If you've been following the Tuned In Process from the start, the step that we're discussing now—articulating powerful ideas—should be easy! After all, you've already spent a great deal of time understanding the unresolved market problems of your buyer personas. You've identified what's likely to resonate with your market, and you've built your product or service to deliver a breakthrough experience. If you've done those things right, then all you need to do next is focus on crafting those golden nuggets that will perfectly sum up what your organization does for your customers. You will want to express those morsels as one or more powerful ideas—phrases and concepts that resonate with your buyers.

The most powerful ideas are those that draw on your company's distinctive competence and map perfectly onto the unresolved problems of your buyer personas. For example, in just one phrase, "tell me how you live," our colleague's architect captures the needs of someone who is in the market to build a custom home. But the phrase also reflects the second architect's distinctive competence: designing houses perfectly suited to individual family's lifestyles. Finally, the phrase draws a sharp line between the second architect and his more famous competitor, the one who only cares about awards.

Powerful stuff.

A remarkable thing about the most successful ideas of this kind is that they rarely have anything to do with describing what a product or service actually does. Instead, the most powerful ideas are used to express to each of your buyer personas what you want them to believe about your organization. Consider the 2004 U.S. presidential election again. You will recall from Chapter 5 that the campaigns identified buyer personas such as "NASCAR Dads" and "Security Moms." Armed with detailed information of these groups' problems, the campaigns created a set of powerful ideas to use during speeches, in position papers, TV ads, and direct mailings, and on Web sites. For example, George W. Bush consistently used the powerful phrase "Stay the Course" in speeches and advertising. This idea particularly appealed to Security Moms, highlighting the idea that their families would be safer from the threats of terrorism if Bush returned to office for another term instead of John Kerry. Interestingly, as we write this, we're in the thick of the presidential primary race in 2008, and many of those same Security Moms from 2004 are wondering if the Iraq war has gone on too long. As of this writing, the presidential candidates are struggling to articulate the particular ideas that resonate with voters who are part of this buyer persona.

You must draw from your work in the first steps of the Tuned In Process to express the powerful ideas that will resonate. What do you want each buyer persona to believe about your organization? What phrases will you use and how? Remember, people are buying from your organization, so how can you best articulate what's important about you? What else, besides just a product, is each buyer persona really looking for? Is it reliability (as with FedEx)? Luxury? The "safe choice?" Remember, Volvo doesn't just sell a car; it sells safety.^[36]

While the process of identifying the powerful ideas that will resonate with buyers is straightforward, it does require that you meet with them to learn about their problems (as we discussed in Chapter 4). This process takes time. We suggest that you meet with as many buyers as it takes to get answers that converge around both a common problem and a way to articulate the ideal solution that your company will deliver. How many meetings is that? It might take ten meetings with representatives of your buyer persona, or even twenty or more.

Then you need to turn these concepts into a powerful idea. This process isn't difficult either, but many people try to skip most of it and jump to the end. Or they try to reverse engineer the process by thinking up words in their own offices without meeting with buyers at all, merely guessing what the buyers would have said. Other people come up with a concept for a new product or service and then try to create a catchy slogan by hiring an expensive agency to "make it sexy"—again, all without speaking with a single buyer. These attempts often lead to disappointing results, because the manufactured ideas don't resonate with the buyers.

Instead, companies are left with meaningless slogans like "An Army of One." This slogan was used in recruitment efforts by the U.S. Army. Even if you understood that the slogan was trying to say that with today's technology a soldier can equal an army (playing up the screens and panels that make warfare look like playing video games), the message fell apart when a real war started with scenes of miserable living conditions and burning Humvees.^[37] Rather than trying to develop a powerful idea through inside-out thinking via a committee, we follow these four steps:

1. Affinity mapping. You've already documented the problems your buyers experience. Hopefully, you've uncovered many detailed and specific problems, because your ideas need to be specific. If your offering saves your buyers money, don't just express the problem with the phrase "I need to save money." Dig deeper. Document the small problems you can solve that will capture the money. The more buyers you interview, the longer the list will be. The best lists include dozens of problems that you can solve. For example, Zipcar tackles problems such as "I don't want to secure or pay for car insurance" and "I don't want to locate and pay for a downtown parking spot" and "I don't need a car most of the time so why should I have to pay for one?"

Once you have documented the problems, you will notice some commonalities among them. Sort these into categories of similar problems, perhaps four or five. You then want to name the groups that you've identified. What you're looking for now is convergence around an idea (or ideas) you can use. For Zipcar, the three problems listed above could all be grouped as economic. Yet some of the same problems could also reside in other groups, such as convenience or the environment. Remember, what makes this process different from normal in-house brainstorming is that you're using real information you've gathered from your buyers, just as we did in Chapter 4.

2. The elevator speech. Once you have mapped and named the groups, you move to the second step—distilling the essence of the message about these groups of problems into a sentence or two, for about twenty-five words total. Many people refer to a statement like this as an "elevator speech." It's the answer you'd give if you were asked about what your company's product or service does but you only had seconds inside an elevator to do it.

The best elevator speeches are in the buyers' words, not your own egocentric corporate gobbledygook, so it is essential that you complete your affinity map before you develop the elevator speech. Otherwise, you will be tempted to talk about your product's features or about why your company is better than the competition. The elevator speech is all about buyers and the problems that your product or service will solve for them.

If your company sells a sales-force management system and you are speaking to a sales representative, your elevator speech might say, "Our product lets you do what you do best—show up on time, carry the right materials, sell, get your boss off your back, and eliminate your reporting nightmare."

3. The Acid Test. You started with specific problems collected from buyers, so your message will likely resonate. But, to be sure, conduct a quick acid test. Locate some people who represent the buyer persona you are selling to and run your elevator speech by them. Then ask the following types of questions:

Once the message passes the test, you know you have a very valuable tool. Your elevator speech should become an important component within all of your marketing materials, including your Web site, brochures, and press releases. You or your salesperson should also use that concise message to answer the question "Why should I buy your product?"

4. Refining the resonator. The elevator speech is your starting point for developing a powerful idea. The final step is to distill it into a hard-hitting and memorable concept. For Lexus automobiles, "The relentless pursuit of perfection." For Miller Lite, "Tastes great, less filling." For Bounty paper towels, "The quicker picker-upper," and for Burger King, "Have it your way." All these ideas are more than catchphrases; they're rooted in a set of problems that these products solve for buyers.

When Mike Volpe joined HubSpot as vice president of marketing, he was the fourth employee at the Web-based marketing platform-provider for small and medium businesses, and its product was just being launched.^[38] One of the first projects he embarked on was creating a new elevator speech to succinctly articulate what HubSpot does. "I was lucky that before I had fixed ideas in my head, I could talk to many people about what we do, and have lots and lots of conversations about what our buyers' problems are," Volpe says. He called people on the company's in-house contact lists and met others in person at industry events such as the MarketingSherpa Summit and on sites such as the Marketing Profs and LinkedIn. "I would say things like 'Tell me about your biggest challenges' or 'Have you done any search engine marketing?' " Volpe says. "We also asked people what words they would use to describe the solution to the problems they had."

Volpe made sure to keep an open mind as he went through the process. "We weren't sure how people would describe their problems," he says. "Then we brought all the things that we heard from about seventy-five individual discussions back to the office and we had an internal debate. We had to do internal soul searching because sometimes we'd hear things from four or five people that wouldn't work for others. And we heard things that were surprising. But the key to the process was that we started from what buyers said, not our own stuff."

Volpe ended up with eight candidates for his elevator speech. "They used similar words, so we bounced the ideas by some trusted advisers to choose the best one, and now we're implementing it," he says.

HubSpot is an inbound marketing system that uses the Internet to turn your company into a central hub for your market, so you get found by more prospects and convert higher percentages of them into paying customers.

Volpe says that all new customers are interviewed to find out why they made the purchase decision, and those reasons are mapped against the elevator speech. He also analyzes people who respond to the message, measuring clicks on the company Web site and blog, and tracking the kinds of buyers who sign up for company offers.

"This kind of messaging development process is critical, because our elevator speech is like our compass," Volpe says. "It helps us to make decisions. While it takes time to get to the messaging, it is worth the effort. Our next step is to refine the HubSpot elevator speech even further into an even shorter statement of a few words that we can use as a tagline."

We find it fascinating that many times the most powerful ideas are developed through collaboration between an organization and a trusted adviser. In a typical scenario, representatives of a company do the hard work of interviewing buyers about market problems and developing their affinity mapping, much like Mike Volpe did at HubSpot. Then, at the time when the elevator speech and the powerful idea are ready to be developed, someone from the outside is called in to help, because the outsider brings a fresh perspective. Here's an example of what we mean.

Steve Cohen grew up in affluent Westchester County, where he learned magic from his great-uncle, who had studied under the renowned Harry Houdini. As Cohen was getting started in the world of professional magic, he lamented that people treated all magicians as interchangeable commodities who could be hired on the cheap for their kids' birthday parties. Without seeing him perform, people just didn't understand that he was one of the country's great sleight of hand artists. They'd ask him questions like "Do you fold balloon animals?" and "My daughter is having a Bat Mitzvah on Sunday. Will you do it for $500?" His pride and his wallet were suffering, so Cohen decided to call in positioning expert Mark Levy to help him develop and articulate powerful ideas about his magic.^[39]

To come up with his position, Levy informally interviewed Cohen over the course of a month. "We'd be hanging out and I'd ask him about his first performance, his favorite magic trick, and the people he enjoyed performing for most," Levy says. "I'd also watch Steve's shows, and I'd ask audience members about their favorite moments."

As Levy gathered a great deal of information about Cohen, a few key elements were converging to form a powerful idea. "Steve grew up near Chappaqua, NY, which is a very wealthy community," Levy says. "He learned to perform for people who, at times, can be demanding: people with money." In fact, Levy had discovered Cohen's distinctive competence—he was comfortable performing in front of the rich and famous and had done so since the age of ten. "Not everyone knows how to entertain affluent people, who have a lot of options on how to spend their time and money," Levy says. "Steve, though, wasn't exploiting this talent. He'd do shows for anyone who called, and his fees were middle-class affordable, no matter who called."

Levy then drilled down into Cohen's distinctive competence. "I asked about the famous people he performed for and Steve gave me a list. Many on the list were celebrities and movie stars, like Michael J. Fox," Levy says. "But buried in it were some interesting names, such as David Rockefeller, Andy Grove, and Jack Welch. All these names had at least one notable thing in common: they weren't just rich, they were insanely rich."

Levy put all those pieces together and realized that Cohen's best position would be as a performer for the super rich. "As obvious as that sounds, no magic performer was in that space," Levy says. "Other performers were billing themselves as the funniest, or the edgiest, or the flashiest, or the coolest. Or adept at performing at trade shows, or at parties, or for children, or at functions, or they were the best at a specific kind of magic. But no one was focusing on people with insane amounts of money and clout."

The powerful idea that resulted from all of this? The Millionaires' Magician, Entertainment for Exclusive Events.

"When Mark first developed my brand identity, 'The Millionaires' Magician,' I fought him tooth and nail," Cohen says. "I was scared it was exclusionary and would frighten people away."

Fortunately Cohen took Levy's advice, because he now commands fees of $10,000 to $25,000 per gig—many times what he was making on the birthday party circuit. In 2005, Cohen made $1 million performing for such people as Martha Stewart, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Paul Fireman, the former chief executive of Reebok. The Millionaires' Magician has a weekly gig at the Waldorf–Astoria Hotel in New York and often lives the lifestyle of the rich and famous. For example, he frequently flies on his clients' private jets to gigs at their vacation houses in places like Aspen and Switzerland. He's been profiled in the New York Times and other newspapers and on TV for shows such as the CBS Evening News and the Today Show. Cohen appeared in Forbes magazine's 2005 special issue about the 400 richest people in the world. "The article's angle? 'Who do these richest people get to entertain them? Why, Steve Cohen, The Millionaires' Magician'," says Levy.

The transformation of Cohen's business based on the powerful idea of the Millionaires' Magician has changed his life. "I've raised my private-show fee by 2,000 percent and often turn away bookings because my schedule is so full," he says. "I've performed throughout the world, including Lisbon, London, Japan, and Paris. And I've so much business that I had to hire a staff to manage my publicity and bookings." Cohen even signed a deal to write a book for HarperCollins called Win the Crowd, and is working on a television special.

All from the power of a few simple words: The Millionaires' Magician.

As a buyer of products and services, you've probably encountered a number of tuned in organizations. And it's likely that your first encounter was with a concept or even just a phrase the organization presented. It may have caused you to think, "Finally! These guys get my problems, and I can't wait to do business with them!" The tuned in company articulates these powerful ideas from your point of view, getting at the core of your market problems. You instantly realize that you've found an organization with a product or service that you want to purchase. We've experienced a few ideas that were so powerful that we had the feeling someone was reading our minds.

Sometimes these powerful ideas are expressed in advertising. The best television, radio, and print advertising draws from the Tuned In Process and articulates ideas that have been discovered by meeting with and understanding buyers and their problems. Unlike most advertising work, which is plucked out of thin air by agencies who don't understand buyers' problems first, the best ads resonate by nailing the essence of a powerful idea.

Powerful Ideas That Resonate:

Articulating powerful ideas that resonate with your buyers is a natural step in the process of getting tuned in. The powerful ideas, concepts, and phrases naturally flow from your understanding of buyers and their problems. However what we see far more frequently are organizations that are tuned out and that try to engineer mission statements, corporate vision documents, and poorly executed advertising taglines. Unfortunately, these efforts usually fall flat.

When ideas are developed through tuned out thinking, they typically cause buyers to say, "I don't want to work with an organization that doesn't understand me or my problems. I'm going to find someone who gets me."

Most corporate messaging of this tuned out variety results in egotistical mission statements developed based on what's important to the company, not what's important for buyers. The big issue here is that these mission statements do not exist for internal use only; many buyers check out these documents as well. And because they're usually created without a true understanding of market problems, they often read as if written by a committee (because they have been)! Consider this one from Bayer:

This mission statement from Bayer is similar to many we see every day, and frankly it just makes our heads' hurt. While it might be OK to serve constituents such as employees and shareholders, it doesn't contain the powerful ideas that cause buyers to say: "Wow. I want to do business with these guys!"

As you develop concepts that will resonate, don't forget that each buyer persona may require something different from your organization, since each has a different problem for your organization to solve. There's no doubt that your ideas are more likely to resonate if you develop them for each buyer persona instead of simply relying on a generic set of broad messages for everyone.

What makes comedians funny? They are tuned in. The great comedians understand what resonates with people enough to make them laugh. A really good one-liner is a powerful idea, just like those from FedEx or Apple. While a great-product or service idea makes us want to learn more, a great joke idea makes us think and then makes us laugh.^[41] Some classics:

Many comedians have a knack for deep insight into certain demographic groups, and very often it is these same groups who enjoy the comedians' performances and buy their products. The humorous twist resonates because comedians are insightful observers, and the ideas they relate resonate with people inside and out of the group being lampooned.

This is true of Jeff Foxworthy, whose distinctive competence is an uncanny knack for understanding blue-collar southerners and performing "common-man comedy." Widely known for his redneck jokes, Foxworthy goes well beyond that to explore the humor in everyday family interactions and human nature. His 1993 comedy album You Might Be a Redneck If . . . topped the charts and sold millions of copies; in fact, he has sold more comedy albums than anyone else ever, and his fans have snapped up a string of twenty-two Foxworthy-authored books.^[42] Jeff knows how to get his audience's attention:

By getting tuned in to his audience, and especially the very people he was poking fun at, Foxworthy created humor that resonated and leveraged his unique understanding and perspectives to build a career. He is now host of TV's popular game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Here's one last example of an organization that really knows how to communicate with buyers. When Dr. Eleanor "Connie" Mariano opened her Center for Executive Medicine, she vowed to offer the same standard of care to her patients that is offered to the president of the United States: the best, available seven days a week and around the clock, with a minimum of bureaucratic delay and overseen by a doctor "who knows you and understands your individual needs," as the center's Web site says.^[43] Now that's a powerful idea—treat every patient like the president!

Mariano knows firsthand about caring for U.S. presidents. While serving as a rear admiral in the United States Navy, she headed the White House Medical Unit through three administrations. Mariano was the primary care physician for presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, overseeing each president's yearly physical (and briefing the world press on the results), performing routine check-ins and check-ups, and mobilizing emergency teams of specialists (such as the one she assembled on just a day's notice to travel with Clinton to Helsinki for a summit with then–Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, less than two weeks after an operation to repair damage to his knee).

After leaving the White House for the Mayo Clinic, Mariano tuned in to people's problems with their existing health-care options. Although she worked at one of the best medical facilities in the country, she learned that patients there still felt like they were being treated as part of a standardized care machine. Doctors often saw dozens of patients per day, and the interactions were brief, impersonal, and largely limited to a packaged set of services. While at Mayo, Mariano began a study of how physicians operated their businesses, meeting with hundreds of patients to get tuned in to their needs and preferences.

"After meeting with hundreds of patients, I became convinced that we needed to bring back the notion of the local doctor who really cared about patient care," Mariano says. "When I met with a group of potential investors for the business, I told them that I believed passionately in this notion and talked about all the barriers we would break down that were getting in the way of this fundamental purpose. I was shocked when several of them walked up to me personally afterwards and wrote checks from their own personal accounts to encourage me to start the practice right now."

The Center for Executive Medicine is built with the market problems of the busy executive buyer persona in mind. The powerful idea Mariano articulates—treat every patient like the president of the United States—is much more than a hollow tagline or trumped-up mission statement. The idea permeates every aspect of her practice:

"I never questioned a call in the middle of the night when I was working for the president," Mariano says. She now applies the exact same principles to her practice. "My goal is to ask the right questions to ascertain what the problem is, and then take all of the issues of dealing with that problem away from them."

As a result of getting tuned in to her marketplace and articulating the powerful idea of health care that is as good as the president's, the Center for Executive Medicine is now one of the fastest-growing, most profitable practices in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

"When I was taking care of the president, it was funny because he'd come in for a visit and we'd have a full team of specialists in the waiting room for my diagnosis to see if they were needed or not," Mariano says. "Imagine that, the doctors were waiting on the patient! If you treat everyone as if they were the president of the United States, you know exactly what is required. The quality of care has to be superior and you make sure you're developing a relationship built on trust. Translating that level of care to every patient who walks through that door is what we're all about. We tell our patients to expect nothing less."