Interpretations of Perfume -- A Thought on Visceral Sales

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I want to cut to the quick on this one because the quote does the job for me. Don’t sell the journey; sell the vacation.

Don’t talk to me about flight delays, security check-in, lines, bad airport food, over-priced drinks, and crying babies. Don’t talk to me about missing luggage or AirBnB cleaning fees.

Talk about the sea. Talk about the crackle of the fire atop the mountain and that little dusting of snow that made the view beautiful. Talk of sunrises and dawns. Talk of adventure. Talk of dreams.

Sales is not about how your product is better than someone else’s. It’s not about ingredients or formulas. It’s not proprietary blends--whatever the hell those are.

It’s about how your product makes your client into the person they want to be.

We don’t care about how your product works. We care that it works.

Perfume companies realized this a long time ago. Balsam and Pine don’t sell the fragrance, but a handsome man who could double as Bond’s stuntman swimming next to Venus projects the exact feeling Channel No. 5 wants.

Do their ads make logical sense? Hell no. Do they evoke emotion? Mystery? Sensuality? Abso--floggin--lutlely.

Man is a storytelling animal. We interpret facts even when there is no logic. We see reason and uniformity where there is chaos and luck.

Narrative connects the dots. It’s Jesus on toast and Satanic verses in backward music.

“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” --Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Every single one of us is The Gambler’s fallacy. Right now, if I were to flip a coin and your life depended on your bet, you’d drum up some mystical reasoning for Heads (No tails!) Perhaps, all your life, you picked heads, but last week, the Chiefs picked tails and won and (alert recency bias) therefore, this time, with your life on the line, you will go with Fates. And…

Tails it is.

Obviously, the stars aligned. The Chiefs played, not for the Super Bowl, but for you.

The need for justice is so innate that it connects the very fabric of our brain.

Renowned neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studies split-brain patients, people with severe epilepsy who undergo a procedure where the corpus callosum, the link between our left and right brain, is severed. The goal is to alleviate pain, and it works with great success.

It also cues us into how the brain works and that our left brain is a mouthy SOB.

In his book “The Success Equation,” Michael J. Mauboussin explains this process and how it creates, “The Interpreter.”

"In the unique experimental condition created by the surgery, researchers can input information into the right hemisphere, which has limited language ability. For instance, they might show a key to the right hemisphere and ask the patient to point at the corresponding picture. While the patient easily points at the door, when asked why, the left hemisphere, unaware of the key's presence, quickly fabricates a story to explain the action.

This phenomenon is so pronounced that neuroscientists term it "the interpreter," a part of the left hemisphere present in all brains. The interpreter compulsively attributes causes to effects. When presented with a positive outcome, it assumes something good happened; when faced with a negative outcome, it assumes something bad occurred. This tendency persists even in situations with probabilistic outcomes, where individuals retrospectively craft a narrative to explain the resolved outcome, disregarding other possibilities." --Michael J. Mauboussin at Google

This is man’s strength and his weakness.

We literally are, “the stuff that dreams are made on.” And, we have a glaring weak spot for bullshit.

We buy with emotion. We buy with feeling. We buy with our gut, which means we buy with our biases, our stories, our interpretations.

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.”--Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

So the next time you want to mock Armani for their ridiculous ad, and it is, remember: they know what the fuck they are doing. They’re selling to your primal self. They’re using deeply embedded emotions against you.

And it’s not just them…it’s every business. And we’re absorbing all their propaganda at a rapid pace. What a time to be alive.