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The Pawnshop Chronicles: Street Wisdom for the Business World by Jack E Rossin Chapter 7 Essential message Part II: Creating the Message If you could say just one thing to your customers, what would it be? It sounds simple. It’s not. Advertising agencies, marketing consultants, and research directors have fretted for years over what each client’s core message is. What makes the task more complicated is that the message must be differentiated from what the competition is saying. And, of course, it has to be relevant. Finding that essential message takes experience and perseverance and your current customers to help you define it. Customers have already figured out what your message is. If you ask them the right questions, you’ll begin to understand exactly why they made that choice so that you can articulate that to recruit new customers. Finding the Essential Message We took lots of rifles into pawn. Customers would hock them the day after hunting season, and pick them up the following spring. Guns were one of those things that people rarely left behind. One exception was a 22-caliber rifle that went unclaimed. We soon learned that it was because the rifle had a nasty defect: the bolt that allowed you to cock the gun had a piece missing and wouldn't stay in the chamber. The rifle would still fire, but the bolt would slide out the back. When we tried to sell it, people who understood guns would have nothing to do with it. It was marked $39.95, but we couldn't get $5 for it—until a certain woman walked into the store. She was pretty. She was in her late 20s. She had four young, noisy kids trailing behind her. She said she felt unsafe in her neighborhood and wanted a rifle for protection. Nate broke into a big smile. He went to the back room and came out with The Rifle. "This is a safety rifle," Nate explained. "The bolt comes out of the rifle and you can store it separately. It's for parents who want a gun in the house, but need it to be safe so the kids can't hurt themselves." "Wrap it up," the woman said, and paid us $39.95. It was just another day in the pawnshop. Every day was an adventure in selling at the pawnshop. Because we were almost always selling used merchandise, we wouldn't learn until we were with a customer what the problem with the product was, so we had to be quick on our feet. Selling the kind of merchandise that we did forced us to become very creative. I couldn't have had a better teacher than Nate. He instinctively knew how to get to the essence of the sales message quickly. Calling the broken gun a Safety Rifle is an excellent example of powerful messaging. It turned the negative feature of the rifle into a positive one. It also played to the concerns of the buyer. Developing that single sentence that takes into account the target audience, what their needs are, and how our product can satisfy those needs, is at the heart of effective messaging. At the very core of all marketing efforts is messaging. It is a directional sentence that completely understands the needs of a specific customer group. It is very focused. It is very customized. It is intended to work best against a specific audience and the issues they care about. It is not a blanket statement for everyone about everything. Messaging is where the formal process of marketing should start once you're clear on who the customer is. There's no use talking about advertising, media, PR, direct response, or even sales strategy until you've first determined what the messaging of your product or service is, because it will influence all of those other activities. In 1992, the Clinton for President Campaign was in trouble. Their senior advisor, James Carvel, knew the problem was that his candidate had not yet focused on the messaging that could excite the electorate. In 1992, people were concerned about the economy and jobs and paying their bills. They worried about how they could send their children to college and save for retirement. But, on the campaign trail, the candidates were all talking about crime, abortion, and gun control—all things that the public cared about, but nothing that could electrify the voters. “It's the economy, stupid” became the rallying cry within the Clinton campaign. From that moment on, everyone in the campaign knew exactly what message had to be woven into every speech, press release, commercial, and talking point. Developing messaging is part creative, part experiential, and part entrepreneurial. It requires that you understand everything about the product, the target, competition, and human nature. A key to this process is interviewing your customers. You can get to the messaging quickly by hearing customers give the specific reasons why they do business with you. But, be prepared for a surprise; it's not always going to be the reason you think. The president of a company that sells mattresses by phone and delivers them within two hours thought the reason for their success was low prices. Research proved otherwise. Their own customers said they did business with them because of the convenience of not having to shop in a store and not having to lug a mattress home. In fact, many customers thought their prices were high relative to the competition. Before you start creating marketing communications, isolate the one thing your company provides to customers that solves their needs and is different from what your competitors are saying. Use that messaging to influence all of your other marketing and communications’ efforts. Jack Rossin is a marketing consultant who specializes in Presentation Skill Training. For more information how he could make your team present more dramatically and more successfully, visit his web site at www.jackerossin.com or call 617-527-0265. To Chapter Eight
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