Don’t Change Your Story
May 23, 2010 by Ed McLaughlin
It’s frustrating to listen to people, companies, and politicians say they stand for something while at the same time they try to please everyone. It doesn’t work that way, no matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise.
A company’s story can’t be about convenience, low-cost, premium-value, and great selection.
A politician can’t talk about lowering taxes, increasing services, attacking bureaucracy, and reducing the deficit.
A Little League coach can’t preach health and fitness to his team and then sneak a cigarette while the kids are running laps.
I realize that it’s hard to take a stand, to tell people what they don’t want to hear. But it does no good to change your story to suit your audience. Sooner or later people will figure out that you don’t stand for anything at all, which means you’ll be gone tomorrow.
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Persuasion & Surprise
October 6, 2009 by Ed McLaughlin
Sooner or later, you’ll need to persuade someone to take action they may not have taken before. To hire someone with an unusual background, buy a product they’ve never used, or embrace a new idea.
One approach is to play it safe. Outline features and benefits. Put together a PowerPoint with fancy charts and bullet points. Maybe even use a scare tactic or two.
The safe approach assumes that people make decisions logically. Here’s the problem – decisions are made emotionally and justified logically. So if you want someone to do something they haven’t done before, you need to persuade them in a way that hasn’t been done before either.
The video below was the sales pitch used to sell The Muppet Show. Note: this was done in the early 1970′s, long before the existence of the easy-to-use editing programs we have today. Which means that this 2 1/2 minute video took a lot of time and creativity to make. I doubt that it felt like the safe way to persuade CBS to pick up the show.
But I’ll bet you it surprised them. And surprise is a great lubricant to “yes.”
[Update: the video was recently removed from You Tube. Regardless, hopefully the point is clear - sometimes the safe approach is riskiest one to take.]
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