Passion is so attractive…so why don’t more companies use it to their advantage?

Think back to a time when you were talking passionately about something to your friends. Did you notice that all of them gave you their full attention? Did you notice that you not only commanded attention but also spoke confidently, articulately, and with self-assurance in your voice.

Image consultants know that one of the greatest ways to have a magnetic and attractive personality is to be passionate about something. We tend to gravitate towards people who seem to have taken the time to become certain on things that we are uncertain about.

Passionate people usually have a lot of self-assurance and certainty in the things they say. They seem so clear on all their values and goals, and where they stand on the issues that are important to them. We remember people for their passions.

Unfortunately, many people merely exist. They follow the trends and live reactively to their environment, instead of taking the time to really connect with what they truly want. They get so caught up in trying to be accepted that they miss tuning into who they really are inside.

Now…so far in this article I have talked about people. Now re-read the above and put a company in place of the person…it’s exactly the same!

I talk to my clients about having a corporate personality and ask them, would they hire their current ‘corporate personality’ to do their marketing? More often than not they wouldn’t. And there begins the journey to build a personality that is not only fit to present the company to the marketplace but is also passionate, charismatic and attractive when doing it. To become someone that customers want to spend time getting to know, believe in and so buy from.

Part of achieving this is to uncover what the company is really passionate about. What it stands for, believes in and will protect and defend in good and bad times. And like people this is often buried. Over the years, some of the risks that were taken may have hurt so passionate ideas and values have been stifled. The razor sharp edges of its character that cut through markets in its early days, dulled. It now stays safe, comfortable and careful not to offend anyone.

It has slowly become more settled, and less interesting…

So if you are reading this and feeling that some of it is ringing true, leave me a comment, ping me an e-mail (tobin@xcitations.com) or give me a call (01295 724546) and lets see if we can re-kindle some passion back into your company.

I’m passionate about Emotional Marketing and since I started Xcitations in 2004, quite a few others are now passionate about it too.

It’s very rare that anything you believe in life is truly factual…it’s just your version of events

Someone talking our language! And that someone is Deborah Meaden. Now she knows a thing or two about business, growing Weststar Holidays from 1 to to 5 holidays parks in 2 years and finally selling up for £83 million. She has also been part of the cut and thrust on BBC 2′s Dragons Den for 5 series. But what does she really mean and how can that help us in business?

Facts aren’t the whole story…if you just look at the facts, you will be missing out on the whole area of our ability to view the facts from a whole load of different viewpoints. And if we as marketeers and business owners just look at the facts we will miss opportunities and fail to focus on the desires of our customers, employees and the marketplace.

For example, two journalists reporting on the same speech will likely have different takes on the meaning and implications in the speech. If we just took one journalist’s version as gospel, then we would be missing out on the other angle. It’s not just our opinion that counts, it’s everyone else who has an opinion on the subject. How many times have you been in discussion with someone and they have come up with a version of ‘the facts’ you had never even considered and which then changes your view. An insight which helps progress your understanding and unlocks further insights.

As we get older, our experience builds. As our experience builds, we become more certain about how to run our lives and our businesses; what works and doesn’t work. We get to a point in our life where we have a certain view of ourselves that we want to uphold and preserve amongst our colleagues, piers and friends. BUT we should never assume that we are infallible, that we have our finger on the pulse at all times and we know it all. We have to be open to new ideas, other opinions, different views. We should always be looking at our customers, our marketplace, our competitors and the technology that feeds our marketplace, to see how this is affecting people’s opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. After all, we are one of those people too and we equally have changed over time.

Seth Godin, in his book All Marketers are Liars, calls it our worldview. The views and opinions we hold on the world informed by all the interactions we have day to day. He makes the point that ‘Successful marketeers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead they tell a story. A story we want to believe…Marketeers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends.’

And like any good author knows, just giving the facts doesn’t make for a good story. We need to emotionally engage our audience and to do that we need to understand their point of view. We need to empathise with them and fit into their world view of things. We need to communicate and position what we are selling to ‘fit’ within their world.

Deborah adds ‘Trying to understand where everyone is coming from and why they say what they do, can be very important in a business deal. I had been going through life trying to find the absolute truth and there isn’t one’

To ‘fit’ our communication into our customers and prospects world, we need to understand it and if you have been reading my previous posts you will see this is not always easy.  However Xcitations has been working with Psychologists, NLP [Neuro Linguistic Programming] and LAB [Language and Behaviour] practitioners who have spent a long time building knowledge on how to uncover what emotionally engages customers and prospects and gain a deeper understanding of their worldview.

If you’d like to know more about how we can engage your customer and prospects visit our website www.xcitations.com or contact Tobin at tobin@xcitations.com

85 per cent of the decisions we make are made by the unconscious part of brain

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0bd88596-4426-11df-b327-00144feab49a.html

Emotional Marketing and the Gunfighter Dilemma

It is a well-known fact amongst statisticians and psychologists that in a gunfight, the person who draws second is more likely to win the fight, than the one who draws first…why is this?

It’s all to do with the way our brains process information and gain knowledge…in other words learn. Because the brain is pretty lazy it likes to automate tasks and run these in the background, or sub-consciously, so it can get on with the important tasks of processing all the information that constantly comes at it from the ears and eyes.

As we learn, so a process becomes automated…walking, talking, writing, typing, driving, shopping, building relationships, making decisions. Any task in fact, that we do a lot. It becomes so well known to us that we don’t even have to think about it, we just do it. The more experienced we become, the more the brain automates and the better we become at the task…because as soon as you have to start thinking about something, it becomes slower.

Remember when you were learning to drive…there seemed to be so much to think about and do, all at the same time…so you were slow and exhausted when you had finished your lesson. Now, driving a car is a piece of cake, because you don’t have to think about it!

And this is where the problem lies for marketeers…what we as consumers don’t think about, we can’t describe very well and when we think about it, it becomes slow and confused. Running our daily lives is hassle enough, without having to think about why we do what we do, what attracted us to that product over another, what made us finally press submit on a website, take that holiday, buy that service. So when it comes to understanding how to communicate with customers to convince them to buy your product or service, it’s no good asking them, as they won’t have a clue. They’ve done it automatically….sub consciously…emotionally.

That’s where Emotional Marketing from Xcitations comes in. With a few clever tools and over 10 years experience, Xcitations can uncover what it is that motivates consumers to buy a product, respond to an e-mail, buy from a website or read a brochure by uncovering what it is that motivates them sub consciously…emotionally.

We use this powerful insight to develop websites, brochures, social media, employee brand engagement, events and exhibitions delivering better ROI and more engaged customers.

Oh and by the way, that gunfighter who draws second…he makes the kill because he is reacting to the draw of the first gunfighter…and because he is reacting, it is an automated action…and as we have seen, automated is quicker.

So if you want some quick, positive customer or client reactions to your communications, give Tobin at Xcitations a call on 01295 724546 or e-mail me at tobin@xcitations.com

Agony Aunt Marketing

It struck me today whilst reading an Agony Aunt column that really what we do here at Xcitations is play Agony Aunt to our client’s customers/prospects.

Whether we think so or not, everything we do is driven by our emotions. But did you know that in fact we are driven by just four; mad, sad, scared, and glad. Everything else is a “shade of grey” built on one or more of these. For example “elation” is an extreme form of glad, whereas “disgusted” is a combination of sad and mad.

But because we are never satisfied, for the most part we walk around feeling one of the first 3 … Mad, Sad, or Scared.

So when it comes to marketing to customers, we need to become their Agony Aunt and understand what they are sad, mad or scared about and offer a solution to make them glad!!

To get your customers or prospects to take action, consider you over the competition, order a brochure, make a purchase, click on an email link, stay on your website longer, become a fan, tell their colleagues or friends about you, you have to convince them you will move them from feeling ‘mad’, ‘sad’ or ‘scared’ to feeling ‘glad’. (Note: there are 37 very special variations of “glad” which represent the spectrum of emotional benefits that we’ve found to motivate purchase behaviour)

Anytime your customer or prospect does anything you want them to do which moves them even an inch along the path from disinterest, to interest to actually making a purchase, it will be because they believe this action will move them from their current emotional state to feeling ‘glad’.

Think about yourself for a minute. What are you feeling when you are reading this? Maybe you are feeling sad that something has not delivered the results you hoped for, scared about delivering against unrealistic sales targets on the budgets you have been given, or mad that people around you just don’t deliver on their promises? Wouldn’t you like to start feeling glad?

But in order for me to start to help you feel better, you have to trust that I am the right person to do this…Agony Aunts usually have some long list of letters by their name or if not, have some connection with us by being a personality who we relate to. This is the key: For a relationship to begin we have to trust and to trust we need to get to know the personality.

So before we can convince our customers we can make them glad, we need to build a relationship with them by being a likeable, trustworthy, interesting person – We need to build a personality behind the brand.

Too often brands and organisations generate acquaintances, colleagues and ‘oh yeah I remember him…whathisname’ type relationships through their communications. These types of relationships won’t defend you against another brand, they might generate a recommendation but with no conviction and they’ll drop you like a stone if there are any issues. So what kind of a relationship is that…would we rely on those kinds of people to care about us enough to make us feel glad every time we interact with them?

Brands need to work harder at creating a trustworthy personality and building longer term relationships. They need to stop thinking there is a quick, automated fix around the corner. We don’t automate building our own true friendships so why do brands think they can do it. Building relationships takes time and effort and they don’t happen overnight. But invest and you will reap the rewards tenfold!

Check out xcitations.com for some quick and clever ways we can help brands become an Agony Aunt to their customers and build deeper more long lasting relationships which generate higher value, long term customers.