The Death of the Spineless Character

Most marketing budgets are wasted. The countless all-day meetings. The mad rush to hit a deadline…

We all know the gut-wrenching feeling when two months of work go up in smoke and everyone’s eyes turn to you – ‘does he know what he’s doing?’ All you want to do is hide.

At that moment it’s very tempting to run for safety in the shadow of excuses.?Don’t give in.

Maybe the product isn’t as great as we thought it was, maybe there was an issue with campaign delivery…

OR

Maybe you forgot to tell a valuable story about the product.?Crap!

Maybe all those facts and figures that were important to your internal team confused your prospects right out of your sales funnel.

But why can’t they see that our product is obviously better?

Well…you forgot the cardinal rule of communication. You forgot to make them care.

“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell,” – Seth Godin.

The good news is that most of us know this truth at our core. It’s the reason we tell ourselves we’re too busy to workout, but we magically find two hours in our busy schedules to watch a movie about mobsters, superheroes, or a romantic tryst…

…sorry P90X, we have a more compelling story to get lost in today.

But what is it that makes some stories compelling and others dull??The characters. See, before we know who the character is and what problem they’re trying to solve, we have no way to identify with them.

As Donald Miller says in his book?Storybrand?“screenwriters have to define the character’s ambition within the first nine or so minutes of a film getting started.”

Most agtech marketing could be crudely characterized as a movie at the 20-minute mark with vague platitudes substituted for clear character ambitions.

This is because we’re only half-listening to our prospects, and they know it. As a result, we make dangerous assumptions about the way they see the world and how they will react to our messages.

Characters with Spines

In his?TED talk, animator Andrew Stanton asserts a lesson he had learned in a recent acting class: all well-drawn characters have a spine. The idea is that “the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they’re striving for, an itch that they can’t scratch.”

An aside:?Meryl Streep once gave an interview with Gene Siskel?at the Chicago Tribune where she revealed that for every role she gives herself a secret that she would not want to share with other people – even her fellow cast members. What if you made your marketing characters and campaigns that real?

People crave real, your customers are tired of generalized marketing messages. They want something to believe in and rally around. We must identify our prospect’s worldview and then create characters in our marketing material with “spines” that resonate with those individuals.

Putting it into practice:?I have found it practical to employ Dan Kennedy’s?“10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions”?when trying to get to know my prospects:

1. What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling?

2. What are they afraid of?

3. What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?

4. What are their top three daily frustrations?

5. What trends are occurring and will occur in their business or lives?

6. What do they secretly, ardently desire most?

7. Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical.)

8. Do they have their own language?

9. Who else is selling something similar to them, and how?

10. Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed?

Final thought: As you’re engaging with prospects and thinking through this list, don’t listen in order to fit them into your pre-determined paradigm, listen to truly understand them so you can create characters with internal motivations that propel your prospects to action.

Here’s to building characters - and campaigns - with spines!

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

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