Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

In large part, service marketing is a popularity contest.
Voted Best Personality
Meryl Streep’s observation shows up again in another phenomenon in service
marketing: chemistry.
Time and again, we hear that Doe & Associates failed to get the account
because “the chemistry just wasn’t there.” And time and again, that explanation
is accurate.
But what is “chemistry”? And if the principle of business should be “Let the
best business win,” what does chemistry matter?
When many prospects choose a service firm, they are not buying the firm’s
credentials, reputation, or industry stature. Instead, like the high schoolers we
continue to be throughout our lives, these prospects buy the firm’s personality.
“I just liked them.”

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“I had a good feel about them.”
“It just felt like a good fit.”
Notice carefully the prospect’s choice of verbs: “like,” “feel,” “felt.” The
words do not refer to logic and reason; they refer to feelings.
Service businesses are about relationships. Relationships are about feelings.
In good ones, the feelings are good; in bad ones, they are bad.
In service marketing and selling, the logical reasons that you should win the
business—your competence, your excellence, your talent—just pay the entry
fees. Winning is a matter of feelings, and feelings are about personalities.
Meryl Streep is right. Life is like high school, and success in high school and
service marketing often is largely a question of personality.
Be professional—but, more importantly, be personable.

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P
LANNING
: T
HE
E
IGHTEEN
F
ALLACIES

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Fallacy: You Can Know What’s Ahead
The three cornerstones of planning—predicting the future, seeing what you want
your future to look like, and devising ways to make sure your future comes out
that way—are shaky from the start.
Start with predicting the future. Don’t. People can’t. For example: Every
significant business commentator in the 1950s insisted that the baby boom
would create enormous unemployment when the boomers started entering the
workforce in the 1960s. These experts goofed not once, but twice.
These experts failed to predict that women would flood the labor force. By
the experts’ reckoning, this flood should have created even more massive
unemployment. Yet from 1965 to 1985, the labor force grew 40 percent, while
the number of jobs grew 50 percent. That’s more jobs, in both percentage and
absolute numbers, than at any other time in America’s peacetime history.
To see another bad prediction, look around your office. Dozens of experts
predicted that huge numbers of your employees would be working from home.
Surprise: Everyone’s at work. The number of working-from-home employees is
less than 30 percent of what most people predicted. (These experts failed to
recognize that work performs a social function; most people want to be at an
office.)
Weren’t VCRs going to kill the movies? Movie attendance has surged since
VCRs were introduced. It seems that only bad movies will kill the movies, and
they’re trying.
Wasn’t television supposed to kill books? Well, books and mega-bookstores
are proliferating. The reading group has become a social phenomenon. In fact,
television probably has helped increase book sales. Would Norman
Schwarzkopf’s book have sold as many copies if the Gulf War had been covered
only on radio? And does any technique sell more books than having the author
appear on TV talk shows?
Speaking of bookstores: To appreciate why the future can’t be predicted, go
to your local bookstore. Go to the math section. Look at the top two rows.
Chances are that those books discuss today’s hot topic in mathematics: fractals.
Fractals spring from chaos theory, which suggests the unpredictability and
randomness of everything—even relationships among numbers.
If even numbers are unpredictable, and if you cannot predict something as

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physically based and data-rich as weather (where chaos theory first was
postulated), then you certainly cannot predict people’s attitudes.
Even if you can identify or predict people’s attitudes, it’s not that helpful,
because behaviors don’t always follow attitudes.
Take smoking: Given the almost universal awareness of smoking’s risks
since the first Surgeon General’s report, the virtual disappearance of stars
smoking on television and in movies, and all the public condemnation and
ridicule, smoking should be way down. It’s not.
Take our eating habits: Health consciousness and the growing fear of
cholesterol should have made the American steak house extinct. But six steak
houses have opened in Minneapolis in the last four years, while not one has
closed.
Sane, smart people—almost all planners are both—would have predicted just
the opposite of these behaviors. Again, even if you can identify people’s
attitudes, you cannot predict the behavior that will follow.
So it seems that our efforts to plan are at the mercy of something that Einstein
warned of, years ago:
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose. It’s queerer than we can
suppose.”