The Movement: Here's How Market Leadership Happens

To better serve older consumers, you must understand them better than they understand themselves. The counterintuitive way to do that is to start with you.

Oct 05, 2023

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Great copywriters, content marketers, and digital entrepreneurs know they need to speak the language of the prospect. Marketing is messages, and effective communication uses the right words for the intended audience.

Beyond the words they use, you need to understand the conversation happening in your prospects’ heads. How they think, feel, and behave in the context of the problem you’re solving, which is another way of saying their attitudes.

As you know from prior lessons, when it comes to purchasing behavior and brand connection, 74% of consumers favor feeling valued and understood as a critical factor. That means they're downright begging you to understand the conversation already happening in their heads. In the context we’re working in — older adults — that feeling of wanting to be better understood is compounded by what Joseph F. Coughlin calls the “counterfactual narrative of aging.”

When it comes down to it, you’re not creating desire or changing people’s minds. Instead, you have to speak to what they already believe and value and the fundamental attitudes, opinions, and desires they already have. That’s the conversation going on inside their heads.

The result of getting it right is the kind of connection any marketer and entrepreneur lives and breathes for:

This person “gets” me
This person shares my identity
This person is different like I’m different

So, how do we make this connection happen? Before getting there, we must understand how people make decisions and how persuasion actually works.

Why You’re Not Really Convincing Anyone

You may have heard that the most powerful form of persuasion is to make someone think it’s their own idea to agree with you. This is the realm of reverse psychology, where you tell someone to do the opposite of what you want them to do to get them to do what you really want.

Reverse psychology can work, but it can also backfire spectacularly. It’s not really necessary, though, because outside of coercion, it’s always essentially their idea if someone agrees with you, whether they think about it that way or not.

Let me unpack that because it can cause some head scratching.

Whether you call it marketing or thought leadership, you have people who wrongly believe they’re changing people’s minds with their messages. Put another way, they think they’re in the business of convincing people to do business with them.

Some try straight, logical arguments designed to persuade, only to come up empty. Others resort to an emotional appeal, only to be surprised when it doesn’t connect or shocked when it backfires.

The right logical and emotional messages can work, but there’s something at the root of both that determines whether your words connect. That’s because neuroscience tells us that we don’t really decide with our conscious minds at all.

A deluge of research in recent years about the emotional, irrational, and unconscious dimensions of decision making [reveals that] consumers, i.e., humans, make most of their decisions in life quite unconsciously.1

When you hear that we make decisions at the unconscious level, you may think that sounds like some sort of Freudian gobbledygook. But all it really means is that our attitudes (likes, dislikes, opinions) emanate from a precognitive point before we actually “think” about how we feel about messages we’re faced with.

In other words, by the time your logical brain kicks in, you’re rationalizing what you already feel about the message you’ve encountered. It seems like you’re agreeing or disagreeing with your conscious thought processes, but the reality is you’re convincing yourself to go along with what your unconscious mind has indicated you want to do.

Don’t think of the “unconscious” as some mystical place in the brain. It’s more accurate to say that there are decision-making processes that we are not consciously aware of, which is to say we are unconscious of them.

Social psychologist Erich Fromm gave this useful example2:

If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious.

The key next question is what causes the fear? There must be a belief at work generating this particular emotional response, which manifests itself in a strong negative attitude toward a person at the conscious level.

These underlying beliefs are what psychologists seek to uncover during therapy sessions, and it’s also what we must connect with to engage highly with prospects.

This is a practical example of what we’ve already explored in detail – our rational minds and emotional responses are informed by what we believe. That’s why a logical argument or an emotional appeal can fail to land or even backfire because of a lack of congruence with your prospect’s underlying belief system. This means they’re done with you before you’ve really begun.

If you lead with shared beliefs, however, whatever case you’re trying to make has a much better chance of connecting. You won’t be immediately tuned out or face the backfire effect that comes with butting heads with a worldview or value set.

So, how do you start?

Connect Quickly with Core Values

Steve Jobs famously refused to do surveys, focus groups, and other forms of foundational market research. Instead, he began with his own core values. Then he worked with his high-dollar advertising agency to properly express the attitudes that resonated with like-minded people with campaigns like “Think Different” and “The Crazy Ones.”

And yet, all you hear about when it comes to understanding your prospects is to “ask” them. But if consumers ultimately make their decisions unconsciously, why are we asking them why they do what they do?

Jobs also famously said, “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” It’s your job to figure it out, and that’s why you start with your own values and go from there.

Similarly, Henry Ford once said, “If I asked customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse.” Innovation doesn’t happen from focus groups; it comes from a leader on a mission to solve a problem in a new way.

Don’t misunderstand me — people know what they fundamentally desire deep down. They just can’t generally articulate it, nor can they imagine the innovative solution that a mission-driven marketer or entrepreneur might come up with. And that’s why it’s smarter to begin with your own beliefs and attract people who share your sensibilities.

In other words, you don’t find the core values of your audience. You start with your own, and attract like-minded people with a similar set of values and worldview — because you’re positioning yourself as a leader. And then, from there, you're able to discover the right attitudes to play off of with your messages.

Here are a few “leading” examples (see what I did there?):

Patagonia

When people think of values-based marketing, they primarily consider social issues. That’s not always the case by any means, but in Patagonia’s case, it’s true. The company’s founding story, though, involved a very specific environmental problem and solution compared with the broad environmental and social justice values Patagonia now represents.

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor clothing and gear company, invented an aluminum climbing wedge that could be inserted and removed without damaging the rock face. This not only solved a problem for environmentally conscious rock climbers (which is just about all of them) but it also reflected Patagonia’s founding core values and mission statement:

Build the best products while creating no unnecessary environmental harm.

This is a perfect example of founder-problem fit from way back in 1973. Chouinard’s values and drive to solve the problem of damage done during rock climbing resonated strongly with other climbers — not just at the cash register, but with what they believed and therefore valued.

Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch worked at a traditional advertising agency in Kansas City and was frustrated that he couldn’t help small businesses given the firm’s high rates. So John launched Duct Tape Marketing to use courses and affordable consulting to solve the problem that drove him.

Duct Tape Marketing is a metaphorical brand that reflects the core values the business is built upon. And those values are Jantsch's values as a no-nonsense Midwestern guy.

John’s chosen brand instantly communicates the core values he stands for with the duct tape metaphor — what he offers prospects is useful, pragmatic, and inexpensive. It works, it’s creative, it's multipurpose, and you need it in your business toolbox.

Don’t Mess with Texas

In the early ’80s, the State of Texas was fighting a losing battle against highway litter with its “Keep Texas Beautiful” campaign. The Texas Department of Transportation brought in an Austin-based advertising agency to better reach the 18-to-24-year-old males who did the majority of the littering and had the attitude that it was their "God-given right" to throw trash from their pickup trucks.

The new proposed slogan went right to the heart of Texas pride, not environmental beauty: Don’t Mess With Texas. The reaction of Texas Department of Transportation administrators ranged from apprehensive to hostile, and the first advertisement with the slogan ran without committee approval. Turns out it was a hit.

The campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways by 72% between 1987 and 1990. The slogan was not intended to become a statewide cultural phenomenon, but that’s exactly what happened. Never underestimate the power of value-based messages.

The Bold North

Now, let’s look at a values-based campaign that ended up being the broader positioning for an entire U.S. state. When Minnesota hosted the Super Bowl in 2018, it introduced the slogan “The Bold North” via a commercial during the game that effectively said, “Yeah, it gets cold here. Are you tough enough to handle it?”

Talk about a different approach that goes against the perceived status quo. But did it work?

“The goal was to change people's views or reinforce a positive view of this state,” said Richard Davis, chair of the Minnesota Super Bowl Host Committee.

Richard didn’t understand that he wasn’t going to change people’s view of cold weather. However, the campaign did speak to existing core values of heartiness, resilience, and perseverance, which strongly appealed to people with those values. And now, it remains at the heart of Minnesota’s marketing five years later for attracting conventions, tourism, and relocation.

Get a Mac

“Hello, I’m a Mac.”

“And I’m a PC.”

Yes, we need to now return to my favorite example: The “Get a Mac” series of commercials that ran from May 2006 to October 2009. These ads were perhaps the finest examples of what you need to understand about values-based marketing.

The commercials were short vignettes featuring John Hodgman as the dorkily sweet-yet-virus-prone PC and Justin Long as the creative, hip Mac. These 66 short spots were named the best advertising campaign of the 2000s by Adweek.

The success of the long-running campaign leads one to believe that Apple certainly knew then and, still to this day, knows who its ideal customer is. Of course they do because, as we've explored, they chose their perfect customer right from the birth of the Macintosh itself.

Apple knew they would never get hardcore PC people to switch to a Mac. Instead, Apple used these 66 humorous little stories to target those more likely to “swing” toward Apple after being educated about the benefits by the contrast between the two characters.

Further, Apple knew likely “swing” users saw themselves as (or aspired to be):

Hip
Creative
Non-conformist

So, they created a character that personified the Mac with those traits. And then, they created an opposite persona to illustrate the contrast between the Mac and the geeky Windows PC.

By the end of 2006, Apple sales increased by 39%; they sold a record-breaking 1.6 million Macs in that first year of the campaign. But as you know, the Mac character’s core values were the very same values that Apple had always based their advertisements on, going back to 1984.

And those values were inspired by the personal values of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Also, did you notice that Justin Long and John Hodgman resemble younger Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as the Mac and PC?

Apple created an archetypical hero and a “villain” to represent not only the competing products but the type of person swing users aspired to be and, just as importantly, who they didn’t want to be viewed as.

The “Get a Mac” campaign is my favorite example because you also need to create archetypical profiles of who you’re trying to attract and who you’re not. Not as representatives in your marketing, but as a way to always know what to say and how to say it to your chosen audience.

Who is Your Hero and Villain?

There’s only one crucial demographic aspect to the longevity economy – the market is defined as people over 50. These are the people being ignored by marketers despite accounting for more than half of consumer spending in the United States and 83 percent of household wealth.

Beyond that, we’re talking about all sorts of different kinds of people, and you need to know how they think, feel, and behave in the context of later life. Everything you do to grow your business or serve your clients will emanate from this understanding.

Starting with your own core values (or your client’s) gets you off to a great start. It’s the beginning point for a mission-driven company with spectacular founder-problem fit (insert owner-problem or executive-problem fit as appropriate).

But from there, you need to do some work. Because figuring out what to say and how to say it after you’ve got your foot in the values door is all about the attitudes that result from those core values. And it’s dangerous to assume those are the same as your own attitudes.

More next week.