The Power Of “Interest”
The #1 ultimate marketing sin is: being boring, and the marketplace will forgive you for just about anything but this.
In one of the classic sales formulas, ATTENTION is the first step; INTEREST is the second. Developing and holding the interest of people requires timeliness, a sense of “newness”, reasons to want to know more.
As I was writing this, I noticed that Proctor & Gamble was continuing its strategy of making sure there’s a frequent answer to “What’s New?” – and Tide…..now, new TV advertising for “Tide With Bleach” and “Mountain Spring Tide.” P&G makes some kind of change to Tide every few months like clockwork, so as to recapture the interest of the consumer.
The American attention span is declining rapidly. The biggest complaint about Internet Web sites is the slow speed at which they open. With clicker in hand, today’s TV viewer restlessly surfs thirty channels, clicking out of commercials or boring scenes, going from one unconnected place to another – bored and trying not to be. My favorite industry, horse racing, is in trouble because it is too “slow” for the public’s taste, so times between races are shortened, TV monitors are placed on tables in the clubhouse so people can watch TV between races, slot machines are invading the tracks, and so on.
It is the marketer’s job to find new and different ways to be interesting to a jaded, disinterested, detached marketplace.
Above all else, remember that interest and self-interest are closely linked. There’s a Chinese proverb I use in many of my seminars that makes this point:
“Man more interested in boil on own neck
than the drowning of 10,000 in Yangtse.”
