HOW YOU CAN SELL ANYTHING
Derek Thompson shares the 4-letter code to sell anything.
Quite recently, I watched Derek Thompson's Ted talk which absolutely baffled me, and it has to be one of the most interesting Ted talks I've heard. Derek Thompson reveals "The code to selling anything"- which on the face of it sounds kind of impossible, but let me tell you how exactly this works, because it is a very real and simple concept.
First, you need to know something called the mirror effect. Let me ask you a question, have you noticed that most of the times, we tend to like the way we look in a mirror rather than the way we look in a picture, or you’ve probably heard one of your friends say, ‘Ew, I look much better in person than I do in pictures.’ Well they’re not wrong, hear me out. We love things that we are most familiar with, things we know, things we are acquainted with. Where do we see ourselves the most? That’s right, the mirror! Hence, this has become our most familiar image of ourselves. And like I said before, we love familiarity and thus our favourite or most desirable image of ourselves is the one we are most familiar with.
For many years, scientists tried to find out what makes something sell the most and after going through years of marketing techniques, or advertisements used by various brands and then judging the success of those products, they realised that NOVELTY was the key word- something new. Now if you think about it, it’s true. We do love things that are new. But wait didn’t I just say that we like the things we are most familiar with? Yes, I did, and this is exactly where the twist in the tale comes. See, the thing is while we do like new things, we also like familiarity and this balance is the game-changer. So how exactly can we get this perfect balance between newness and familiarity?
To answer this question, we need to turn to Raymond Loewy, the man who designed our century. He is the one who designed the pencil sharpener we see in almost every class room, he designed the modern sports car, and he is the one who designed the most famous airplane – The Air Force One. So, what was it about human psychology that he was able to figure out? What was the trick that he knew? In his words the code is MAYA.
M – Most
A – Advanced
Y – Yet
A – Acceptable
That’s it, that’s the spell. What this means is that while we do love novelty, we also don’t like too much novelty. Too much of something new discourages us, or even scares us in fact. Basically, we want things that are new, but still have in them a sense or a hint of their predecessor; some familiarity. So how can you use this code to sell anything? Let's say you're offering a service. You need to let your customers know how you are better from the competition while still being a part of the competition. What is the experience that you can give, that your competitors cannot.
Now let me ask you a question, how long has Apple been doing this and how long have they been successful? Why does the latest iPhone sell so well in spite of being quite similar to its predecessor?