPORTANT as providing an overt benefit.

When communicating benefits, you may recall that there is a negative correlation between the number of benefits featured and the impact of the message.  More is NOT better.

Not so with providing reasons to believe. In fact, as a rule, more reasons to believe are better than fewer as is evidenced by successful infomercials.  Think about it. The best infomercials (the ones you see over and over) dedicate more than half of their time to reasons to believe (as opposed to communicating features and benefits).

I have mentioned the Proactiv skin care product line before. You lose count of the “unpaid” celebrity testimonials after a while.

How do you communicate your reasons to believe?

According to the research done at the Ranch, there are five proven strategies to communicating real reason to believe.  With one exception they are all equal in their effectiveness:

Strategy

• Kitchen logic     (42% probability of success)
• Personal experience (45% probability of success)
• Pedigree (41% probability of success)
• Testimonial (41% probability of success)
• Guarantee (60% probability of success)

Kitchen logic conveys how the benefit is delivered, using language that people can easily understand and quickly relate to… old-fashioned logic.

Personal experience is about providing customers with an opportunity to see, feel, and experience the product or benefit.  There are three types of personal experience: 1. sampling, 2. demonstration, and 3. sensory feedback.

A demonstration is particularly effective when it is set in a situation that seems nearly hopeless.  They can be done live OR documented and used as evidence in brochures or advertising.  Sensory feedback is about providing people with signals that reinforce your product’s effectiveness.  At its simplest, this means helping them see, feel, smell, taste, or touch the experience.

Pedigree is about providing people confidence by detailing the heritage behind your product or service.  There are three types of pedigrees: 1. development pedigree (providing credibility as a result of the design, creation, formulation, or production process behind your product or service), 2. marketing pedigree (best selling, recommended by 3 of 4 doctors, etc.), and 3. trademark pedigree (using a brand or trademark that has a pedigree of trust – Good Housekeeping).

Testimonials can be provided by customers, experts, or independent third parties. Media quotes can be an outstanding source of independent testimonials.

Guarantees can be the most powerful reason to believe IF the fine print is minimized. The power of a guarantee is directly linked to the level of risk that you appear to be taking. No risk… no marketing benefit.

6 More tips on being the most believable marketer in your industry:

1. The Internet and infomercials are marketing media that carry high levels of consumer skepticism.  If you use these media, you must triple your credibility communications to achieve the same level of impact as classic physical retailers.
2. Score your real reasons to believe versus your competition.
3. Your reasons to believe MUST BE relative to an overt benefit that MUST speak to a target audience. Therein is created a chain reaction in which each piece of your message works together.
4. Anything done during development or production that is unique offers potential as a reason to believe.
5. Beware of offering irrelevant reasons to believe.
6. Beware of following the industry in offering reasons to believe.  The more a strategy is used, the less credible it becomes.  People simply conclude “they always say that.”

If only they would believe everything we say. How easy selling would be.

After years of being conditioned to believe that marketers are liars (and sales people are worse), we as consumers have evolved into a very skeptical breed.  Sadly, our skepticism is often validated and reinforced by real-word experience in the marketplace.

So what do we do about it?  How do we differentiate ourselves and our message as simply being believable?  If we can figure this out, we’ll sell more (online and offline).  We’ll increase our conversion rates.  And we will be more profitable.

I would argue that believability is among the greatest weaknesses of today’s new business concepts. Consumers insist on compelling credibility… evidence that we will perform as promised. And we generally don’t get it from marketers.

I would go so far as to say that providing consumers with compelling reasons to believe our marketing message is as important as our presentation of features and benefits.

I found an outstanding supporter of this line of thought in author, groundbreaking marketing researcher, and chief of the Eureka Ranch, Doug Hall.  Doug says that it is almost impossible for marketers to over-communicate solid reasons to believe a marketing message.

Evidence of his wisdom can be seen in successful infomercials (the ones we see over and over… Bowflex, The Little Giant ladder, Proactiv skin care, etc.).

Let’s face it.  Along side the Internet, infomercials are about the least inherently trustworthy marketing medium there is. On the other hand, it is a powerful format to present fully the benefits of a product.

So what do successful infomercial creators do? They load up the message with reasons for us to believe what they are saying.

We’ve all seen the infomercial for Proactiv.  This is the skin treatment regimen invented by a couple of dermatologists (Doctors Katie Rodan and Kathy Fields) to eliminate acne. Their spokesperson is Vanessa Williams.  You know the one… it’s on every night (or so it seems).

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that less than 20% of this infomercial is dedicated to an actual discussion of the product.  The rest is just reasons we should believe.

After a very short product description, it starts with a list of the non-paid celebrities who owe their flawless faces to the magical elixir.  Jessica Simpson, Kelly Clarkson, Lindsay Lohan, Paulina Rubio, Puff Daddy (make that P-Diddy), the list goes on….

Then it’s on to the real life stories.  Amy Tucker, age 19, couldn’t get a date.  Look at her acne marred face. Presto! She’s hot and beating the guys away with a stick.  Ronald Bowman, 15 year old African American (Proactiv is not just for white girls.) – same story.  Margaret Chen before and after – (works for Asians too). Patrina Gunsolley, age 38 – worked like a charm (not just for kids). In fact MILLIONS of people have “discovered Proactiv Solution and changed their lives for the better.”

Now for the story of the doctors, Katie and Kathy, their impressive bios, and why they created Proactiv.

More stories. More celebrities. A few tears of joy. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t pick up the phone and order some! Not just a sample… I bought the continuity plan. As my inventory of Proactiv grew, I decided to cancel. But I swear I think it works – especially that Refining Mask.

My point – Proactiv and the other infomercials we see over and over succeed because they reassure us with LOTS of seemingly good reasons to believe what they are saying.  We should all take a lesson from them and apply it to our own messaging. Why SHOULD your audience believe what you are saying to them?

Doug Hall has discovered five proven strategies to communicating reasons to believe a marketing message.  With one exception, they are all equal in their effectiveness according to his research.

• Kitchen logic (Probability of success: 42%)
• Personal experience (Probability of success: 45%)
• Pedigree (Probability of success: 41%)
• Testimonial (Probability of success: 41%)
• Guarantee (Probability of success: 60%)

Kitchen logic conveys to customers HOW your product/service benefit is delivered, using language that your audience can easily understand and quickly relate to. Good old-fashioned logic…. We see HOW it works.  And it just makes sense.

Personal experience is about providing customers with an opportunity to see, feel, and experience your product or benefit.  There are three types of personal experience: 1. sampling, 2. demonstration, and 3. sensory feedback.  A demonstration is particularly effective when it is set in a situation that seems nearly hopeless.  “Can the amazing bathroom cleaner really work on this horrible mess???” Sensory feedback involves reinforcing a product’s effectiveness by helping prospects to see, feel, smell, taste, or touch the experience.

Pedigree is about providing confidence to potential customers as a result of detailing the heritage behind a product or service.  There are three types of pedigrees: 1. Development Pedigree (providing credibility as a result of the design, creation, formulation, or production process behind a product or service). Consider the impressive bios of the two Proactiv dermatologists.  2. Marketing Pedigree (best selling, recommended by 3 of 4 doctors, etc.); and 3. Trademark Pedigree (using a brand or trademark that has a pedigree of trust – Good Housekeeping).

Testimonials can be provided by customers, experts, or independent third parties. Media quotes can also be a good source of independent testimonials. In my opinion, however, our skepticism as consumer is even beginning to attack the tried and true testimonial. Particularly in print, we are becoming suspicious.  Is this a real person?  Did they actually say this?  How can we be sure? For this reason, particularly online, marketers are evolving to the next-generation testimonial: customer reviews.  Which would you rather read – a testimonial (which almost by definition is a positive statement) or a review? For now at least, reviews are perceived as more objective.  And the most effective ones contain a little something NEGATIVE. We all know nothing is perfect.  And we trust the few marketers who will acknowledge that about their own product or service.

Guarantees can be the most powerful reason to believe IF the fine print is minimized. Doug Hall made an interesting discovery relative to guarantees that we can all validate at a gut level.  The power of a guarantee is directly linked to the level of risk that the marketer is perceived to be taking. If you aren’t taking any risk with your guarantee – you must not have much confidence in what you’re selling.

In no particular order, here are a few more practical tips especially for online marketers.

1. Proof your copy. Misspellings and grammatical errors erode credibility. That said…
2. Write as though you are speaking to only a single prospect at a time.  We experience the Web alone – you and the site you are visiting.  Write accordingly. Write like a person might speak – not like you are writing an article for a technical journal. A casual writing style does NOT erode credibility. To the contrary, it gives your audience a sense of your company’s personality and thereby builds trust.
3. Have a simple privacy policy and remind people of it every time you ask them to give you personal information.
4. Test your site. Broken links, like misspellings, erode credibility.
5. Permit a negative product review.  If you are transparent enough to reveal a criticism of one product, prospects will be more likely trust your positive statements about another.
6. Write using the active voice. A brief lesson on active vs. passive voice… All sentences that contain action verbs have a voice, either active or passive.  The voice tells the reader whether the subject performs or receives the verb’s action.  In sentences with active voice, the agent (doer) of the action is the subject. EXAMPLE: Bill shot the clerk.

In passive voice sentences, the receiver of the verb’s action becomes the subject of the sentence. EXAMPLE: The clerk was shot.Writing scholars say you should use the active voice in most of your writing because it engages the reader more effectively than passive voice.  I agree.  But the real reason I advocate use of the active voice in marketing copy is because we as consumers what to know exactly who does what.We want accountability. Passive voice is squishy and feels like the writer is hiding something.

   Judge for yourself.  Which do you feel better about:
   Your order has been received.  OR We received your order.
   You will be notified…. OR We will call you….
   Returns will be accepted…. OR We accept returns….

   Things just feel better (more definitive) when they are communicated in the active voice.  So use it.

We’ve all heard the age-old admonishment. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

What a joke.

In a time when we are all subject to constant information overload, there literally is no time to judge a book – or anything else for that matter by anything more than its cover.

Thankfully, it appears that we human beings are intuitively equipped to make snap judgments with shocking accuracy. If you doubt this point, pick up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking). In it, he shares countless examples of people reaching amazingly insightful conclusions with seemingly almost no data on which to base their positions.

So why do I raise this issue?

I’m sick of selling people on the importance of design.

In an environment in which time and attention are abundant, marketers have the luxury of focusing on the substance of communication rather than its packaging. Unfortunately, outside of a focus group where subjects are being paid to concentrate, I’m not aware of many other settings in which our prospects’ time and attention is anything but DARN scarce.

So we marketers had better package what we have to say (and sell) in a way that creates the desired impression in a second or two. Because that’s all we’ve got… if we’re lucky.

Let me be clear.  Am I saying that our prospects will decide to buy on the basis of a momentary impression?

No. At least not always.

Some of us sell products and services that require careful consideration.

But the FIRST sale we make to these prospects is to persuade them to invest their scarce time and attention in learning more about what we have to offer. This sale, I would argue, is made or lost in a fleeting moment.

So what should you do about this?

• STOP shaving budgets by skimping on design.

• STOP passing off design to the receptionist who just learned Microsoft Publisher last weekend – and seems to enjoy it.

• START identifying the seriously talented designers in your area, and engage them in your work.

The great thing about the world of graphic design, in my experience, is that you DON’T always get what you pay for.

I work with a handful of extremely talented designers.  They all used to work at agencies where an hour of their time cost a client $150 – $250. They freelance now, and guess what. An hour of their time costs a LOT less.

Are they any less talented than they were at the agency? No.

Is their equipment any worse than it was at the agency? No. Often better in fact.

The design function is fueled very little if at all by the overhead of agencies. So find the talented freelancers, and work with them. You’ll be amazed by how small the incremental cost is relative to the value you receive.

And once this whole information overload thing passes, you still have the receptionist to take over design.

For several years, I’ve been working on the development and launch of a consolidated electronic health record for consumers. This is a challenging undertaking for reasons I’ll likely share in a future post. But something happened that prompts me to write on the danger of familiarity.  I see it all the time in product development, marketing, sales system development, and even among entrepreneurs raising money for new ventures.

We were presenting a beta version of our portable health record to a group of first responders (EMTs). When you launch the health record, one of the first things you see is a collection of pictures of everyone whose records are on the drive (i.e. a family).  You then click the picture of the person whose records you wish to view. This is a practical feature in an emergency where the patient may not be conscious because it allows a visual verification of whose records a doctor is viewing.

When the first responders viewed the screen featuring the pictures of the people whose records were on the drive, very few of them knew to click the pictures to access the records.

So what? You ask. Isn’t that why you do user testing?

Sure.  But what struck me is that for a moment, I was actually surprised.

I have become so familiar with the software that I lost my ability to see it as a first time user would.  This is a condition with which most if not all of us are afflicted. As soon as we learn something, we suddenly forget what it was like to not know what we just learned.

In product development, this condition is generally overcome by user testing – as was the case with the portable health record. But how often do you user test your marketing… your sales processes… your pitch to venture capitalists… on people who are as ignorant to what you are selling as your audience is.

It’s not that it can’t be done. We just rarely do it.

You know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a presentation that was created by someone who is too familiar with what they are talking about and has lost empathy for the audience – you. It turns people off.

The most painful examples in my experience are seen in venture capital presentations. This is especially tough because in many cases the investor audience actually is more ignorant (with respect to the business proposition) that the audience of prospective buyers for whatever the business sells. Entrepreneurs often fail to realize that they actually need to explain the problem that they are addressing to a group of investors who, unlike their prospective buyers, may not be able to identify first-hand with this problem at all.

I hate the caution issued to marketers – to write/speak for an eighth grade audience.  I don’t disagree.  I just think it’s a tragedy to compromise the power and elegance of language. But don’t assume that because you are successfully communicating at an eighth grade level that you have purged your message of all assumptions of familiarity. One has little if anything to do with the other.

As in the case of the entrepreneur pitching investors, your audience may be highly intelligent – and therefore able to handle a flowery vocabulary, but they may be totally unfamiliar with what you are selling. No matter how much you dumb down the language, you simply have to start from the beginning and empathize with your audience.

User test whenever you can.  But at the very least, objectively challenge every assumption of pre-existing knowledge that you make in your communications.

Brian Korte is an artist pioneering a new and fun medium.  He builds mosaics – big pictures – out of LEGOs.  You can find him in the Guinness Book of World Records in connection with his craft.

I can remember the time he told me he was working on his first one – a portrait of two of his friends who had recently married. With limited expectations, I took a look, and WOW! pretty darn cool!

What’s really interesting about his LEGO art, is that once you understand HOW he does it, unlike other forms of art that so often require freakish talent, most anyone could do this with his level of precision.

He has leveraged this sense of attainability to create a following of enthusiasts. Kids can (and do) actually help him complete his work.

Now he has built a growing business called Brickworkz out of this form of LEGO art, and by all indications, he’s doing quite well. You should have a look.  He’s being commissioned to build his mosaics for individuals and businesses around the country, and he’s creating a growing buzz.

I mention this for two reasons.  First, he’s a creative inspiration, and he’s succeeding at breaking into the crowded art community in a new and exciting way.  It’s worth watching.

Second, and more to the point of this post, he wrote something recently that highlighted a phenomenon that has intrigued me for several years now as a marketer. It is a counter intuitive quirk of human nature that many of us marketers should recognize and exploit.

Let me set the stage for you.  Brian’s at a show/exhibit in Chicago displaying his work, and yes – teaching others how to do exactly what he does.  Remember – once you know his methodology, you too could produce Brian Korte caliber LEGO art.

He describes his workshop – and the resulting revelation beautifully:

“The first “Intro to Mosaics” session I hosted was very informal…. So, I fielded questions, explaining the methods of mosaic building. This is one of those situations where free advice surprisingly does not mean you lose your stance among your market. Contrary to popular belief, if someone takes the time to explain all the technical and subtle nuances of brain surgery to you, you just gained a new appreciation and respect for the surgeon, and despite your new knowledge, you still want THAT GUY to do the operation. Why? We may never know. But education is never a wasted thing. It’s strange, but give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he still wants you to fish for him tomorrow. Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s paying the bills! ”

This is not the first time I’ve seen this phenomenon at work.  I had a similar conversation with one of the Eisenberg brothers who founded Future Now. They are masters of online conversion, and they dispense their proprietary techniques in shocking detail in their books, newsletter and web site.

One day, while at one of the Future Now workshops gobbling up all that they had to say, I asked, “Why do you give away your secret recipes to people who could be potential buyers of your services?”

Eisenberg replied, “It is a universal law.  The more you give it away, the more people want to buy it.”

A leap of faith?  Yep.  It’s not intuitive. But it works.

Sure, some trade secrets must remain in the vault.  But a lot of what we in business consider our secrets may be put to more productive (and profitable) use if we shared them with the public.

I have a few thoughts on why this may be.  When you openly share your secret how-to techniques:

You convey a sense of confidence that – try as I may, I can’t do it as well as you can. I now understand and appreciate what you do, so who better to hire to do it for me?

People gain an appreciation for what’s required in your field of expertise to be successful and conclude that it’s easier to outsource.

You become the authority. People trust those from whom they learn.

Even if you are not, you appear as the pioneer… the originator of the concepts you are sharing.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this, but here’s my suggestion.  Revisit what you regard as trade secrets, and consider publishing them for the world to see.  It works.