chapter 7

Promotion: Trumpet Empathy

Overview

A businessperson asks Aesop to evaluate some silly stuff he wrote to ­promote his business. “I think you are quite right to praise yourself. You will never find anyone to do it for you.”

Aesop conveys that an egotistical businessperson is his own trumpeter. Most prospects ignore such hyperbole because they seek benefits from a business, not egotism.

Effective promotions are empathetic with key customers and prospects. Promotions should provide the information they need and convey this information when, where, and how they need it. Let us learn how to create empathetic promotions for the target market of the business.

Vignettes

Patrick Is Not Another Carpet Cleaner

Patrick is a carpet cleaner in a town full of carpet cleaners. “How can I promote my service when there are so many competitors?” He knows he cannot compete on price since his costs would drive him out of business. Some competitors brag their cleaning method is best. “Customers want clean carpets, not technology.” Others rely upon referrals from their customers, but Patrick is just starting his business.

Patrick notices a competitor that specialized in cleaning hand-knotted rugs has gone out of business. These rugs require special handling. “I know how to clean hand-knotted rugs, but other carpet cleaners may ruin them.”

Patrick visits stores in the area that sell hand-knotted rugs, becomes acquainted with their managers, and leaves some business cards for referrals. “I can show them how to maintain the beauty of their hand-knotted rugs.” They want their customers to return to their stores so they schedule carpet demonstrations with Patrick. Before long, Patrick has a list of referrals from satisfied clients.

Who Believes a Conceited Ad?

An Aesop Fable

A businessperson asks Aesop to evaluate some silly stuff he wrote to promote his business. Concerned about his boasting, the businessperson says, “I hope you don’t think that I am too presumptuous or too cocksure of my ability.”

The man’s wretched trash made Aesop sick. “I think you are quite right to praise yourself. You will never find anyone to do it for you.”

Aesop conveys that an egotistical businessperson is “his own trumpeter.”

Should Promotions Trumpet Empathy?

Is Your Business Its Own Trumpeter?

Many business owners are conceited. Some brag about their longevity, experience, or certificates. Others provide testimonials, list clients, describe projects, and display self-portraits. Egotistical business owners claim the lowest prices, broadest assortment, best service, and highest customer satisfaction, but most prospects ignore such hyperbole.

Do they really care about these boasts? No, prospects seek what brings them joy, fulfills their needs, or helps them express their desired lifestyle. They seek to solve their problems with the products and services of your business.

Prospects want a hole, not a drill; a social group, not a twin-cam motorcycle; and glamour, not a stick of tinted wax. They care about the benefits and lasting value your business can provide them.

How Can Your Business Trumpet Empathy?

Effective promotions are empathetic with your key customers and ­prospects. Promotions should provide the information they need and deliver the information when, where, and how they need it.

The goal of a promotion is to convey how the target market can solve their problems with your products and services. Discover what really ­matters to them. Walk in their moccasins, empathize with their desires, and understand their buying behavior. Mirror their feelings, visualize their success, and assist them with their purchase process.

How Valuable Is Empathy?

What Is Revenue?

In simply terms, revenue equals the price that customers pay for items multiplied by the quantity of items they purchase. Key customers of most businesses are loyal, heavy users. They frequently buy its products and services and are willing to pay high prices for them.

Tony Robbins¹

Tony Robbins understands the value of empathy and predicts results with the 80/20 rule. Robbins Research International offers several events. The entry-level event is called Unleash the Power Within (UPW), the next event is Date with Destiny (DD), followed by several events about mastery. The top-level event is the Platinum Partnership (PP).²

Each higher-level event offers additional benefits and more contact with Tony Robbins. Graduates can return to events at no cost and can obtain a discount for enrolling in the next higher event.

Along with about 3,000 others, I attended UPW in Orlando, Florida, in the fall of 2013. At its close, Robbins encouraged graduates to enroll in the next event in the sequence. He led us in clapping and chanting until about 600 participants committed to DD.

People who prospered from a Mastery event testified about its impact on their lives. We kept clapping, chanting, and watching videos until about 120 graduates of DD came forward and applied for a Mastery event.

Over lunch, I talked with someone who had spent about $70,000 for the Platinum Partnership. He testified about its value and hoped Robbins would allow him to return for another year. Table 7.1 and Figure 7.1 are estimates for illustrative purposes.

Table 7.1 Events with Tony Robbins

Pareto’s law				Events offered by Tony Robbins
Layer	Buyers	Profits	Return	Event	People	Price	Revenue
All	100%	100%	1-fold	UPW	3000	$1,095	$3,285,000
1	20%	80%	4-fold	DWD	600	$4,380	$2,628,000
2	4%	64%	16-fold	Mastery	120	$17,520	$2,102,400
3	0.8%	51.2%	64-fold	PP	24	$70,080	$1,681,920

Figure 7.1 Layers of key customers

How Did Saturn Trumpet Empathy?

The advertising agency, Hal Riney and Partners demonstrates empathetic promotions for Saturn automobiles. Its owners still refer to their love for the brand. The agency successfully introduced a new ­American automobile brand in June of 1990, to replace small, sporty Japanese automobiles. At that time Riney said:

2009 Saturn Sky³

No one had introduced a successful new brand in the automobile business …. We built a whole new personality for customer belief. That folksy little company from Tennessee is an American car.⁴

Hal Riney⁵

According to Riney, Saturn asked the advertising agency to make ­fundamental decisions:

We did everything … [Saturn] came to us one time and asked us, “What should we name it?” … “Just call it a Saturn coupe or a Saturn sedan and keep it simple” … “What do we call the colors, Sante Fe Sunset or what?” “How about red?”⁶

The advertising agency created a charismatic brand with the ­overarching message, “a different kind of car company; a different kind of car.” Riney explained:

All you had to do was look at everything that Detroit did and just do the opposite, and that’s virtually what we did. We guided the company through all that. It was extraordinarily rewarding to find out that this kind of honesty and straightforwardness and integrity that we tried to maintain, actually worked.⁷

Riney found ways to forge relationships with Saturn’s customers:

Our job has not been to create commercials. Our job has been to solve problems …. Our answer is to find ways to make ­people like this company and that took the form of letters we wrote to consumers and a thousand other things besides television ­commercials.⁸

According to Riney, early ads featured the first customers in a community telling others about their new Saturn and encouraging them to buy one. Saturn used real customer stories in local commercials because customers prefer to buy a product or service that someone has recommended to them.⁹

Jean's dance class¹⁰

For example, one customer brags about how Saturn’s traction-control system and antilock brakes cope with winter driving conditions. The spot features Wisconsin resident, Jean Jubelirer, who drives her Saturn through snow to teach her Polynesian dance class.

Riney believed that Saturn owners felt that they belonged to a family so he planned a homecoming for them:

This summer we invited everyone who owned a Saturn to come and visit us in Tennessee, the place their car was born. We called it the Saturn Homecoming.

People could see where their cars had been built and spend some time with the men and women who built them. They could see where the idea for a new kind of car company had taken shape. And we could thank them for believing we could do it.

Forty-four thousand people gave up their usual summer vacation to spend time with us at a car plant—a pretty good turnout for our first big party …. We were all in it together, the way it’s always been.¹¹

Saturn’s homecoming¹³

Customer satisfaction with Saturn was amazing. Saturn finished third, behind two luxury brands, Lexus and Infiniti.¹² Experts rated its brand management higher than three luxury brands, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW.¹⁴

Saturn’s Vice President of Sales, Service, and Marketing Joe Kennedy believes that the enthusiasm of customers has fueled our sales success.¹⁵

Russ Hand, owner of two Saturn stores near Los Angeles, California, summarizes:

The advertising, marketing and positioning of the car in the ­marketplace has been an unqualified success. What’s carrying ­Saturn is the perception it really is “a different kind of company.”¹⁶

Did Saturn Capture My Heart?

My Saturn

With great anticipation, I drove my Saturn toward a Humorous Speech Contest of Toastmasters at a local university. My headlights shone on the entrance to the campus. I stopped in the median to cross the boulevard, but sea oats blocked my view of oncoming traffic.

How could I escape this impasse? I rolled down my window to ­listen for the sound of oncoming cars. I saw the light change at the next ­intersection, noticing how the traffic flowed with the traffic light. The shadows lengthened into night.

Finally, I peeked around the sea oats and dashed across the street. An unlit car sped out of the darkness and smashed into my Saturn. ­People gathered around as I searched inside the crushed glove box for my ­documents. My Saturn was totaled. Stunned, but unhurt, my tears flowed in grief for my irreplaceable Saturn.

Key #7: Trumpet Empathy

How Do You Create Empathetic Promotions?

What Are the Steps in a Promotional Campaign?

Just like Saturn, you can promote with empathy for your target market. These are the steps in planning a promotional campaign:

1. Review the overall marketing plan.
2. Analyze consumer behavior and the communication process.
3. Evaluate previous promotional campaigns.
4. Decide on the overall communication goal and objectives.
5. Establish communication goals, objectives, strategies, and ­budgets for the advertising, direct marketing, Internet marketing, sales ­promotion, publicity, and personal selling components of the ­promotional campaign.
6. Make promotional decisions that use these strategies to fulfill your goals and objectives within the allotted budgets.
7. Monitor, evaluate, and revise the promotional campaign.

What Are the Stages in a Purchase Process?

Each customer moves through the five stages of the purchase process:

1. Gaining awareness of their problem
2. Seeking options for solving the problem
3. Comparing choices
4. Making a purchase decision
5. Timing the purchase

Ask key customers about their purchase process. What event or ­passage in their life initiated their search process? What did they want to know and how did they feel at each stage of their search? What led them to actually buy its product or service? Their answers convey how to ­persuade key prospects to buy your products and services. At what stage are most of your prospects in their purchase process? Plan how your ­promotions will move key prospects along to the next stage in their ­purchase process.

What Are the Elements of a Promotion?

The most important element is conveying a unique selling proposition, a distinctive way your products and services provide the benefits and ­lasting value they seek. Get inside the prospects’ heads so the promotion speaks to their emotions and use their self-talk to support your claims. Be ­empathetic when creating the promotion’s headline, subhead, copy, and call to action:

• Hook their attention with an emotional headline.
• Clarify the benefit with the subhead.
• Drive home the claims with the copy.
• Motivate them with a call to action.

Grab the attention of key prospects with graphics. Depict people who are similar to them or visualize their idealized self. Dramatize their ­problem and demonstrate how the product or service will solve it. Use colors and symbols that convey their emotions.

The business may wish to use a spokesperson to persuade key ­prospects to buy your product or service. Who would influence them with this ­purchase? Is that person a celebrity, expert, sports hero, physician, or another high-profile person? Maybe key prospects identify with a certain lifestyle or image of success. Which spokesperson would best convince customers they will benefit from using its products and services?

What Media Convey Promotions?

Customers can receive your message in many ways:

• Searching the Internet
• Asking friends for recommendations
• Listening to a television or radio program
• Referring to a magazine, newspaper, e-zine, or blog
• Reading publicity
• Attending a special event
• Competing in a contest
• Responding to a direct marketing campaign
• Seeing a poster, sign, brochure, spec sheet, or display
• Evaluating products in a store

Discover which media facilitated and triggered each stage of their ­purchase decision. What specific media vehicles moved them from one stage to the next? These answers determine where, when, and how often you should schedule promotions for your key prospects.

How Do You Evaluate Promotional Decisions?

You have many promotional decisions to make, but start with the most important decision. Rank your options by their empathy with your target market and select the most empathetic option.

Continue making promotional decisions based on their empathy with your target market and create a short list of possible promotions. Then ask a representative group of key customers to select their favorite promotion from these possibilities. Conveying empathy will satisfy key customers, attract similar prospects to the business, and retain their loyalty.

Barnum and Bailey¹⁷

Without promotion, something terrible happens—nothing!

[Phineas Taylor] P.T. Barnum, founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, author, 1810–1891.

Summary

Aesop conveys that an egotistical businessperson is his own trumpeter. Most prospects ignore such hyperbole because they seek benefits, not egotism. Effective promotions are empathetic with key customers and prospects.

Start with the most important promotional decision and select the most empathetic option. Then ask some key customers to select their favorite promotion from a short list of possibilities.

Conveying empathy will satisfy key customers, attract similar ­prospects to the business, and retain their loyalty. The seventh key to enhancing profits is to trumpet empathy.

Trumpet Empathy With the Target Market

Key customers are similar to key prospects, so seek to understand their buying behavior. Conduct a focus group or speak to them at a trade show for the industry or special interest group. Interview key customers and probe for in-depth responses. Keep interviewing key customers until their responses become repetitive. They will predict the buying behavior of key prospects and guide the business to create empathetic promotions.

Interview Guide for Key Customers

Specify what instigated your purchase.

□ Change in your life

□ Observation

□ Occasion

Describe factors that motivated your purchase.

□ Desire

□ Emotion

□ Need

How did you notice a problem?

How did you learn ways to solve the problem?

How did you search for information for comparing your options?

What information led you to decide to buy?

What information influenced the timing of your purchase?

Describe the information that influenced you the most.

What were your requirements relative to features, reputation, and services?

What was the most important factor in your decision?

□ Convenience	□ Low price	□ Reputation
□ Less risk	□ Relationship	□ Uniqueness
□ Long-time value

Describe people and groups who influenced your decision.

What media informed you about the item?

□ Catalog	□ Radio	□ Television
□ Magazine	□ Signage	□ Trade show
□ Newspaper

What publicity informed you about the item?

□ Blog	□ E-zine	□ Promotional items
□ Contest	□ Internet search	□ Referrals/sponsors
□ Direct marketing	□ Materials	□ Website
□ Displays Event	□ Packaging

Describe the options you considered.

□ Competitors

□ Other ways to solve the problem

In general, how did you decide on your purchase?

□ Convenience	□ Impulse purchase
□ Modeling another person	□ Weighing alternatives

How long did you search for information?

Where did you shop for the item and where did you actually buy it?

What buying terms did you seek?

What benefits did you receive from the purchase and what benefits did you receive?

Summarize the Responses of Your Key Customers

1. What usually instigated and motivated their purchases?

2. What specific information did they seem to need at each stage of their purchase decision?

3. What information did they prioritize?

4. Who usually influenced their decisions?

5. What advertising and publicity media did they often use?

6. What options would they consider?

7. Generally speaking, how did they decide on their purchases and how long did it take?

8. Where did they usually shop for the item and where did they buy it?

9. What buying terms were expected and received?

10. What benefits did they want from the purchase and what benefits did they receive?

Make the Following Promotional Decisions

1. Overall communication goal

2. Overall communication objectives

3. Strategy, objectives, budget, message, and media strategy for each program the business will be using:

• Advertising

• Direct marketing

• Internet marketing

• Sales promotion

• Publicity

• Personal selling