Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling, by Josh Weltman
Real-life ad man Weltman was a co-producer of the Mad Men TV show for several years. And this book has a lot of good advice for marketers, especially those whose strategies rely heavily on advertising. More importantly, Weltman leads off with excellent lessons in consumer psychology—and to me, those are some of the best insights in the book. A few examples:
- Happiness is not about what you have, but what you EXPECT to have—and how closely that matches reality (p. 10)
- Forget “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The reality is that once you build that mousetrap—and whether it’s better is subjective—you have to TELL the world (p. 11). For every example like Google, where the world actually did beat a path to its virtual door, thousands of businesses foundered with excellent products strangled by poor marketing.
- Never do a good promotion for a bad product; it will kill your business (p. 12)
- Solving customer problems is more about DISCOVERY than invention; we’re more curious than creative (p. 13)
- (My favorite) Advertising (which I would broaden to include marketing generally) is about CONFIRMING, not changing, prospects’ minds (pp. 14-16)
- Engage both adrenaline (emotional response) and dopamine (explanation); if the main headline confuses, the subhead must explain—or vice-versa (pp 25-28). Emotion cements the brand, while facts cement the sale (pp. 38-40).
Weltman also provides the recipe for a successful advertising developer: keen observer; good listener; endlessly curious; and, interestingly, “pathological inability to lie” in their ads (pp. 15-16, emphasis added). He noted that even Mad Men’s Draper wrote truthful ads, even though truth in other aspects of his life was often lacking.
Advertising [or marketing] is a strange business because different companies (or parts of a company) are responsible for making the brand promise (the agency or marketing department) and for keeping or exceeding that promise (design, manufacturing, distribution, etc.). Both are required to build a brand (p. 33).
For Weltman, successful marketing answers one of four questions, each used at a different stage in the customer lifecycle—and each requiring different ads (or other marketing messages):
- What is it? (aimed at prospects who don’t know the product or company)
- Why do I need it now? (creating scarcity or urgency or bargain-frenzy among those who are wavering or not yet committed—with these, be careful not to cannibalize the 20 percent who would buy anyway without a discount or other incentive)
- What makes it different? (why they should choose you over a competitor)
- Who else thinks it’s good? (social proof and community building—these ads are aimed at your existing customers, to turn them into raving fans)
By far the biggest portion of the book explores these four types, the situations to use them in, and what you can expect to happen. The important thing is that each marketing piece should only address one of the four, because the different messages aim at different market segments with very different needs.
I’m a long-time believer in segmenting the market; if you’ve heard me speak, you’ve probably heard me discuss marketing differently to Deep Greens, Lazy Greens, Non-Greens, and Green-Hostiles. But for me, the big insight of this book is to also segment by stage in the buying process and the lifetime customer cycle. And I like the idea of using tag lines that unify these different stages (p. 61).
The market also shifts by demographics and psychographics, of course. In one of many case studies, Weltman goes through the process of advertising an SUV specifically to communitarian Generation Y, with a brilliant spot where sequential users do something cool with the car, then toss the keys to the next user (pp. 75-77). That’s useless to individualistic, antiauthoritarian GenXers but sings to digital natives Millennials who create their own participatory Internet daily (pp. 147-148).
Another counter-intuitive case study involves setting expectations low enough that a shaky brand can keep its promise (pp. 91-93)—an advertising heresy! And a refreshing admission that not all marketers believe in the products they’re hired to pitch. (Personally, I turn down assignments that go against my values or my quality standards.)
And I love his focus on the power of the right words, noting again that persuasion requires both fact and emotion. That means ruthlessly going over copy drafts to change weak words like “hungry” into powerful ones like “voracious” (p. 120). And remembering that once your prospect agrees to your key principle, persuasion is happening.
Unlike most marketing authors I’ve read, Weltman sees online as fundamentally different than offline marketing. The final nine chapters focus on online: how to demonstrate values and vision through empathy, what stories to tell to whom (pp. 161-162), four key strategic questions (p. 165), and why to change people’s sense of what’s possible (167-168).
