You can’t beat Thursdays. Dinner with friends is on the calendar.
Chosen restaurants are usually in the back of beyond — somewhere in the Five Boroughs of New York City.
Join us and you might find yourself having Italian on Staten Island, seafood in Far Rockaway or Ethiopian on West 135th Street.
You won’t go begging for variety.
While we’re all good friends, our group still sets ground rules. Nobody talks about himself/herself.
The me-me-me-thing is out.
So the conversation is often more than passable.
Recently a quote from Sir Isaac Newton came up.
‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’
That dates from around 1689 or so, early in the Enlightenment.
To us the message is clear: ‘pay attention to those who know’.
As dinner friends we do just that.
We stand on each other shoulders, so we reckon we’re something like 42-feet tall when together.
Of course, you can stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to your communications.
You can learn from the giants of marketing and advertising.
That should encourage you to make your messaging less about your company and product and more about your target audience.
Bill Bernbach took that approach.
Those like Bernbach — Howard Gossage, David Ogilvy and John Caples — would probably say, you need to concentrate on your customers’ needs, wants and problems.
Why haven’t all marketers learned this? Where’s the enlightenment?
After all, your prospects’ perceptions outweigh a CMO’s opinion about his/her brand.
That opinion often equates to what people already know or believe. Will that quicken heartbeats? Not really.
You don’t have to be Isaac Newton to understand that the answer to marketing problems — both online and brick and mortar — lies in the way customers think.
They’re the ones who dip into their wallets for you.
So write accordingly.
Instead of beginning Web content or an email, with words like ‘We’, ‘I’, ‘Our’, ‘My’ or ‘Here at the XYZ Company’, put your customers first.
Ban the ‘me’ words.
Make your first word ‘You’, then craft your customer benefit message from there.
That way you’re on the shoulders of giants instead of struggling somewhere below.
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