Creating Business Magic. David Morey
not limit or force the hand of today’s increasingly knowledgeable consumer, but instead provides cost, quality, and value comparisons. Technology is an enabler here. The Internet has trained us all to expect Choice. If we aren’t confronted by what we have been taught to expect, we quickly find Choice on our own.
•Change usually leads to more and newer choices. Change used to induce anxiety in many people, but ever since Steve Jobs revolutionized personal electronics, consumers have anticipated change positively. These days, the negative dynamics of political leadership have been making change especially attractive to voters. “Anybody but” has become a viable—and often winning—candidate everywhere.
•With more Choice and more Change, Customization is now more attainable than was ever before anticipated. During the bygone era of mass marketing, consumers accepted the tube sock dictum of “one size fits all.” With the technology-driven penetration of the controllable search concept, consumers now accept, embrace, and demand the idea that “I can find that one size that fits just me.”
•Convenience is a known decision driver. It is taken for granted in a world of increasing Choice. Although early adopters will seek out a new idea, once they adopt it, they expect to find it distributed ubiquitously. What is more, in contrast to the early days of the personal computer, they expect the initial usage experience not to give them too many headaches. Nor do they want the burden of thick instruction manuals in seventeen different languages, none of which ever quite come across as native to anyone.
•Connection is not a new driver, but it is now empowered by new tactics and new media. The urge to associate with “people like me, people I like, and people I’d like to be like” still pulls consumers toward brands and voters toward candidates.
These six factors are essential today to great marketing and are at the core of how great magicians manage audiences and their perceptions. In fact, the greatest magicians take command of these 6 Cs. Take, for example, the legendary Spanish card magician Juan Tamariz. His virtuoso performance allows the audience to feel in control, even as he fools them badly and beyond any logic. He offers anyone and everyone just the card they want, he constantly changes the tempo and jolts the audience with ongoing surprises, he acknowledges every helper by name, creating almost intimate connection and making it all seem completely and utterly simple; and finally, he brings the audience to a sense of connection, earning a standing ovation every time. For Tamariz, all 6 Cs are on magical performance overdrive.
Or consider the late, great Harry Blackstone Jr. When he asked for children to join him on stage, he ceded control to the audience—any kid who could make it to the stage was welcome. Every parent within reach of the stage could choose whether to let their child join. Then Blackstone, stepping out from the wings carrying a small bird cage and canary, invited the children to place their hands on the cage, on the top, bottom, back, front—on all the sides. By the time every kid stretched out a hand, the cage and even most of the magician were covered. Then, in a flash, the cage and bird would vanish from Blackstone’s hands and the children, who were invited to look under the magician’s coat—still more ceding of control—could find nothing. Imagine the connection Blackstone made with a vast swath of his audience literally touching him. At that point in the show, his audience was prepared to suspend disbelief and come along for the ride. They were sold.
In business, the 6 Cs are the instruments essential to performing an autopsy on a dead brand or business:
1.Did the deceased take away that sense of Control (as the major airlines so often do)?
2.Did the cadaver before me narrow choice (in the whole category or in its own portfolio)?
3.Did the victim stop changing and refreshing?
4.Did the stiff insist on positioning itself as “one size fits all?”
5.Was this floater inconvenient even for its most loyal users?
6.Did the dear departed discourage the connection of one user
to another?
The 6 Cs will help you engage and hold today’s most difficult audiences, consumers, and voters. And in our hyper-challenging environment, we need all the help we can get.
Finally, we need to delve more deeply into magic by asking how we can learn from the stage instincts of today’s great magicians so that we can better understand how each member of our audience—our consumer—thinks, feels, and acts. Magician, marketer, political candidate, we each sell something to somebody. So how can we “think ahead” (as magicians put it)—think one step ahead—to understand and thereby influence the purchasing process through which audiences/consumers/voters are led by their perceptions?
How? Get the answers to the ten questions that follow. (Magicians get the answers through long experience and close observation. Marketers—well, marketers simply ask consumers.)
1.What surrounds your customers’ world? In what context do they live? Overall, what are the most critical dynamics, forces, changes, products, services, and brands that touch them every day? How do they perceive that world? Every magician asks: Who is my audience? It’s one thing to perform for a group of children on Saturday afternoon, but quite another—as John McLaughlin has done recently—to work corporate events for audiences of electrical engineers, information scientists, or mainline journalists and government officials.
2.How do they see the future? Is it headed in the right or the wrong direction? Remember to ask your customers the classic question Ronald Reagan planted in the minds of voters to win the 1980 election: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” What do they expect from your company or brand in the future? What do they expect from your competitors? A great magician will always try to understand how his or her audience experienced magic in the past—in order to aim his or her show toward the future. Has this audience seen an excellent magician before, or a magician that in some way disappointed? And how has this conditioned their expectations?
3.What do they dream about? What is their ideal product, service, or offering in your category? Since 1984, David Morey has worked with partner Scott Miller and political pollster Pat Caddell as they developed the groundbreaking “Candidate Smith” research, which asked voters not to react to existing candidates, but to construct their own perfect, ideal candidate for president. Once you understand your customers’ ideal product and service brands and brand relationships, you can probe ways to fill in the gaps. For a magician, the relevant question is: what will your audience perceive if they believe you really can do magic?
4.What’s in their hearts? What emotional drivers are most important to your customers? Because more and more decisions are being made impulsively, more and more of marketing is driven by emotion. For example, in politics, one of the most telling measurements of any campaign is the degree to which people believe that a candidate “cares about people like me.” Behind this question is a combination of curiosity and cynicism. “Can this person understand my life? And can I understand this person and the way she or he makes decisions?” They want to know the same thing from the companies and brands that they decide to deal with in the marketplace. In magic, the best magicians, such as David Copperfield, don’t have to deal with quite the same factors, but they do work hard to show they care about and treat their audiences well; and, too, they seek to establish an emotional context for their illusions—to touch the audience’s hearts as well as their minds and embed illusion in a meaningful framework.
5.Where is their pain? What are your customers missing that they most need? What do they worry about at night? For example, in the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s and the recession of the late 2000s, far too many companies received funding—without being able to articulate what specific marketplace “pain” their offerings uniquely addressed. Chances are those companies’ stock certificates are about as coveted today as two-day-old sushi. Similarly, the magician’s job is often to take his or her audience away from any pain they feel in their lives, even if temporarily, and at their best, to inspire and help these audiences to rise above pain, and to help relieve it by the wonder of magic, all the time working to entertain and astonish.
6.What’s relevant and different? Value is created by relevant differentiation—by the benefits