E-zine Story | Philip Graves

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Since we’ve been discussing stories with Kevin, I thought I’d share this one here. Readers of my Mindshop! E-zine will see it when they receive the next edition (sorry for the duplication, but you can comment on it easily here).

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I sat looking across the desk at the man holding a set of white boards close to his chest.

“We’re really excited about this,” he said nodding confidently, whilst looking up at the rest of us with big eyes that said “please me”.

I could feel the energy in the room, the sense of anticipation, the others not aware and not affected by the incongruence between his tone and his body language.

I sat back with an impending sense of doom.

“We’re sure this is going to be so good for the brand.” His statement did nothing to change my feelings, but the others were shifting on their seats with nervous excitement; they were trying to look composed but failing to carry it off.

“I’ll let Simon tell you a bit more about how we got here.” I knew this wasn’t going to be a story about the car journey, although part of me wished it would be. Rather this would be more nefarious razzle dazzle, more self-justification, more winding up the audience. This little act was priming the pump.

I didn’t know at the time how an excited unconscious mind thinks differently; how much more likely it is to buy what’s in front of it. I did know that the wool was being firmly pulled over the eyes of the audience and that whatever they were about to say “yes” to (and I was fairly sure that they would say yes to it) wasn’t going to be judged objectively.

Paul, the man with the boards containing his agency’s new campaign of magazine adverts, got ready to perform the big reveal.

The problem I had was that I had no objective basis with which to counter what was happening. If I’d been able to point to the ads we were looking at and say, “Look, this won’t work because…” I would have felt much happier.

I could either agree with everyone else or I could be the outsider, the lone voice sounding gloomy about the new advertising campaign. The chances were that the advertising agency had used the old leave-it-as-late-as-possible technique, whereby the original launch has little chance of being met if they’re sent back to the drawing board.

No one was going to thank me for being negative. After all, weren’t we just expressing our opinions? Was there really anything more to it than that? I certainly couldn’t tell people what I know now: that their feelings were, at least in part, a by-product of their excitement and nothing to do with the adverts they were seeing. They would have thought I was mad.

I opted for a non-committal but wimpy, “I’d like to think about it a bit more” and let the others revel in their pleasurable anticipation of higher sales that they expected but wouldn’t get.

Now I could take that advertising campaign apart very simply and very logically. Now I understand how the unconscious mind processes an advert. Now I understand the secret of what sells and what doesn’t.

If you want a more considered response to marketing material, whether it’s your own website or a new television advertising campaign I’d recommend you read The Secret of Selling: How to Sell to Your Customer’s Unconscious Mind. Inside you won’t just find the mechanisms that influence how a potential customer perceives you or your product, you’ll also get a step-by-step guide to developing the right associations for your product or service, whatever you sell.

The Secret of Selling is available for a limited time at just £27.00, backed by a full 60 day money back guarantee; honestly, I’m really excited about it 😉 !

Philip Graves