“Change your life, so you can use our
product.”
How many people do you think would want to
take you up on that proposition? Yet sometimes
we’re inclined to position a product
or service in just such a way — to represent
big change — to make “The Big
Promise.”
When we want people to adopt a new product
or service, we have to give them reasons why.
Logic tells us that the stronger the reasons,
the greater the chance we’ll succeed
in making the sale. So, we start cooking up
the biggest promise our lawyers will allow
us to make. We want to say things like, “The
most revolutionary advance of its time,”
or, “You'll never have to do (whatever
you are doing now) again.”
But people really do not like too much change,
even when the reasons for it are irrefutable.
That’s why there are still people
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living
in Gary, Indiana, a place with arguably the
worst air pollution andeconomic decay in North
America. People prefer to stay put.
That’s
why some new products with a great deal of
advantages meet an inexplicable wall of resistance.
People are afraid of too much change, and
we can compound their concern by making the
promise too big.
Sometimes, if you’ve got a “Big
Promise” to make, maybe you should reconsider.
It might be more persuasive to position the
product or service closer to the person’s
comfort zone — not a big change, but
a simple extension of something they’re
already doing.
If I had to sell Gary, Indiana residents on
the idea of moving to a new utopian community,
I might try to reassure them that it’s
as much like good old Gary as my lawyers would
permit me to say. |