Motivational Marketing

By Brent Filson

Reprinted from Sales & Service Excellence Magazine

Just as we're supposed to use only a fraction of our brains' capabilities, so I'm convinced, working with businesses in major industries, that people get just a fraction of the results they're capable of.? A key reason are ho-hum strategies.?

???????? Developing Inspirational Strategies

Few businesses come close to achieving their potential results.

One reason is that businesses are not strategizing from the heart.? When I speak of the heart, I speak of that intuitive, emotional, feeling aspect of all of us.

No question: Emotion is a key factor in driving business success.? Clearly, people in business have to be skilled and knowledgeable about products, processes, and programs.?? But simply having rational skills and knowledge is not enough to get big increases in results.? We must have emotional skills too.?

Being Emotionally Skillful

This is not simply about “emotional intelligence,” it’s not enough to be emotionally intelligent, you must also be “emotionally skillful.” ?

A fundamental truth of human motivation is that we define ourselves in terms of our emotions.? Descartes didn't quite have it right: it's not, "I think therefore I am; it's really, "I feel therefore I am".

Yet most organizational strategies focus on the rational — market share, target identification and validation, and customer needs analysis — and ignore the emotional.? In doing so, such strategies ignore great opportunities.?

The End of Marketing ??

To achieve quantum leaps in results that most businesses are capable of, let's recognize that marketing as we know it has come to an end.

Such marketing served companies in relatively stable economies when businesses were like large ships, with captains giving orders to the mates, the mates to crews.? But today businesses are in white-water canoeing races. And with the advent of the “move fast and break things” ethos of disruption, it’s not even like water watering canoeing but instead like a video game in which one reality can be immediately upended and replaced with a totally new reality.?

Strategies That Inspire

In rapidly changing markets, exclusively rational marketing can't compete well.

Strategies that inspire are more important than ever.

Unless people believe it passionately, wake up in the morning motivated by it, spend each day exciting others about it, see it as a key stimulant of their life, and zealously realize it in their work activities, then it is merely a recitation of dry postulates.? It can only realize partial results.

When strategies resonate with people's heartfelt needs, great things happen.? History is replete with such strategies:? Themistocles' naval strategy for defeating the Persians; the Pilgrim's strategy of attaining religious freedom by building a “city on the hill” in the New World; Jefferson's strategy for realizing an America bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific; America’s strategy for putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, etc.

And the history of business has its examples too:? Ford Motor Company of the second decade of the 20th century, IBM of the 1950s, Apple, Amazon, etc.?

Developing a Motivational Strategy

There are four ways to develop a motivational strategy.

First, link it to what people feel strongly about.?

Many leaders wrongly believe that just because they have taken the trouble to develop a strategy, that strategy automatically excites others.?

If you don't root your strategy in the fervent convictions of employees and customers, you don't have the right strategy.? ???????????

Steve Jobs' strategy for bringing a powerful, versatile computer into the hands of average people around the world, fired the imaginations and the ardent actions of his colleagues and, ultimately, customers.?

Raise the Stakes?

Second, raise the stakes.? Follow Emerson's dictum: "Hitch your wagon to a star."? Distinguish between vision and strategy.? A vision is the star.? The strategy is how you will hitch your wagon to it.? When people's vision and strategy provide a higher purpose in their lives, their motivation is of a higher order.

Jobs convinced John Scully to leave a high-level, fast-track position at PepsiCo and commit himself to the uncertainties of working at Apple by asking: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Scully said the question landed like “a punch in my gut.”

?Make it Simple and Short

Third, make the strategy simple and short.? Growth can be complicated, but people's needs are simple.

?Bill Gates wrote a strategy in longhand on a single sheet of paper when he founded Microsoft.? He still has possession of that paper and is still following that strategy.?

The processes of putting that strategy into action may take comprehensive descriptions.? Still, those descriptions should flow from simple, brief motivational elements.?

Promote Action

Fourth, promote action. The function of an inspirational strategy is not simply to get people emotionally involved but to have that involvement trigger results-producing action.

Examples: Uber, monetizing “share a ride;” HubSpot, “inbound marketing;” Apple, “enriching people’s lives;” Toyota, “highest-quality at the lowest cost;” Airbnd, “give property owners hotel action,” Tesla, “helping reduce global warming through mass produced, affordable electric cars”; PayPal, “making payments without banks;” Amazon, “shopping from your laptop.”?

I don’t know if these were the parts of their formal strategy, but the key concepts of each give you an idea of action-based strategies.

Motivational strategy isn’t just a plan, it’s also a call to action.? Without people acting, results can't happen.?

Middle-manager Meat Grinder

Rational marketing stumbles because leaders often view such marketing as dust that, sprinkled out, changes behavior.? But only motivated people change their behavior.??

?In trying to realize marketing plans, top leaders often get jammed up in middle-manager meat grinders. Those leaders can usually persuade their direct reports to participate in the changes.?

However, the far more important task is to persuade middle-managers and small-unit leaders to lead change.? Because traditional marketing ignores the emotional needs of middle-managers, needs that frequently illuminate ways to increase results, those managers can and will make mincemeat of even the best-intended, rationally consistent, and brilliantly conceived marketing strategy.

Getting results is simply about strategy and action: making a simple, powerful motivational connections in the many, little actions taken daily by skilled people.

???? ?????? Having strategies flow from the hearts of people, rather than rain down from the top levels of management hierarchy, such strategies get people championing actions in ways that achieve exceptional results.

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Copyright ? The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

Brent Filson is the founder of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc., which for 37-years has helped thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions in top companies worldwide achieve sustained increases in hard, measured results. He has published 23 books and many scores of articles on leadership. His mission is to have leaders replace their traditional presentations with his specially developed, motivating process call the Leadership Talk. www.brentfilson.com and theleadershiptalk.com . ?

Besides having lectured about the Leadership Talk at MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia University, Wake Forest, Villanova, Williams, Middlebury, I also brought the Leadership Talk to leaders in these organizations: Abbott, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, BancOne, BASF, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Betz Laboratories, Bose, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Campbell Sales, Canadian Government, CNA, DuPont, Eaton Corporation, Exelon, First Energy, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, GTE, Hartford Steam Boiler, Hershey Foods, Houghton Mifflin, IBM, Meals-on-Wheels, Merck, Miller Brewing Company, NASA, PaineWebber, Polaroid, Price Waterhouse, Roadway Express, Sears Roebuck, Spalding International, Southern Company, The United Nations, Unilever, UPS, Union Carbide, United Dominion Industries, U.S. Steel, Vermont State Police, Warner Lambert — and more.

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