MARKETING STRATEGY MADE EASY

people dont buy for your reasons, the buy for their reason

#1. Marketing is forget your want, forget about everything but your customer. Our Marketing Strategy starts, ends, lives, and dies with I your customer.
So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want—forget about everything but your customer!
And what your customer wants is probably significantly different from what you think he wants.
#2. Customer decide based their sense and preference
Try to visualize your customer. He’s standing before you.
He’s not frowning; nor is he smiling. He is perfectly neutral.
And the sensor is taking in all of the sensory data around it—the colors, shapes, sounds, and smells of your store, or your office, or the restaurant where you’re meeting for lunch.
The sensor is also taking in sensory data from you: how you are standing or sitting, the color of your hair, how your hair is combed, the expression on your face—Is it tense? Are you looking directly at him or off to the side?—the crease in your slacks, the color of your shoes—Are they shined? Are they worn? Are the laces tied?
Nothing escapes the sensor as it absorbs the stimuli from the environment.

Nothing escapes your customer as he absorbs the information by their sense. They uses this information to make his decision to buy or not to buy.

Even though your customer’s Conscious Mind is actively absorbing all manner and forms of impressions, it is totally unaware of most of them. It’s your customer’s Unconscious Mind.
It’s in your customer’s Unconscious Mind where all the action is.
What is your customer’s Unconscious Mind?
It’s like a vast, dark, underground sea in which a multitude of exotic creatures swim about, single and in schools, silently seeking out food, each with entirely different needs and tastes.
Those creatures are your customer’s expectations.
And the sea in which they swim is a truly foreign place to your customer.

#3. Customers dont know or never say about their preference
In a print ad, tests have shown, 75 percent of the buying decisions are made at the headline alone.
In a sales presentation, data have shown us, the sale is made or lost in the first three minutes.

And all that happens after that psychographic moment of truth, after the buying decision is made, is that the Unconscious Mind sends its answer up to the Conscious Mind, which then goes back out into the world to assemble the rational armament it needs to support its already determined emotional commitm ent.
And that’s how buying decisions are made.
Irrationally!
If anyone cared to do it, it could probably be proved that no one yet has ever made a rational decision to buy anything!
So when your customer says, “I want to think about it,” don’t you believe him.
He’s not going to think about it.
He doesn’t know how.
He’s already done all the “thinking” he’s going to do—he either wants it or not. What your customer is really saying is one of two things: he is either emotionally incapable of saying no for fear of how you might react if he told you the truth, or you haven’t provided him with the “food” his Unconscious Mind craves.
Either way, little or no thought enters into the transaction. Despite what we would like to believe, the decision was made unconsciously and instantaneously.
In fact, it was made long before you ever met.
But your customer didn’t know it.
#4. To know about customers preference is not by their confession, but by their demographic and psychographic.

The question then becomes: If my customer doesn’t know what he wants, how can I?
The answer is, you can’t!
Not unless you know more about him than he does about himself.
Not unless you know his demographics and his psychographi cs.
Demographics and psychographics are the two essential pillars supporting a successful marketing program.
If you know who your customer is—demographics—you can then determine why he buys—psychographics.
And having done so, you can then begin to construct a Prot otype to satisfy his unconscious needs, but scientifically rat her than arbitrarily.
Again, demographics is the science of marketplace reality. It tells you who buys.
Psychographics is the science of perceived marketplace reality. It tells you why certain demographic types buy for one reason while other demographic types buy for another.
Now, I know that sounds ridiculous, but you can test it if you like.
Remember the little test I suggested earlier in this book, the one with the navy blue suit?
I’d like you to visualize someone wearing such a suit.
Can you see him in your mind’s eye?
Deep navy blue, vents in the back, possibly a pin stripe. Sharply creased trousers. White starched shirt. A red and blue striped tie. Black, highly polished wing-tip shoes.

Now how do you feel about him?
Does he look businesslike?
Does he look like someone you can trust?
Does he appear to represent something solid, reliable, dep endable?
Of course he does.
Research shows that the navy suit is perhaps the most powerful suit a person can wear in business. Instant impact.
Now visualize the very same person you did before, but this time he’s not wearing a navy blue suit.
Now he’s wearing an orange suit.
That’s right, a two-piece orange suit!
An expensive one at that.
And with it, he’s wearing a white-on-white silk shirt and a green and white striped Italian silk tie.
And a silver belt buckle with his initials in green jade across its face.
And a diamond tie pin, two carats, glimmering out at you just above the top button of his vest.
And proudly peeking out of his finely creased orange pants, an incomparable pair of white lizard cowboy boots!
Can you see it?
Do you get the picture?
Well, you better take it fast because he’s out of business!
And what’s important to know is that the difference between the two men isn’t in them—it’s in your mind.
Your Unconscious Mind.
What’s more, the difference is perceived instantly without a moment of thought.
The fact that you couldn’t conduct serious business with the man in the orange suit but you could if he were wearing blue says that there is no such thing as reality. At least as we understand it.
Reality only exists in someone’s perceptions, attitudes, bel iefs, conclusions—whatever you wish to call those positions of the mind from which all expectations arise—and nowhere else.
So the famous dictum that says, “Find a need and fill it,” is inaccurate.
It should say, “Find a perceived need and fill it.” Because if your customer doesn’t perceive he needs somet hing, he doesn’t, even if he actually does.
Get it?
Those perceptions are at the heart of your customer’s decision-making process.
And if you know his demographics, you can understand what those perceptions are, and then figure out what you must do to satisfy them and the expectations they produce.
You can know your customer’s psychographic reality. Each demographic model has a specific set of perceptions that are identifiable in advance.
Women of a certain age, with a certain amount of education, with a certain size family, living in a certain geography, buy for very specific psychographic reasons.
Those unconsciously held reasons will be different from another group of women, of a different age and marital status, with a different educational background, living in a different part of the country.
And these differences predetermine what each group buys. Are you beginning to get a sense of the complexity of this business called marketing? I hope so.
#5 Procedure to make demographic and psychographic research.
“The first question you must ask, then, is: Who are they?
“Who are my customers, specifically? What is their Demog raphic Profile?
“How do you answer that question? You ask them!
“You ask each and every one of them, by having them complete a questionnaire in return for a free pie!
“The free pie is the price you pay for that information.
“The answers you get will prove to be a bonanza!
“But, while you’re at it, you might as well get the
psychographic data you need, as well as the geographic data you need.
“How do you do that? You find out on your questionnaire what colors they prefer, what shapes, what words. You find out the brands of perfume they buy, automobiles, clothes, jewelry, food. You match those brands to the ads and commerc ials that sell them, and you discover by becoming interested in what messages are being sent to your customers by other companies—who are successfully selling to them—what mess ages you might send to those customers, who are demographi cally and psychographically the same as your existing Central Demographic Model, to intentionally come in your door.
“How do you find them, those people you have not yet met?
You buy a list of those who fit your Central Demographic
Model in what you’ve now determined to be your Trading
Zone!
“What’s your Trading Zone? It’s the geographic perimeter within which your current customers mainly live. You take their addresses from your questionnaire, identify them on a map, draw a line around them, and that’s your first-pass Trading Zone.
“You then buy a list of demographically correct people living in that area.
“Is that enough ‘how to do it’ for now?” I asked Sarah with mock impatience. “Will that keep you busy for a while?
“Because if it is, I’d like to go back to the ‘what to do’ for a minute. There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.”
“This marketing thing isn’t nearly as complicated as I might have made it seem,” I continued. “But it’s important that you take it seriously. Because it most often is regarded by small business owners as merely ‘good common sense.’ And I have seen more often than not that the only definition of ‘good common sense’ is ‘my opinion.’ That most small business owners, suffering as they do from what I’ve come to call ‘willful disinformation,’ simply decide what they want to do without any information at all, without any interest in what’s true, and then simply do it. Stationery designed by the local quick-printer with a logo thrown in. Colors picked by their wives. Signs designed by the local sign guy whose experi ence is in painting signs, not in determining what colors and shapes are psychographically correct.

Extract from E -Myth Michael Gerber