calling to mind the magic word safety or the vivid blue, red, and orange of a Southwest Airlines jet evoking the incantatory utterance—value.
The Marketing-Magic Nexus
We marketers and magicians may not always like what the audience thinks and believes. As the late Arizona congressman and presidential candidate Mo Udall proclaimed the day after losing an especially close election, “The people have spoken…. The bastards!” David Morey particularly recalls how a client, a famous (but nameless here forevermore) high-tech CEO, banged on the soundproof two-way mirror of a focus group session, impotently yelling at the truth-telling consumers inside: “These…people…just…don’t…understand!”
Well, they don’t. But their misunderstanding was my famous client’s problem and responsibility, not theirs. We report to them—consumers, constituents, audience, voters. They are the boss.
So how do we discharge our responsibility and solve our problem? Let’s break it down.
The very first thing in both magic and marketing is to provide a context for and a summary of the perceptions you want your audience or your customers to have. This is crucial because—remember—perceptions are reality, or might as well be. To provide both context and summary, both magicians and marketers exploit the concept of brand. Bestselling author, entrepreneur, and marketing guru Seth Godin defines “brand” as a set of “expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that in combination drive the decision to choose a particular company, product, or service.”11 David Morey describes “brand” as a bucket into which we pour our expectations and our sense of relevance, difference, and credibility, along with the thousands of images we gather about any leader, country, company, product, or service. Either way, a great brand sums up and reveals to the world how you or your product are different, special, and better.
Next, having contextualized and summed up your merchandise (product, idea, whatever you are selling) in a brand, apply the rules magicians follow every time they perform. David Morey and his business partner, political and marketing consultant Scott Miller, have developed a framework around consumer and voter perceptions that has added exponential business value and won global elections. They call it the 6 Cs.
These days, with more choice on every shelf and in every brick-and-mortar and online store, it is harder than ever to know what consumers will decide. But it is relatively easy to know how they will decide. Six factors drive the decisions of consumers, audiences, and voters. Luckily for us, all six happen to begin with the letter C: Control, Choice, Change, Customization, Convenience, and Connection. Behold:
•Control is at the center. Consumers make decisions that will give them a greater sense of control—over their personal safety, their economic security, their health and wellness, and in opposition to the influence of powerful institutions. A soda pop, piece of software, or athletic shoe can give a consumer the feeling of control. It’s a matter of product development and positioning. Orbiting Control are the five following satellite factors.
•Choice provides more consumer control. It does not limit or force the hand of today’s increasingly knowledgeable consumer, but instead provides cost, quality, and value comparisons. Technology is an enabler here. The Internet has trained us all to expect Choice. If we aren’t confronted by what we have been taught to expect, we quickly find Choice on our own.
•Change usually leads to more and newer choices. Change used to induce anxiety in many people, but ever since Steve Jobs revolutionized personal electronics, consumers have anticipated change positively. These days, the negative dynamics of political leadership have been making change especially attractive to voters. “Anybody but” has become a viable—and often winning—candidate everywhere.
•With more Choice and more Change, Customization is now more attainable than was ever before anticipated. During the bygone era of mass marketing, consumers accepted the tube sock dictum of “one size fits all.” With the technology-driven penetration of the controllable search concept, consumers now accept, embrace, and demand the idea that “I can find that one size that fits just me.”
•Convenience is a known decision driver. It is taken for granted in a world of increasing Choice. Although early adopters will seek out a new idea, once they adopt it, they expect to find it distributed ubiquitously. What is more, in contrast to the early days of the personal computer, they expect the initial usage experience not to give them too many headaches. Nor do they want the burden of thick instruction manuals in seventeen different languages, none of which ever quite come across as native to anyone.
•Connection is not a new driver, but it is now empowered by new tactics and new media. The urge to associate with “people like me, people I like, and people I’d like to be like” still pulls consumers toward brands and voters toward candidates.
These six factors are essential today to great marketing and are at the core of how great magicians manage audiences and their perceptions. In fact, the greatest magicians take command of these 6 Cs. Take, for example, the legendary Spanish card magician Juan Tamariz. His virtuoso performance allows the audience to feel in control, even as he fools them badly and beyond any logic. He offers anyone and everyone just the card they want, he constantly changes the tempo and jolts the audience with ongoing surprises, he acknowledges every helper by name, creating almost intimate connection and making it all seem completely and utterly simple; and finally, he brings the audience to a sense of connection, earning a standing ovation every time. For Tamariz, all 6 Cs are on magical performance overdrive.
Or consider the late, great Harry Blackstone Jr. When he asked for children to join him on stage, he ceded control to the audience—any kid who could make it to the stage was welcome. Every parent within reach of the stage could choose whether to let their child join. Then Blackstone, stepping out from the wings carrying a small bird cage and canary, invited the children to place their hands on the cage, on the top, bottom, back, front—on all the sides. By the time every kid stretched out a hand, the cage and even most of the magician were covered. Then, in a flash, the cage and bird would vanish from Blackstone’s hands and the children, who were invited to look under the magician’s coat—still more ceding of control—could find nothing. Imagine the connection Blackstone made with a vast swath of his audience literally touching him. At that point in the show, his audience was prepared to suspend disbelief and come along for the ride. They were sold.
In business, the 6 Cs are the instruments essential to performing an autopsy on a dead brand or business:
1.Did the deceased take away that sense of Control (as the major airlines so often do)?
2.Did the cadaver before me narrow choice (in the whole category or in its own portfolio)?
3.Did the victim stop changing and refreshing?
4.Did the stiff insist on positioning itself as “one size fits all?”
5.Was this floater inconvenient even for its most loyal users?
6.Did the dear departed discourage the connection of one user
to another?
The 6 Cs will help you engage and hold today’s most difficult audiences, consumers, and voters. And in our hyper-challenging environment, we need all the help we can get.
Finally, we need to delve more deeply into magic by asking how we can learn from the stage instincts of today’s great magicians so that we can better understand how each member of our audience—our consumer—thinks, feels, and acts. Magician, marketer, political candidate, we each sell something to somebody.
