What is Most Relevant to Consumers Today

Marketing guru Seth Godin introduced the term permission marketing to us. But in so doing, he was only memorializing a fact of no small significance: before I can persuade you to a course of action I must get landing rights in your brain for what I have to say. This generally means that you need to feel that what I’m offering is relevant to your interests. Until then, you are unlikely to markedly lower your walls of defense against my pitch.

Of course like an opportunistic high-pressure salesperson, I might make you feel that what I say has greater relevance to you than is the case. On the other hand, I might connect with you empathetically, which enables me to identify with and understand your situation, feelings, and motives.

In his recent book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink cites empathy as one of the six most important “senses” in a new era that he terms the Conceptual Age. He defines the Conceptual Age as an “economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising.”

The days of unmitigated hucksterism when the relationship between marketer and customer was product centric to the extreme are coming to an end. The practice of product centric marketing and sales is increasingly being assessed in a moral light.

Questions are being raised as never before about encouraging children to pressure their parents into buying products through eye-catching advertising that plays on children’s natural gullibility. And even some drug companies are reevaluating the morality of advertising that encourages patients to insist that their doctors prescribe them a given drug.

Marketing is moving inexorably away from the 20^th century hucksterism paradigm to a new paradigm of healing that is better suited to the 21^st century marketplace. Melinda Davis addresses this in her book, The New Culture of Desire. She writes:

We are taking tentative steps into a new era: the era of state-of-mind marketing. This is the new imperative: The marketer must now be a healer.” She advanced this thought as, “the possibility for real differentiation,” which is not based on the product but in “in how you collaborate with the consumer’s need to heal.”

A few eyeballs sometimes begin rolling when I talk about the marketer as healer instead of huckster, but they begin coming to a rest when I cite firms like Chico’s (no more sizes 14 through 18; just sizes  0 through 3, so go ahead and be comfortable with a bit larger size);  Dove (plus-sized and elderly women can have a special kind of enviable beauty); New Balance (reinforceing the midlife pursuit of life meaning instead of winning at the cost of others' losses); and Whole Foods, which gives consumers the opportunity to feel better about the producers of the food they buy and about the kind of life lived by the meat they eat.

Healing is a relevant value. In the years ahead, marketers who empathetically connect with people’s need to feel better about themselves, about life, about the world in general will be the norm. They stand to be more influential on consumers’ decisions than the old product centric hucksterism that was all about a company’s objectives and little about the consumer’s real needs.

Comments

[David Porter]

David,

I enjoyed this piece.

Thank you!

David Porter
President
Pacesetter Mortgage Company, Inc.

[David Wolfe]

David,

Thanks! I'll keep trying to do my best!

Happy Holidays!

DBW

[max Lenderman]

Great post, David. I allude to it on my blog today! Love it!
All the best,
Max

[Mike Bawden]

David,

Thanks for the great post. I managed to catch up on it over the holidays and have decided to include it in my list of blog posts marketers should read on my "Much Ado About Marketing" blog for today (01/02).

Hope you had a great holiday.

Regards,

Mike Bawden
Brand Central Station