“Born to Buy”

By William D. Hinsch

I’ve spent a lifetime intrigued by sales, salesmen and the process of inducing another human being to make a buying decision. Yet, I am not a salesman.
I wish I had the ability to inspire a buyer to reach into their pocket and accept my offering, and thereby change their world for the better while allowing me to live another day. This process is one of the most important forces in our society, yet it is under-recognized and often misunderstood.
As my friend Chris Anderson says, "Nothing happens until there's a sale." That quote sums up why so much effort, expense and emphasis is placed upon the selling function in every office in every corporation in the land, whether it's the recruiting department at Harvard or the telemarketing room at Hewlett-Packard. All need to persuade someone else to embrace what they have in a scarce world of potential customers.
Today, a sea change is occurring in the advertising world, one that is shaking the foundations of commerce. It is bound up with the Internet and the non-acceptance of old modes of advertising. A rising class of buyers -- variously referred to as Generation Y, Millennials, Generation Next , the Net Generation -- have concluded that the old models do not work, and they actively bypass, thwart, ignore and supplant those aging sales strategies. To wit, the death of newspapers and the ascendancy of TiVo. If you are contemplating a $3 million, 30-second ad on Superbowl XLlll, think again.
These Echo Boomers -- raised on video games and suckled on free downloads, free software, free news and yes, free advertising -- don't respond to the "normal" impetus to buy that their forebears of only a generation or two ago embraced. Most of us are now more sophisticated, and many companies are left wondering "who moved my customers?"
That’s the bad news. Now for the good news.
I remember stealing a book from the library when I was a kid called “Hidden Persuaders,” by Vance Packard, who saw malevolence all around him from his Madison Avenue suite. What he described in his book shocked a naive public. They found they were being manipulated by crafty ad men with practices cribbed from the research papers of psychologists and re-purposed to disarm the natural defenses of the buying public, triggering them to part with their money, usually without thinking.
Marketers were tapping into our collective monkey brains. That was a scary thought in 1957, a time when dangers large and small seemed to lurk everywhere. The publishers of “Hidden Persuaders” sold this as a grand conspiracy, which was a clever marketing tactic in itself. To sell the book, the publishers shot across the bow employing the very methods the book sought to reveal.
Machiavelli would have chuckled. And I was smitten.
I didn't see anything wrong with what the whiz-kid promoters were doing. Instead, it fascinated me that people had “buttons” that could be punched like an automaton to impel them to take an action they secretly wanted but would be aghast at if they found that their psyches were being manipulated, much like a virus lurking in the background ready to wreak economic havoc.
I was vigilant in noting the effects promised in the book, and I immensely enjoyed understanding what was at play even as my mother ordered useless stuff from late-night infomercials that were the brainchild of Ed Valenti, inventor of the infamous Ginseng Knife, whose dummy Ron Popeil was Charlie McCarthy to Valenti's Edgar Bergen. Popeil made famous such Valenti aphorisms as "But wait, there's more!" and "Now … how much would you pay?"
Each phrase followed the addition of another item or feature to the catalog of a product's advantages or attachments. The advertisements frequently answered the "how much?" question with pseudo prices, followed by a dramatically lower actual price, which was also a Valenti creation.
This was an early example of utilizing the Contrast Principle, whose ultimate expression in marketing is the Perceptual Contrast, which takes advantage of a human trait of noticing differences among things, not absolute measures. We are shown a poor product first, then made to feel exultant upon discovering a better product on its heels. Consumers are prompted to embrace a service that is “half-price” from its quoted pseudo value, feeling they have landed a real deal. In fact, they have been manipulated to buy when they otherwise would not have considered parting with their money.
Fast-forward 50 years. On one level, everything has seemingly changed. But not really. The terms are just different, as redefined by a new generation. On the most fundamental level, the old rules still apply. But opportunity now lies in creating unique and sustainable ways to position the few things that have changed in such as way that marketers are able to leverage the things that haven’t.
Webification of the market has merely repositioned the process. The product is now out there for everyone to see immediately, which on one hand means that if you develop a unique approach and it’s a good one, it can go virally successful overnight – light years faster than before. At the same time, it means copycats will be on your scent as soon as they detect your success.
The success of the Internet means that you have to create sustainable ways to perpetually nuance your message while at the same time sustaining a consistent look and feel in the way you present your product or service merely to stay even with the wolves.

The Internet age forces companies to take a fresh marketing approach to keep their competition at bay.

Ten years ago, I became the founding artist at Root Learning (www.rootlearning.com). It grew into a global business solutions leader by streamlining how corporations communicate strategies to their organizations by using a unique application of graphics combined with narrative learning technologies.

At Root, core research showed that people remember only 10% of what they read, but 50% of what they see or hear. Leveraging that truth, we were able to adapt our graphically-based learning tools to meet specific customer needs in such a way that communicated messages cleaner and faster--and with significantly higher retention.

Since then, I’ve gone on to found my own firm, LearningVisuals.com. I've developed methodologies to help companies streamline their sales messaging similarly.

After attending The White Paper Success Summit of 2010, I will gain powerful, cutting-edge insights. My intention is then to midwife "Born to Buy" solutions for my customers and deliver new business into their hands