identify with your potential customers

Marketing is all about behaviour management – encouraging a target market to behave in a preferred manner – for the first or last time, more often, or less often. Persuasion is often central to managing consumer behaviour. This is the second of five thoughts addressing five of the many persuasion tools in the marketer’s toolkit. Some might be obvious, but none is easy to engage effectivelyIt is often said about professional service firms that few purchasers can identify a tangible difference between the big four accounting firms or the big four law firms. While each of these businesses may claim to be unique, few can identify what is unique about them. As a consequence, the decision to use one firm over another tends to be based on relationships.

The fact is, in both the B2B and B2C sectors, people do business with people they like. They also do business with people they identify with – people they believe are ‘like’ themselves.
We all like to do business with people we:

In 1934, Dale Carnegie wrote the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People’. In his book, which has sold more than 15 million copies, Carnegie highlights three fundamental principles:

Again, this highlights the fact that people tend to do business with people they like, and, indeed, identify with. We want to do business with people we like and people who are like us – or we believe are like us.

This has implications offline in the real world, online, and in social media. Blogs and other social media contributions will inevitably communicate the nature and character of an individual and make the reader more familiar with that individual. I would argue that for a true relationship to be built, there is a need for personal, real-world contact between individuals, however, social media can, and does, contribute a great deal to the profile of an individual and the way in which they are perceived.

This highlights the importance of being liked and being identified with. It highlights the importance of personal branding and the communication of a consistent personal brand both offline and online.

In 2018 – identify with your potential customers.

Every year – put the facts ahead of intuition and guesswork.

Sources of core statistics – Upwork, Psychology Today, Social Media Examiner, Neuromarketing, HubSpot, Marketing Ideas 101, Direct Creative, Mashable Australia