Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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changed them and the decks—without any camera breaks—when the angles allowed. We never noticed these far more dramatic color changes because we were focused—narrowly, like a spotlight—on the cards and the magician’s ongoing patter. “Change blindness” is a side effect of a favorable evolutionary adaptation, spotlight attention, and it can cause us to miss a huge transformation in the reality that, although right before our eyes, remains beyond our perception.
The Truth? Pigs Fly!
Focusing, as we normally do, on the status quo—the expected and the anticipated—we miss some truly amazing thing, like pigs flying. Throughout most of 2015 and 2016, the answer pundits and other experts reflexively gave to the question, “Will Donald Trump be elected president?” was “When pigs fly!”
As it turned out, the pundits, who focused exclusively on the expected and anticipated, were afflicted by change blindness. They did not see what many voters saw in Donald Trump, a candidate capable of bringing the change they deeply craved. Therefore, the pundits did not—because they could not—believe what many voters believed, that Trump should and would be president. If voters (assuming you are in the punditry business), consumers (if you are in the making, advertising, or selling business), or audience members (if you are in the magic business) believe pigs fly, it’s time to get out your pig-proof umbrella.
What’s the point of all this? Pundits, business strategists, and magicians must start from a simple and ineluctable understanding: The voter, the consumer, the audience is boss. We play by their rules at their party on their terms. As the brilliant magician Tommy Wonder once challenged, “Imagine what the audience thinks.” Like great magicians, great marketers know how to put themselves inside the simple, daily reality of their customer’s world to understand what is missing, to understand the opportunities, to understand what this customer may “need”: You get up, go to the bathroom, shake off whatever sleep you found, ponder, sit, shift this morning’s stupid urgencies away from the strategically important, hear your email beeping, jump onto your computer, check Facebook, hear about another scandal in Washington, D.C., and you realize you “need”….
This is what the great marketers understand—these perceptions,
what consumers need but don’t have, and how to get ahead by fulfilling those needs.
The first corporate client David Morey’s company served, Steve Jobs, had this in mind when he answered a hostile question from the audience at a 1997 Q&A. In the fullness of time, the question has ceased to be important, but the answer remains valuable—and always will. In developing a product, Jobs explained, “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.” Jobs went on to explain that in trying to come up with a vision for Apple, he and his team asked, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with ‘let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we gonna market that?’”10
This is even more “right” in what today is often called our “reset environment,” in which disruption is the norm, and where change is not only accelerating, but accelerating exponentially and unpredictably. It is an environment in which outsiders are the new insiders, winning power, and governing nations, and where companies such as Uber, Lyft, Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, and Bitcoin are creating industries unimagined just a few years ago. Beginning and anchoring business strategies—not to mention life strategies—with perceptions is today’s new reality.
Fortunately, magicians give us secret tools to do this. They challenge our sense of what is “real,” of how we define real. By challenging our assumptions, they prompt us to do as they do: figure out how their audience thinks, feels, and acts—and how this relates to what we want them to think, feel, and do. Somewhere in the dialectic between these two hows is our reality. The late eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant divided reality into what he called the Ding an sich (the thing in itself) and the Ding für uns (the thing for us, or the thing as it appears). These days, magicians, marketers, and political strategists have pretty much given up on finding the Ding an sich and have instead settled for the Ding für uns—because perceptions rule, and it is the magician’s, marketer’s, and strategist’s job to begin with, understand, and shape these perceptions.
Brylcreem was the key to the kingdom of civilized virility until it became greasy kid stuff. Bounty was just another paper towel—a dull commodity—until some ad man or ad woman pronounced it “The Quicker Picker-Upper.” Now it is the nation’s leading paper towel product. The phrase is a magic word, an incantation, a spell, endowed with its magical power through a combination of language and the context of “information” created by incessant advertising. The lilting “Quicker Picker-Upper” pricks our memory of TV sequences showing Bounty absorbing several times as much water as any competing towel soaks up. This perception, reinforced by the incantation, is our reality—as solid as the image of a Volvo calling to mind the magic word safety or the vivid blue, red, and orange of a Southwest Airlines jet evoking the incantatory utterance—value.
The Marketing-Magic Nexus
We marketers and magicians may not always like what the audience thinks and believes. As the late Arizona congressman and presidential candidate Mo Udall proclaimed the day after losing an especially close election, “The people have spoken…. The bastards!” David Morey particularly recalls how a client, a famous (but nameless here forevermore) high-tech CEO, banged on the soundproof two-way mirror of a focus group session, impotently yelling at the truth-telling consumers inside: “These…people…just…don’t…understand!”
Well, they don’t. But their misunderstanding was my famous client’s problem and responsibility, not theirs. We report to them—consumers, constituents, audience, voters. They are the boss.
So how do we discharge our responsibility and solve our problem? Let’s break it down.
The very first thing in both magic and marketing is to provide a context for and a summary of the perceptions you want your audience or your customers to have. This is crucial because—remember—perceptions are reality, or might as well be. To provide both context and summary, both magicians and marketers exploit the concept of brand. Bestselling author, entrepreneur, and marketing guru Seth Godin defines “brand” as a set of “expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that in combination drive the decision to choose a particular company, product, or service.”11 David Morey describes “brand” as a bucket into which we pour our expectations and our sense of relevance, difference, and credibility, along with the thousands of images we gather about any leader, country, company, product, or service. Either way, a great brand sums up and reveals to the world how you or your product are different, special, and better.
Next, having contextualized and summed up your merchandise (product, idea, whatever you are selling) in a brand, apply the rules magicians follow every time they perform. David Morey and his business partner, political and marketing consultant Scott Miller, have developed a framework around consumer and voter perceptions that has added exponential business value and won global elections. They call it the 6 Cs.
These days, with more choice on every shelf and in every brick-and-mortar and online store, it is harder than ever to know what consumers will decide. But it is relatively easy to know how they will decide. Six factors drive the decisions of consumers, audiences, and voters. Luckily for us, all six happen to begin with the letter C: Control, Choice, Change, Customization, Convenience, and Connection. Behold:
•Control is at the center. Consumers make decisions that will give them a greater sense of control—over their personal safety, their economic security, their health and wellness, and in opposition to the influence of powerful institutions. A soda pop, piece of software, or athletic shoe can give a consumer the feeling of control. It’s a matter of product development and positioning. Orbiting Control are the five following