Let me tell you a story. About a year ago, I started getting into online marketing in preparation of starting a business. Fair game, right? Split testing, Keywords, the whole google-fu. But the most important aspect of online marketing isn't ninja-SEO, or conversion secrets out of Japanese dojos. It's copywriting. And copywriting is like all other writing. You improve by practice, and you improve by studying the masters. So I set out to find some masterfully crafted ad copy.
Now through my previous study, I stumbled over the ads of John Carlton. One of them, "Testosterone" caught my attention. It was one of his best converting, it was older, and I was incredibly far removed from his target market. After all, he was trying to sell body building supplements, and if there's a thing I don't do, then it's bodybuilding. I mean look at me, I'm skinny as a twig. I look at gyms from the outside, and that's that. So I thought, perfect, I'll start with that one.
So I started chewing my way through this 5 page ad, this machine gun feed of bullet points. I was trying to reverse engineer what he did. I get exited by it. This is good. I like this. I...I want to buy it? What the hell? That moment, I knew Carlton had me. I'm wary of ads. I toss most of them without reading further than 3 lines, the words BS written all over my face. But there, he got me.
So you think you're dealing with low hanging fruit there?
Minimizing the amount of marketing literature you expose yourself to is a good start. In fact, that's a good way to reduce your exposure to many of the weapons in marketers' vast arsenal. Exposure to marketing materials should be limited only to what is necessary to evaluate what objective benefits are offered with a product or service, and what it costs.
One technique is to read those minimum necessary materials, take notes on the actual objective costs and benefits, omitting all marketing buzz, and then walk away from it until any excitement from what you read fades. Later, you can review those notes with a clearer head. Or better yet, hand them off to someone else to evaluate, who hasn't been exposed to the propaganda.
It's also a good idea to read Robert Cialdini's Influence, and then reread it periodically. It's an excellent (but far from complete) run-through of some of the most common tools used by marketers, and techniques for resisting them.
I don't have TV, and when I go to somewhere that does have, it's very easy for me to become mesmerized.
I actually agree but will add that if the product is, say, a cloud service I think the wrap will work because it can create an image in your mind and you aren't holding a physical object.
So perhaps selling boxed software it doesn't apply that much but with a cloud service you don't really know what goes on by the wizard behind everything. So you could spin some story much easier talking about how great you've got things setup or done better than your competition.
I'm reminded of all the web hosting companies that talk about and show pictures of their data centers which are actually just the place they have their machines racked at. But they don't tell you that they make it seem by wording to be their data center with the multiple feeds and diesel generators going into explicit details about things that most people don't know about (which is another way to sell to talk about things that confuse people that they, for some reason, put a higher value on oddly enough.)
Second, it's iffy whether this advice generalizes to other types of products. It's obvious when it comes to art and antiques. It's less obvious when it comes to technology products.
But to some extent, while this article doesn't provide good evidence, the "story" concept can arguably be applied to many other consumer products. Most consumer products are purchased at least in part for status, regardless of the buyer's conscious intent.
For example: A tech savvy person buying a laptop may actually need the laptop, but anything they buy over the bare necessities is likely driven largely by the perceived status boost obtained thereby, not by the extra convenience those features will afford. The reason it feels good to imagine having lots of computing power at your finger tips is not that you are conceiving of that convenience, but that your status-increasing hardware is perceiving that in that fantasy, you have higher status than you do now. You are imagining being the kind of fancy schmancy person who has a computer with that much power. Whether you realize that consciously is irrelevant.
The telltale sign of this is that after purchasing the laptop, the thrill of those features dies off rapidly. That's not just that you're getting used to the convenience; that would take longer. Rather, your status seeking instinct has assimilated the high speed computer into "status quo" and has turned its avarice to other status symbols.
So in that sense, "stories" attached to consumer products can increase their value. There's a reason that Steve Jobs liked to mention that the Titanium PowerBook was made of the same alloy used in space shuttles, for example.
What I wonder is whether businesses are as susceptible to that kind of pressure. My gut tells me "no", but perhaps the people making the buying decisions will still want to bring high status talismans back to their "tribe".