purchasing process through which audiences/consumers/voters are led by their perceptions?
How? Get the answers to the ten questions that follow. (Magicians get the answers through long experience and close observation. Marketers—well, marketers simply ask consumers.)
1.What surrounds your customers’ world? In what context do they live? Overall, what are the most critical dynamics, forces, changes, products, services, and brands that touch them every day? How do they perceive that world? Every magician asks: Who is my audience? It’s one thing to perform for a group of children on Saturday afternoon, but quite another—as John McLaughlin has done recently—to work corporate events for audiences of electrical engineers, information scientists, or mainline journalists and government officials.
2.How do they see the future? Is it headed in the right or the wrong direction? Remember to ask your customers the classic question Ronald Reagan planted in the minds of voters to win the 1980 election: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” What do they expect from your company or brand in the future? What do they expect from your competitors? A great magician will always try to understand how his or her audience experienced magic in the past—in order to aim his or her show toward the future. Has this audience seen an excellent magician before, or a magician that in some way disappointed? And how has this conditioned their expectations?
3.What do they dream about? What is their ideal product, service, or offering in your category? Since 1984, David Morey has worked with partner Scott Miller and political pollster Pat Caddell as they developed the groundbreaking “Candidate Smith” research, which asked voters not to react to existing candidates, but to construct their own perfect, ideal candidate for president. Once you understand your customers’ ideal product and service brands and brand relationships, you can probe ways to fill in the gaps. For a magician, the relevant question is: what will your audience perceive if they believe you really can do magic?
4.What’s in their hearts? What emotional drivers are most important to your customers? Because more and more decisions are being made impulsively, more and more of marketing is driven by emotion. For example, in politics, one of the most telling measurements of any campaign is the degree to which people believe that a candidate “cares about people like me.” Behind this question is a combination of curiosity and cynicism. “Can this person understand my life? And can I understand this person and the way she or he makes decisions?” They want to know the same thing from the companies and brands that they decide to deal with in the marketplace. In magic, the best magicians, such as David Copperfield, don’t have to deal with quite the same factors, but they do work hard to show they care about and treat their audiences well; and, too, they seek to establish an emotional context for their illusions—to touch the audience’s hearts as well as their minds and embed illusion in a meaningful framework.
5.Where is their pain? What are your customers missing that they most need? What do they worry about at night? For example, in the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s and the recession of the late 2000s, far too many companies received funding—without being able to articulate what specific marketplace “pain” their offerings uniquely addressed. Chances are those companies’ stock certificates are about as coveted today as two-day-old sushi. Similarly, the magician’s job is often to take his or her audience away from any pain they feel in their lives, even if temporarily, and at their best, to inspire and help these audiences to rise above pain, and to help relieve it by the wonder of magic, all the time working to entertain and astonish.
6.What’s relevant and different? Value is created by relevant differentiation—by the benefits you provide to targeted customers and the way you provide them uniquely among all market choices. To achieve relevance, you’ve got to know what matters most to your customers. Most importantly, you must know what attributes communicate and prove differentiation for them. Consider using a “laddering” technique that asks customers to rate a product’s or service’s most important attributes in order of importance to them. If you learn only one thing from market research, that one thing should be how your target consumers define relevance and differentiation in your market segment. For magicians, this is a variation of “know your customer”—what is it that this audience will find especially relatable, different, and astonishing?
7.Are they movable? What are your customers’ attitudes toward your product, service, or company? Are they experiencing hard opposition? Soft opposition? Undecided? Soft support? Or are they hard supporters—that is, loyalists? In other words, ask your customers to tell you if they should be a prioritized marketing target. Get your customers to help you order your targeting priorities. Don’t waste time and resources trying to move the unmovable. On this score, the magician asks: am I facing a group of skeptics…are there people in this audience who don’t like magic, find it challenging, or want to think only like engineers and understand how it works? If so, how can I bring them around?
8.How can you over-deliver on their expectations? What are your customers’ current expectations based on today’s market choices? What would constitute an over-delivery on these expectations? And when and how should you claim this success? How can you clearly define expectations in line with their perceptions, over-deliver on them, and then remind customers of your success at delighting them? These are the most constant questions magicians ask themselves—how can I exceed my audience’s expectations? How can I give them an experience of wonder that goes beyond what they know?
9.How can you best define yourself? In the end, how must your customers see you? What must you stand for? And how can you define your competition most advantageously? (Ideally, positioning yourself to advantage will result in positioning the competition to disadvantage.) With a consumer company/brand, as with a political candidate, people are interested not only in what they decide to do, but in how they decide to do it. Self-definition tells consumers what they can expect from the candidate or the company/brand in the future. Great magicians think constantly, “Who is my character? Who am I portraying on stage? (Recalling the words of the famous nineteenth century French conjuror, Robert-Houdin, that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.’) How do I want my audience to remember me?”
10.How can you control the dialogue in your favor? You must understand and objectively evaluate the effect of your competitors’ claims in the marketplace. If the competition consists of the incumbent market leaders, chances are that they have control of the market dialogue. The question is, how can you take it away from them? What perceptual opportunities must be seized to turn consumers’ attention to you? What core message and themes will help up the ante in the marketplace? The magician is competing not so much with other magicians as with the audience’s version of reality—and the magician constantly asks how they can control all the elements of their performance and bring an entire audience to a state of wonder, delight, and surprise.
Before a performance, John McLaughlin always looks at his favorite magic poster—one from the early 1900s depicting the greatest British magician of that era, David Devant. He does this to remind himself of why magicians perform and what they can give to their audiences. The poster is titled “All Done by Kindness,” and the audience it depicts shows every emotion of delight, skepticism, and expectation that we’ve just discussed. Overwhelmingly, what we behold is a happy and satisfied audience, and although Devant may not have consciously asked himself the foregoing ten questions, we are sure he answered them successfully.12
Practice, Practice, Practice
The moment you embrace the equivalence of reality and perception, you feel a rush. But then you start thinking, and then the rush yields to doubt, self-consciousness, and even a tinge of guilt. David Morey had been an avid magician in childhood since the age of five; to his surprise, he returned to the study of magic as an adult, after a twenty-five-year hiatus. What struck him was the “fragility” of the initial embrace. When you try to learn, or relearn, magic, you become self-conscious about the reality-perception equivalence, so that you tend to see it not as an equivalence, but as a dual reality. You
