Author: Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg
Publisher: Nelson Business
Year Published: 2006
Rating:

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Every few days, you read a new headline about how mass marketing is dead. In Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg offer a new paradigm for interacting with customers.

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? This question is really our way of asking, “Are you waiting for your customers to respond the way they used to?” Many marketers are, and that’s a problem.

Marketers have been relying on 20th century behavioral research to create marketing campaigns. In 1904, Pavlov won a Nobel prize for his experiments with dogs. Find a hungry dog. Ring a bell and offer him meat. Repeat step #2 until bell becomes synonymous with “food” and dog salivates with ringing bell, condition can wear off. But consumers are more like cats. While dogs want to please you, cats couldn’t care less. “A cat is not out to please you; she’s in it for herself.”

Marketing has evolved significantly since the late 19th century. Initially, companies just had to focus on a need like thirst or a desire to belong (Maslow) and they could build their brand. As needs became more complex, niche markets sprang up to meet demand. Yet niche markets and global telecommunications and transportation give customers the power to get what they want when they want it.

Markets are now extremely fragmented, but that’s not a bad thing. Chris Anderson just released a book on The Long Tail, which describes how low cost distribution methods are creating great opportunities for profitable niches on the internet. Customers love choices just as they still love to buy. But now, buying is about their experience. They don’t want to be sold or put up with sites that are difficult to buy from. According to Bain & Company Research, 60% - 80% of customers who switched to a competitor said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” on the survey just before they left.

Understanding how customers experience your products and services is what makes marketing so hard. The internet has made a wealth of information easily accessible. Now, not only do customers know (or can easily find out) your business secrets, your product or service defects, your company gossip, and customer praise and complaints, but they are in control of where they want to buy it, how much they want to pay, and when they want to receive it. Businesses no longer control what customers do or don’t know.

So what does this all mean? In order to persuade customers to buy from you, you must provide relevant information and help them achieve their goals. You must align your company’s sales process with how your customer buys. And you must change your focus from your company to your customer’s. If you don’t, you’ve already lost them.

The Eisenberg brothers have published several books on how visitors interact with websites and the steps you need to take to make your website convert visitors into leads or customers. In this book, they explain the Persuasion Architecture, which involves 3 questions:

1. who are you trying to persuade to take action?
2. what action do you want them to take?
3. what does that person need in order to feel confident taking that action?

Marketing’s job is to get people’s attention and stimulate desire. Sales is the art of persuading someone to do something - whether that’s to get a web visitor to purchase a product from your website or for a 5 year old to convince her parent to buy the latest cool toy. When the two intersect, customers buy.

Of course, the exact reasons why customers buy and their objections to buying from you will differ depending on their personality, motivations for buying and complex the decision making process is. There are four factors that determine how complex a sale will be:

1. Need - Needs can range from critical to luxury and depend on how urgent the customer feels they need the product or service.
2. Risk - How risky is the purchase to themselves, their self esteem, or career?
3. Knowledge - What do customers need to know to feel confident that the purchase will meet their needs?
4. Consensus - Who is involved in the buying process? Who are the major decision makers?

The Eisenbergs go into further detail on customer classifications by associating Myers-Briggs and Keirsey personality models with how people use logic and emotion to buy. Later, they discuss Hollywood screenwriting teacher, David Freeman’s “Character Diamonds” - that most major characters in a film possess an average of four core personality traits, represented by a corner of the diamond, and that each trait “helps shape how the character sees the world, speaks, thinks, and acts.” A character can also wear a “Mask” - a phony trait that “fools others and sometimes even the character himself.”

The book is laid out in 29 short chapters of no more than 10 pages each. You can read an excerpt here. There’s an endnotes section providing references and links to websites. The book comes with a cd with an 80 min video seminar and a $50 credit for Yahoo! Search Marketing.

While still heavily focused on persuasive architecture, the book takes a more holistic approach to understanding why and how customers buy than their previous books, Persuasive Online Copywriting and Call To Action. This isn’t just about the web, but about how companies can be profitable in an era where customers control their buying process and are virtually immune to traditional selling techniques. It’s a great read for anyone looking for models to understand their customers’ buying process.

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