The Clean and Green Club

Another Recommended Book: The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back, by Judith Sherven, Ph.D. and Jim Sniechowski, Ph.D. (Morgan James, 2009).

Would you run the same ad in the New Yorker and the National Enquirer? I sure wouldn’t! I’m a long-time believer in matching audience, offer, and message, and that includes tone.

Yet so many Internet marketers want to pretend that their unlimited bag of tools contains only one item: the pay-per-click ad that leads to a hard-sell long-format sales letter (perhaps stopping at a squeeze page along the way). Heavy on hype, lots of promises and claims…wrapped in a sleazy cloud of scarcity that doesn’t do wonders for the mental state of the marketer OR the prospect. Mind you, these have a time and a place–but that is certainly not every time, every place.

Marketing is never a one-size-fits-all choice, and in this day and age, it’s crazy to try; marketing works much better when the message is closely tuned to the target market.. Think of the most ubiquitous offers you can, and I’ll prove that even they are not for everybody. McDonald’s? Not much appeal for vegetarians. Coca-Cola? Diabetics and health fooders will both tune it out.

Sherven and Sniechowski, who come out of the soft-sell worlds of therapy and relationship coaching, understand this dynamic. They’ve achieved phenomenal success marketing softer products with a softer approach, and helping others to do the same.  I love their focus on authenticity and integrity, which nicely complements the work I’ve been dong with Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. They talk about the difference between “technique acting,” where the actor goes through the motions of showing emotion but doesn’t internalize it, and the much more effective “method acting,” where the character actually feels the emotions. By extension, they note, marketing that focused on “techniqued” approaches is rejected as hype. As soft-sell marketers, they understand the value of technique, but combine it with genuine emotional interest. And I love the idea of “reconciling commerce and care”–and getting well compensated at the intersection.

Sherven and Sniechowski note that in their world, Return On Experience is a more useful measure than Return On Investment. And testimonials may be a key to charting ROE, because it demonstrates the tangible results of the soft-sell marketer’s intangible services. As for the scarcity mentality so beloved by the marketing gurus? They reject it out of hand, saying instead that urgency must be authentic, and the use of scarcity often shows a lack or deprivation in the marketer.

This book will be released on or before May 1 and is available for preorder. I’d planned to save it for next month, but neither of the other two books I looked at this month were worthy of recommendation.