Mindshare Marketing

Of the many lessons a product salesman can learn, there is one all-important concept: don’t blue ball your customers!

If you announce a release schedule, even if it’s just a tentative one, you need to stick with your plans.  Constantly redefining schedules for your customers will frustrate people.  Remember, even when your internal schedule is tentative, your customers will think it is rock-solid fact.  They will plan in accordance with the dates and times you give; changing dates on your customers will lose you customers.

You’ve had it happen to you.  You see a movie preview during the evening news that announces, vaguely, “coming this summer.”  Then you wait.  And wait.  And finally see a more solid, “coming this July.”  July comes around, and you hear news of a disagreement here, or a budget crisis there, and the date changes to, “coming this Christmas.”  December roles around, and dates change back to, “coming next summer.”  By now, you’ve stopped caring about the movie and, when it finally comes out you don’t even see it.

Sound familiar?

For those of you who need a more explicit metaphor, think of product release delays as blue balling.  You stimulate your customers with intelligent advertisements and build anticipation.  The pressure builds up as the date comes closer.  Your customer is jumping up and down with excitement.  ”Please, please, please, please!”

Wait.

Your customer backs off, pained, but still hopeful.  You announce a new date.  The excitment and anticipation builds again.  Your customer once again starts jumping up and down.  ”Please, please, please!”

Wait.

The customer takes his pain and backs off to nurse himself back to a sense of normalcy.  You throw out a new release date … and nothing happens.  Wait, what?  Oh, that’s right.  You’ve already teased your customer into a heightened state of arousal … twice … and then told them you had nothing to show.  Chances are, you’ll never see them, or their money, again.

Some salespeople will tease their customers into a state of anticipation this way.  There is danger in that strategy, though.  If you tease too much, your customer will tire of the game and move on to someone more capable of providing instant gratification.

Think about your own purchasing experience — both individual and corporate.  How often were you blue balled in the sales process?  Did you ever think of giving up on the sale?  Did you move on to a new salesman?  If that was a standard sales process, how much business do you think the salesperson lost overall?  How much do you lose in sales through the same strategy?

Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, Mindshare Marketing will be taking a short hiatus today.  Once the Internet returns to working order, you’ll receive the next ‘Sex as a Sales Model’ update.

I apologize for the inconvenience … and now I’ll work on getting the computer back up and running.

Marketing as a profession carries a bad reputation.  People hear the word “marketer” and immediately assoiate words like “liar,” “deceitful,” and “misleading” with the term.  This set of mental associations frustrates me, but I can’t say it’s entirely inaccurate.  Particularly with the kinds of television advertisements we see in the world today.

No, I’m not talking about political campaign ads.  That’s a different story altogether.  I’m talking about television advertisements for popular products.  When diet pills and workout machines claim massive weight loss in a few days, you almost always see the tiny “results not typical” disclaimer on the bottom.  One ab machine I saw advertised the other day bragged about how one woman lost 20 lbs and got a flat stomach in … less than a month!  Then I noticed the brief flash of the disclaimer.  Thank you DVR for letting me rewind and pause.

Results not typical.  Individual results will vary.  This participant paired the ***** ab workout with a healthy diet and daily cardiovascular workout.

So the standalone solution can’t really stand on it’s own, can it?  But we all know to be wary about these particular commercials.  So I’ll move on … to movie trailers.

I like action films.  I also like supernatural thrillers.  So when film makers marry the two concepts into one film, I can almost guarantee I’ll be at one of the many daily showings.  This past week, I decided to go see Max Payne.  I realize it’s a movie based on a video game, but that’s OK with me.  The trailer was compelling enough:

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WARNING!!!The next section of this post contains spoilers for the movie.  Stop reading now if you don’t want to know the ending.

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