Watching Theresa May trying to get Brexit talks back on track has got me thinking about when Michael Gove uttered that immortal line “people in this country have had enough of experts”.
It was rubbish, and he was widely ridiculed… but then it turned out it was completely true. That reminded those of us working across Sales and Marketing about the importance of emotion in a world where we expect people to want the facts and figures.
Sales and Marketing have always known the value of emotional response. More than one of you probably had the Zig Ziglar quote “People don’t buy for logical reasons, they buy for emotional reasons” beaten into you when you started out. More recently behavioural economics has taught us that people make their decisions from the gut, and use available information to rationalise that decision after the event.
In a social world that increasingly wants information served quickly and concisely, leveraging emotional responses becomes even more important. Are people getting to the stage where they actively don’t trust details? Where they think people offering them details are trying to confuse them?
It definitely looks that way.
Stewart Lee once talked about a long argument he had with an aggressively homophobic cab driver in London. Lee spent ages explaining that actually, from a historical point of view, homosexuality isn’t ‘unnatural’ at all. “Well,” replied the cab driver, “you can prove anything with facts, can’t you?”
People don’t like having too much complex information. That’s why big data hasn’t been the tool it should have been for salespeople, and why social media has.
So, do we need to completely change how we approach sharing our ideas and messages with prospects and clients?
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– Tom @WSL
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