Identity, Reframing, Marketing
Posted on January 14, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized
We all spend a great deal of time telling stories about ourselves. Every one of us - king or janitor, socialite or wallflower - walks around each day with an ongoing narrative in our heads, an intricate drama that casts ourselves as the hero. Everyone is important in their own eyes, their own context. We call that context identity, and understanding it is vital to succeeding in business.
Sales and marketing, fundamentally, is about manipulating that context - and so, the reader’s sense of self-importance - in order to motivate them to do something. To effectively market our products and services, we have to cast our prospects’ beliefs and identities into a new frame of reference.
Reframing as a technique comes to us from Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a therapist who spent a significant part of his career working to understand science and therapeutic value of hypnosis. I’ve found Ericksonian reframing to be an invaluable technique in plotting effective marketing strategies. If you’re not sure how to angle your message, you might consider the Six-Step Reframe as a guiding model.
1. Determine what behavior needs to be changed.
Your toughest challenge in selling your message is not your competition, but the status quo. Somehow, your prospects have managed thus far to stay in business without your help (though hopefully not entirely happily). They’ve learned to live with their problem; your job is lead them to see that living with the problem is no longer acceptable. So start by deciding that status quo you need to rock.
2. Determine the communication path between behavior and motive.
Behavior - even self-defeating behavior - does not happen in a vacuum, but follows a communication path from core motivation to outward behavior. The second step in reframing is to determine how the responsible part of the prospect’s psychology is communicating its “desire” consciously to the prospect.
All that is just a complicated way of saying that, most of the time, people generally don’t know why exactly they do what they do - so in the absence of known motivation, the best a therapist can do at this point is to determine how that motivation is turning into behavior. You need to do the same as a marketer. Unfortunately we marketers lack the therapist advantage: we don’t have the luxury of putting our prospects on the couch and asking them a lot of questions.
We have to do two things: extrapolate based on our knowledge of past prospects and customers, and then immediately give your new prospects something to identify with. Too many businesses spend all their message time talking about themselves, when they should be talking about the reader.
Writing strong identity-match copy is a subject all onto itself. Ideally, however, the reader should after a single glance at your copy think to themselves, “Wow - THAT’S me! These people already know me.” If your readers don’t do that, your marketing is falling flat on the second reframe step.
3. Shift the attention from the behavior to the positive intention behind the behavior.
Here we come to the heart of Ericksonian reframing. We presume that every behavior, even a self-destructive one, has its root in a positive intention. The prospect is engaging in the status quo for the same basic reason we all are: because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Again, since we don’t have direct access to the prospect, we need to extrapolate. Think about it. Your customer is suffering with a situation that costs too much, returns too little, represents a major inconvenience to everyone involved and doesn’t provide a clear competitive advantage. But they’re doing it anyway. So what’s the benefit? What are they getting out of it?
Once you have established a strong identity link, your next step is to convey that the intention is not the behavior. Don’t focus on the status quo - instead, reaffirm the positive benefit behind the status quo.
4. Invite the prospect to creatively embrace an alternative behavioral solution.
Now that we’ve redirected the prospect’s attention from the behavior to the goal, we need to demonstrate that our offering provides a better way to get there. Again, we don’t confront the behavior itself, but the intention - we get across that we’ve got a better angle than the prospect is taking with the current status quo behavior.
5. Offer a compelling vision of better circumstances through the new behavior.
It’s not enough to simply tell the prospect that our way is better. We need to show them. Tell the reader a new story; give them a new sense of future context that safely accomplishes their positive intentions and goals.
Let’s say that the prospect accepts your offer. What does their future look like? What can they mentally, emotionally and physically expect to experience with that new status quo?
6. Successfully reassert a sense of status quo.
This is where a lot of marketing fails: if your proposed new behavior conflicts with the prospect’s other beliefs or motivations, you will introduce cognitive dissonance in your prospect rather than a new behavior. The new behavior must play well with others, or else it will be rejected.
In therapy, this step is known as an ecological check. The therapist rounds out the reframe by attempting to elicit objections to the new behavior. Why might the prospect not accept the new behavior as a superior means of reaching the same positive goals?
In marketing, this is where we acknowledge that the reader is not a demographic, but a unique one-of-a-kind case. Your solution is perfectly suited for them. Specifically. Assume that the new behavior is going to cause a conflict - and that the conflict is only apparent because the reader doesn’t yet know the whole story.
Since (again) we don’t have direct access to the prospect at this time, it’s now time to invite direct access. We end the reframe by reinforcing awareness of the basic problem and the communication paths from step #2. Dramatically bring the problem full circle and then invite the reader to contact you for more information.
Once you have direct access (phone or meeting) with the prospect, you can go back through the reframing steps again. As effective as the model can be in writing, it is much more effective in person.
Reframing is just one of many psychological models that come in handy when you’re trying to promote your business. So next time you’re in the bookstore, don’t stop your browsing with just the business section.. gold nuggets can be found everywhere!
Comments
Leave a Reply