I heard a business owner earlier, saying his customers were too stupid to understand how great his offers are.
He was wrong
Here’s the thing: When a prospective customer does not understand a marketing message, the focus should be on building a better message. Writing people off as stupid is where the real stupidity comes in. It also shifts the focus away from the business owner (who can fix the issue) to the prospective customer (who can’t).
A more useful alternative
- Try being clearer. Cut the fluff from your message. Get to the point. Embrace brevity.
- Try testing a new message on a selection of prospective customers, before you go live with it. Get feedback on what they believe you are trying to say. If they get it, others are more likely too also.
- Try explaining things using more forms of media. For example, if it was originally a written message, add video, images, graphs or audio.
Giving up and accusing people of being stupid, when it’s a message we created that’s causing the problem, fails the customer and fails us.
Reach a huge, targeted community of business owners with your marketing.
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This is very similar to writers who claim reviewers/editors “just don’t get” their stories. In almost all cases, it is a problem with the message, not the receiver.
Thanks for this, Jim. Great post as always.
(FYI: I’m trying out Mail Chimp for my site. Thanks for the recommendation.)
Hi Thomas. Thanks for the feedback.
One word: I don’t advise anyone to use MailChimp – My experience of the customer support was the worst of any provider I have ever used.
I use them because when their system works, it’s effective. However, I absolutely do NOT recommend them in any way.
Interesting. Perhaps I’ll re-think that then. Up until now, I’ve been managing my subscriptions by hand, but I’m getting too many to manage that way now. I need something more automated that will integrate with my existing site.
Do you have any service you *would* recommend?
I know several people who manage huge readerships, using Aweber:
http://www.aweber.com/ It’s inexpensive compared to many of the established services, yet seems to work fine.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it.
Let me know how you get on, Thomas.
It’s that old NLP presupposition:
The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
I always refer to this statement when I get feedback.
(Well, to be truthful, I refer to this statement *when* I remember. Sometimes people’s failure to understand my message gets me a tad annoyed, THEN I sit back and consider how I could improve my communication)
It can be easy to offload a communication issue to the recipient, which is why it’s so common.
Thanks for the feedback, Peter.
I think that sometimes it isn’t even that the message isn’t clear, it’s that it isn’t that great a deal! Sometimes when you see a great offer you think, “what’s great about that?” And it doesn’t even have to be about money saved.
Hi Mary. I saw an example of what you’re saying yesterday, with a 5% off ‘special’ offer from Lenovo. That’s about as small a discount as it’s possible to offer. Hardly special.
Fine tune, fine tune and fine tune some more. It’s our responsibility to help customers to make educated decisions about buying our products. Find ways to solve problems and you will make money.
We’re all problem solvers – the better the problems we solve, the more demand there will be and the greater the rewards.
Hi Jim,
I see great comments here, almost revealing the whole range of issues encountered by business owners. We are all concerned by “stupidity”.
Actually, I think it’s an important reminder as we are growing in your domain to get better understood and fix points that we maybe haven’t seen before.
Hi there Yael. You’re right, it’s about learning from feedback, so we can have a clearer message.
Thanks as always for the feedback.
I saw an example of this today.
A guy came into the store where I was and told the owner he couldn’t find the way into the customer car park. I’d had same problem the first time I used the store. When the guy left, the owner rolled his eyes and said how dumb it was that the customer couldn’t find the car park… when it’s his crappy signage that’s losing him business and causing the problems.
Great post once again James. Thanks.
Oh my!
That’s a great story, Kelli. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I agree! We are currently working on our new slogan. Needless to say, it is the owners. I see us as more of a Marketing/Graphic Design business, not JUST a “Print Shop”… AWK!!