Page 46 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

You Have Nine Seconds

I recently met with a mattress retailer who was struggling with his advertising. His two-store chain was relatively new.

He told me that twenty years ago, a very successful mattress dealer in his college town had voiced his own radio commercials. He had decided to duplicate that dealer’s approach — starting every commercial with a story and “easing into the sales pitch.”

It wasn’t working, and he couldn’t figure out why. I asked him to send me some examples, and the next day three commercials landed in my Inbox. It didn’t take long for me to spot the problem.

Each commercial was sixty seconds long, and each started with a story. As I played the first one, I watched the timer on the audio clip. The story lasted more than 30 seconds. At the 34-second mark, the owner abruptly ended the story and launched into his pitch — the store was having a mattress sale.

Two decades ago, when the owner was in college, that approach worked well. In 2011, he wasn’t seeing any response at all.

What’s changed?

We’ve changed. And the internet’s changed us. As early as 2002, BBC News reported on what the Net has done to our attention spans:

The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish.

“Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating,” he told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Author Sally Hogshead, writing in Jeffrey Gitomer’s recent book Social BOOM!, had this to say:

Nine seconds! That’s just long enough to read one tweet. That’s all we get before before our customer’s brain makes a decision to either stay focused or relocate to a new topic.

Before Al Gore invented the Internet, customers were willing to wait for you to tell a story and “ease into the sales pitch.” In 2011?

Your customers are goldfish. You’ve got nine seconds.

Get to the point.

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Why Facts Alone Won’t Always Persuade

“Facts tell, but stories sell” — Jim Doyle

It’s interesting to watch the political left and right — especially those at the extremes — shout past each other. Each has its own set of facts, and each is firmly convinced that if the other side just accepted these facts the argument would be over.

And each believes that the other side’s “facts” are lies.

Seth Godin tackles “The Limits of Evidence-Based Marketing”, using as an example an acquaintance who is firmly convinced that the vaccine for polio is harmful. Stacks of information and studies from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization — “evidence-based marketing” — would not change the acquaintance’s mind.

…evidence isn’t the only marketing tactic that is effective. In fact, it’s often not the best tactic. What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they’ve changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It’s not easy or fast, but it happens.

Which is why testimonial advertising is so powerful, and why I push the television salespeople I coach to replace the charts and graphs with stories of clients who’ve used the station and won.

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Reducing Choice, Increasing Revenue

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, some major retailers and consumer product companies are experimenting* with reducing the choices they offer. The results are often positive:

Several months ago Wal-Mart Canada Corp. decided to overhaul one of the staples of its grocery business – the peanut butter aisle.

It dropped two of its five lines of peanut butter to free up scarce shelf space for cinnamon spreads. But the decision didn’t cost the retailer a single jar in sales. With fewer selections to browse, customers wound up purchasing more than before.

“Folks can get overwhelmed with too much variety,” said Duncan Mac Naughton, chief merchandising officer at Wal-Mart in Mississauga. “With too many choices, they actually don’t buy.”

… P&G, maker of Tide detergent and Ivory soap, recently reduced the number of its soap and other skin care offerings by about one-third at one retailer, while cutting the array of detergents and other fabric care products by about 20 per cent at another chain.

Following the cutbacks, sales grew in each category. “In the skin care example, shoppers reported they felt that they had more choices because the selection on the shelf was clearer,” spokeswoman Jennifer Chelune said.

* An executive at Costco who read the same article told me this:

Costco has been “experimenting” with limiting the number of items in our warehouses for over 30 years. We carry no more than 4,000 items in comparison to a Wal-Mart or Fred Meyer, which may carry 120,000. So when we stop carrying someone’s favorite item (White Cheddar Popcorn or Pickled Asparagus), we aren’t trying to offend them — we are just audacious enough to want to make MORE MONEY.

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More Choice = Less Action

I recently walked into a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida carrying a simple set of instructions: return to the hotel with three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns.

I walked up to the counter and placed my order.

Me: Three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns, please.

Woman at counter: Our Egg McMuffins are $2.59 each or two for $3.00.

Me: Okay, give me four.

Woman: How about the hash browns? They’re a dollar each or two for $1.50.

Me (thinking furiously): Umm… okay, I’ll just take two.

A few minutes went by, and then she was back.

Woman: We’re short one round egg, and cooking one will take a few minutes. Or you can have a folded egg now.

Me: I’ll take the folded egg.

When she brought out my food she threw a couple of apple turnovers into the bag at no charge — “for the inconvenience.”

Two thoughts occurred to me as I returned to the hotel:

1. I had just gotten a screamin’ deal: four Egg McMuffins, two orders of hash browns, and two apple turnovers for about nine bucks.

2. The next time I’m in Orlando, I will go out of my way to avoid that particular McDonald’s.

The woman behind the counter probably believed that she was helping me by offering the discounts.

In reality, she was making my life difficult. I wanted a nice, simple transaction, and instead I got something complicated.

The experience stuck in my mind a few days later when I was asked to evaluate a TV commercial for an aesthetic medicine practice. The ad suggested two possible actions: call on the phone for an appointment, or log onto the practice’s web site.

I advised the clinic to simplify the message and just give viewers instructions to call on the phone. Advertisers often find that just making this simple change significantly increases the response from the campaign.

The strategy seems counter-intuitive, but the reasoning is sound: a viewer faced with a phone number and a web address in 30 seconds won’t have the time or mental bandwidth to write down both. Faced with a decision about which one to remember, many people wind up remembering neither.

In “The Paradox of Choice”, Barry Schwartz discussed a series of studies in which car buyers were offered an array of choices:

Even though their decision was purely hypothetical, participants experienced substantial negative emotion when choosing between Cars A and B. And if the experimental procedure gave them the opportunity, they refused to make the decision at all. So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

Participants in these studies showed the pattern of reluctance to make trade-offs whether the stakes were high or low. Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.

What, then, do people do if virtually all decisions involve trade-offs and people resist making them? One option is to postpone or avoid the decision.

The last thing you want when you advertise is for your prospect to postpone or avoid a decision. Paradoxical though it may seem, offering one choice instead of two will increase the likelihood that your prospect will actually take action.

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