Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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you’ve got to know what matters most to your customers. Most importantly, you must know what attributes communicate and prove differentiation for them. Consider using a “laddering” technique that asks customers to rate a product’s or service’s most important attributes in order of importance to them. If you learn only one thing from market research, that one thing should be how your target consumers define relevance and differentiation in your market segment. For magicians, this is a variation of “know your customer”—what is it that this audience will find especially relatable, different, and astonishing?
7.Are they movable? What are your customers’ attitudes toward your product, service, or company? Are they experiencing hard opposition? Soft opposition? Undecided? Soft support? Or are they hard supporters—that is, loyalists? In other words, ask your customers to tell you if they should be a prioritized marketing target. Get your customers to help you order your targeting priorities. Don’t waste time and resources trying to move the unmovable. On this score, the magician asks: am I facing a group of skeptics…are there people in this audience who don’t like magic, find it challenging, or want to think only like engineers and understand how it works? If so, how can I bring them around?
8.How can you over-deliver on their expectations? What are your customers’ current expectations based on today’s market choices? What would constitute an over-delivery on these expectations? And when and how should you claim this success? How can you clearly define expectations in line with their perceptions, over-deliver on them, and then remind customers of your success at delighting them? These are the most constant questions magicians ask themselves—how can I exceed my audience’s expectations? How can I give them an experience of wonder that goes beyond what they know?
9.How can you best define yourself? In the end, how must your customers see you? What must you stand for? And how can you define your competition most advantageously? (Ideally, positioning yourself to advantage will result in positioning the competition to disadvantage.) With a consumer company/brand, as with a political candidate, people are interested not only in what they decide to do, but in how they decide to do it. Self-definition tells consumers what they can expect from the candidate or the company/brand in the future. Great magicians think constantly, “Who is my character? Who am I portraying on stage? (Recalling the words of the famous nineteenth century French conjuror, Robert-Houdin, that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.’) How do I want my audience to remember me?”
10.How can you control the dialogue in your favor? You must understand and objectively evaluate the effect of your competitors’ claims in the marketplace. If the competition consists of the incumbent market leaders, chances are that they have control of the market dialogue. The question is, how can you take it away from them? What perceptual opportunities must be seized to turn consumers’ attention to you? What core message and themes will help up the ante in the marketplace? The magician is competing not so much with other magicians as with the audience’s version of reality—and the magician constantly asks how they can control all the elements of their performance and bring an entire audience to a state of wonder, delight, and surprise.
Before a performance, John McLaughlin always looks at his favorite magic poster—one from the early 1900s depicting the greatest British magician of that era, David Devant. He does this to remind himself of why magicians perform and what they can give to their audiences. The poster is titled “All Done by Kindness,” and the audience it depicts shows every emotion of delight, skepticism, and expectation that we’ve just discussed. Overwhelmingly, what we behold is a happy and satisfied audience, and although Devant may not have consciously asked himself the foregoing ten questions, we are sure he answered them successfully.12
Practice, Practice, Practice
The moment you embrace the equivalence of reality and perception, you feel a rush. But then you start thinking, and then the rush yields to doubt, self-consciousness, and even a tinge of guilt. David Morey had been an avid magician in childhood since the age of five; to his surprise, he returned to the study of magic as an adult, after a twenty-five-year hiatus. What struck him was the “fragility” of the initial embrace. When you try to learn, or relearn, magic, you become self-conscious about the reality-perception equivalence, so that you tend to see it not as an equivalence, but as a dual reality. You yourself know how you are doing a sleight-of-hand effect, and that self-consciousness will kill the magic, if you let it. So, if you are serious about continuing with magic, you adapt by shifting 180 degrees until your natural inclination is to think from the perspective of the audience’s reality.
This takes practice. You know where the card is hiding, so the challenge becomes erasing all guilt about this, trimming away any blinks or tics or other tells that are signs of something else at work, anything that signals to the audience that, no, perception is not reality. You need to practice until all your tells are purged. The thing is, the audience, like Agent Mulder in TV’s The X-Files, wants to believe. Operating inside their own reality, they want to believe it is reality, period. It is the job of the magician—and the marketer—to oblige them by fulfilling, not fighting, their desire to believe. This is not deception, because perception is reality—or might as well be.
As an aspiring magician, how do you know when you have practiced enough? Our sense of the “fragility” of the perception-reality equivalence often lands in the very mirror before which we magicians begin to practice. We start fooling even ourselves, because our minds simply cannot follow our own tools of deception and sleight of hand, and, in this, we fully assume the role of the audience member or the consumer. We become the audience. At this point, practice has nearly made perfect. The next step is to stop using a mirror altogether and instead perform in front of a video recorder. Watch yourself onscreen in recorded time—unreal time, rather than mirrored time, real time—and you will see the magic happen. Never mind that you are the magician, you will begin to wonder how you did that. When you cannot honestly answer how the magic happened, you have practiced enough.
In magic, the great effects go far beyond “fooling” people. They rise high above simple deception. Here is the secret of the world’s greatest magicians: their magic does not trick the mind, it transforms perceptions—disrupting our preconditions, assumptions, and prejudices. The magic of the great magicians is like the physics of the great physicists. When Einstein showed us that space and time were equivalent, he felt no guilt—though he was obliged to remind us that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” and that “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” When the marketers of Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into greasy kid stuff, they did not repent but rejoiced. Great marketers, like great physicists and great magicians, do not deceive. They transform perceptions—of their marketplace, their product, their service, their brand, and the very future of their industry, sometimes even of their culture and their world.
“A computer on every desk and in every home.”
—Bill Gates
Scene: This really happened. It’s the early 1920s, and Harry Houdini is the world’s most celebrated magician. Right now,
he’s sitting behind a closed curtain, having just escaped from one of his signature magical props, the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Moments ago, onstage before a live audience, his feet were locked into stocks fixed into a restraint brace, and he was hoisted upside down, suspended in midair by his ankles. The brace fits on top of the Torture Cell proper, which is a sinister-looking device, a phone booth size glass box reinforced with a steel framework and filled with water.
Head-first, ankles locked, Houdini is lowered into the water, which sloshes over the top of the Cell as his body enters. Once the brace that holds his ankles is fitted securely atop the Cell, assistants lock it into place. The audience glimpses the writhing struggles of the fully immersed magician just before a curtain is drawn across the Cell.
The audience knows it’s a show. They know Houdini has escaped from