The solution comes after the problem

Teaching Perspective

“The customer decides after evaluating pros and cons; if your message only talks about pros, it’s like anyone else”

Research carried out by Dr. Martin Hilbert shows that the amount of information available to us, to decide whether we buy a product or not, has increased five-fold in very few years. People are able to decide quicker if they can weigh the “advantages” and “disadvantages”, and that the advantages outweigh and solve a concrete need. In other words, it is a process which accelerates what a client would have eventually done on his own.

In the film “Crazy People”, Emory is a publicist who starts telling the truth about the products he represents, from dietary aids to luxury cars. His campaign gets published on billboards and magazines by mistake, but before talking about the benefits, the action amplifies the defects and problems. Strangely, clients begin storming down to the shops to look for the brands that are incapable of lying.

From this clip, we are able to learn that “publicity” sells better when it talks about the problem before the solution, and above all when it uses immediate “pleasure” as leverage, at the expense of “pain”, or vice versa. Seeing that Emory deals with publicity, his boss reminds him:
“You don’t have to tell the truth, you idiot”

All the same, to emerge from the background noise, truthfulness is your winning ticket, only after our promises are supported by word of mouth and by becoming “viral”.