Marketing

Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction

Distractions, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging

One of the main causes when a person gets distracted is because of boredom. The other three being hedonic adaption, negativity bias and rumination. As per Nir Eyal in his book Indistractable, the way to avoid boredom is to get curious. Even very mundane tasks as per him can be made interesting if we are curious about something. Curiosity can kill boredom and can stop you from getting distracted

Marketing is applied psychology. What is valid for the individual in his daily routine is also valid for the person who gets your marketing message.

If your message is boring, the prospect will get distracted from your message and move to something else. So you need to make the prospect get curious about your offerings. That’s the only way she will be interested in interacting with you further.

When do people become curious. In my opinion when the message has something directly to do with THEM. Which means the message should look like it’s ONLY TO them and ABOUT them. If the message anywhere screams marketing, it will automatically get banished.

So the messaging has to look one – on – one (to them) and should target the conversation that could be going on in the mind of a prospect (about them). It cannot be a sermon. It has to be specific because people now have a very short attention span.

Which brings us to the most difficult part. Understanding the conversation in the mind of the prospect, building multiple communication pieces which invoke curiosity in her mind.

And you then need to have staying power to ensure, because people respond when they want to respond. If you don’t have the marketing stamina to last long enough then you won’t be able to win.

Till next time then….we will continue on this

Carpe Diem!!!

Dissatisfaction is progress in the market

Lateral Marketing, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, segmentation

Do lions get dissatisfied or for that matter zebras or giraffes. My guess is “No”. Lions and zebras and all the other animals have more or less remained as they were more than a 100000 years back. The lion in the image above still hunts its prey when it feels hungry and then just goes and rests with its family exactly what its ancestors did a hundred thousand years back.

Humans have evolved over that same time. One of the reasons is the fact that we had real estate in our head, due to which our brains could grow and evolve and are still evolving. In one of my earlier posts I wrote about how scarcity is the mother of all development. If we don’t have food, we try to find ways to grow food, we create GM seeds so that pests and weather don’t impact them. If we don’t have water we seed clouds or desalinate water from the sea.

I will qualify that while scarcity causes us to think of solutions, its the dissatisfaction with the scarcity which is the mother of all progress. If we are not dissatisfied with the fact that we are short of something and we need to find ways to get out of the situation, we would never move from being cavemen to what we are today. Not being able to find food would have made us look for ways to build weapons that could be used to kill wild animals and help us not get killed.

But its this same dissatisfaction which cause us to feel bad, feel low etc. Its what gets us emotional about issues. And the negativity with the issues causes us to also do negative things like arson, robbery etc. So its a double edged sword.

Marketing and product management is all about finding the dissatisfaction in the market and providing a solution. If you can clearly identify different areas of dissatisfaction, you can segment the market in different ways. Quite a lot of times the dissatisfaction is latent…..nobody knew they wanted a car versus a horse carriage.

But yes people were fed up of dirty taxis, high fares & tantrums and someone thought of ride sharing without owning any taxis.

However more often then not you don’t create a product or service from scratch. You have to mould what you have, by adding features or deleting some, to meet a specific need of a specific segment of the market and then carry your messaging in a way that the market gets it. I would highly recommend you to read Lateral Marketing by Philip Kotler to learn the frameworks of how you can create new segments/uses by making subtle changes in your products.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Every education has a price to be paid

coaching, education, training

In ancient times in India there was a concept of paying fees (dakshina) to the teacher (guru) after the education was over. It could be in terms of whatever the teacher wanted. Money as medium of exchange was not so prevalent in my opinion hence it was generally in kind and typically what the “guru” wanted. The teachers were reverred more than God because it was thought that the route to reach God would not be feasible without a good teacher.

Yesterday while I was listening to a show on ETNow a finance TV channel in India, there was one a very mature fund manager Samir Arora who was getting interviewed.

Through the interview he made a statement which suddenly caught my attention. While he was talking in terms of the financial markets in India, the statement is true for every field. Every education that you get has a price to be paid. In the financial markets, while I have read a lot of books and heard a lot of lectures, what you learn when you start playing the “game” is invaluable. I for example have learnt that I don’t have the psychology to trade even though I know most of the rules.

While there’s nothing better than getting a real life education, it can take a lot of time even though you may not be paying money but you will end up paying with your time.

That’s where experienced coaches can help, if they are in the field you’re wanting to take. That’s why I pay to join programs from Joe Polish and Jay Abraham and others. These kind of coaches can help speed up your learning process, so you save on time.

If you want to save time to get the experience faster, pay the fees to a coach, because you will have to pay for the education either in terms of money or in terms of time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing and use of education

education, Marketing

I have written a few posts on this subject earlier also. What is different in this post is that I have been seeing which industries do more of this and which not so much.

What I have observed is that in India, its the financial industry – specifically Portfolio Management Companies and Equity investment houses and to a certain extent Mutual fund companies that do a lot of work towards educating their customers, in their own different ways.

So you could have representatives of fund houses come on business channels and on internet properties and talk about their view of where the market is going. Generally the underlying point of the discussion is related to the kind of fund they are launching.

I have already written earlier also about the enormous amount of knowledge that Raamdeo Aggarwal of Motilal Oswal spreads free of cost with his Wealth Creation studies. Its an enormous amount of effort these people would be going through to create these wealth creation studies. The amount of knowledge I have got through reading these free reports, of the Indian stock markets, is more than all the knowledge I have gained over the years by buying and reading books from international authors. to be fair to the international authors, there are certain nuances about the Indian stock market that are different than the more matured US stock markets.

An author whom I have written about earlier also is Saurabh Mukherjea. He weaves interesting stories in his books and includes a lot of background information about the Indian stock markets. He runs a company by the name of Marcellus Investments. You could read the books to gain the knowledge that he is giving or you could also understand the philosophy of their investment process. If you like it, you could actually also park your money with them. He has recently come out with a book Diamonds in the Dust:Consistent Compounding for Extraordinary Wealth Creation, again with a lot of in-depth examples and case studies.

All this education , in all the three examples, is given on absolute neutral basis, but all of them do inform about their philosophy and how their funds work, in passing. So if you like their philosophy you could decide to use them for your financial goals.

So as an example, since I had gained so much free education from Motilal Oswal, I felt obliged to open my demat account with them , when I wanted to enter into the stock market. Indirectly that investment in freely educating me, by Motilal Oswal, has resulted in consistent business for them.

See how you can utilise education to indirectly influence your prospects.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!