Turn Yourself Into A Marketing Genius

Skilled marketers are consistently among the highest-paid individuals in any industry. They earn high salaries, extraordinary bonuses, and the respect and admiration of colleagues and competitors. Marketers who master their trades are all but guaranteed a life of wealth, security, respect, and satisfaction.

Anyone of average intelligence can become a skilled marketer. You don't need a quick wit, a flair for the dramatic, or a degree from a top business school. What's required is an understanding of why people buy things.

Basically, the best marketers know how to apply three fundamental principles. I'll give you a brief overview of them here to help you decide whether this is something that interests you.

The Principle: The Difference between Wants and Needs

In today's consumer-driven economy, it's easy to mistake a want for a need. How many times have you heard the following statements:

• "Sally needs a new wardrobe. The clothes she's wearing make her look silly."
• "John hates the way his hair looks. He say he needs a better barber."
• "I simply have to have that new handbag!"
• "We need a bigger house."
• "We need a nicer car."
• "We need a bigger lawn."

None of those things are needs - as in something you can't live without. Our needs are really few and simple: air, water, food, shelter, transportation (sometimes), and clothing (usually). Everything else we buy is based on our wants. And even when it comes time to purchase needs, such as food and clothing, our buying decisions are usually based on wants. (We want a certain type of bread, a specific brand of clothes, a house in a particular style, etc.)

When you realize that you customers don't need your product or service, you recognize that the way to convince them to buy is to stimulate their desire for it. The most effective way to do that in your advertising is to:

• Promise your prospective customer (usually implicitly) that taking a certain action (buying your product) will result in the satisfaction of a desire (want)
• Create a picture in your prospect's mind of the way he or she will feel when that desire is satisfied
• Make specific claims about the benefits of your product and then prove those claims to your prospect
• Equate the feeling your prospect desires (the satisfaction of a want) with the purchase of your product

The medium doesn't matter. Wherever you find your customers - on television or radio, in magazines or newspapers, at home reading the mail or on the Internet - the basic process is the same. The moment you forget this first principle - that you are selling to wants rather than needs - your marketing will fail.

The Second Principle: The Difference between Features and Benefits

A pencil has certain features:

• It is made of wood.
• It has a specific diameter.
• It contains a lead-composite filler of a certain type.
• It usually has an eraser at the end.

And so on.

These features describe the objective qualities of the pencil. So if buying were a rational process, selling would be a matter of identifying the features of your product.

But as you just learned, buying is an emotional process. And that means you must express the features of your product in some way that will stimulate desire. You do that by converting features into benefits.

For example, the features of the pencil might be converted into the following benefits:

• It is easy to sharpen.
• It is comfortable to hold.
• It creates an impressive line.
• It makes correcting easy.

The Third Principle: The Difference between Benefits and Deeper Benefits

The reason some marketers do a better job than others is because they understand the difference between benefits and deeper benefits.

In our example, for instance, what might be the deeper benefit of having a pencil that sharpens easily?

To figure that out, master marketers ask themselves, "Who is my target customer? And why, exactly, does this customer want little things (like sharpening pencils) to be easy?"
Of course, there's no single answer to such a question. It depends entirely on who that target customer is. If he's a busy executive, his deeper reasons are going to be different than if she's a busy housewife.

Perhaps the executive wants more ease because he's buried in minutiae. Perhaps he senses that if he could just get a little more spare time in his day he could catch up with his work. And if he could finally get his in-box conquered and his e-mail cleaned up, perhaps he could write that memo or make that phone call that would boost his career.

Master marketers who understand these deeper motives - the desire to be more successful at work, for example - can create stronger advertising copy because they will be appealing to emotions that are closer to their customers' core desires.

The example I'm using is, admittedly, far-fetched. But I'll continue to push it to make the point. Our master marketers have dug a bit below the surface now. The recognize a deeper desire than mere ease, and they are going to appeal to it. But before they do, they stop and deconstruct the deeper benefit. The ask themselves more questions: "Why does my customer, this busy executive, want more success? Is it because he wants a better salary? And if so, why is that? Is it because he wants a nicer home? And if he wants  a nicer home, why? To please his family? To impress his friends? And why does he want to please his family and impress his friends?"

Marketers who can figure out the answers to questions like these hold their prospects' hearts in their hands.$

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