Potatoes and the Power of Pre-Frame

There’s an ancient story about how potatoes became a staple food in Prussia.

When King Frederick the Great first brought this food to the rural farming communities at the time, the people said, “The things have neither smell nor taste; not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?”

To sell potatoes to the people, Frederick decided to change the people’s perceptions through better pre-framing. The king cut off the regular supply of seed potatoes and planted them in his own privately guarded garden.

Instead of being a discardable, foreign vegetable, the people began to see them as a delicacy worthy of being guarded.…and they began stealing them.

Soon there was a significant black market for the potato, and it became one of the leading crops across the region.

By changing the pre-frame around potatoes, Frederick changed how the vegetable was perceived and eventually accepted.

Jumping Forward to the Modern Day

In agtech today, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that the introduction does not matter; the important part is "the proof," "the facts," or "the measurements."

...In short, we're all acting like we're from Missouri.

While it is true that agtech has had a historical problem with under-delivering on promises, the way forward is not to drop the pre-frame for your content. If we fail to include this critical introduction to our content, we lose the opportunity to remind ourselves and our audience why what we’re doing matters.

In this industry, we are often selling results today with the promise of an even better tomorrow; we are selling promises built into the future. The incumbent is selling the status-quo with no view of tomorrow. If you neglect your pre-frame and only talk about today, then you will lose every time.

Pre-Framing at MIT

Let's look at a modern-day example of pre-framing in action...In the book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori and Rom Brafman highlight the value of pre-framing by featuring a study conducted on an economics class at MIT.

In this study, a class of seventy students was told they would have a substitute professor for the day. The substitute professor was new, so each student read a short bio on him.

The researchers passed out two identical bios with a tiny difference. Both praised this teacher's graduate work in economics and listed various fabulous accomplishments, but half of the biographies described the professor as "a very warm person" while the other half described him as “rather cold.”

When the lecture concluded, every student was asked to complete a brief survey to rate how they liked the professor. Those who received the “warm” bio said they loved him. They even remarked that he was good-natured, considerate of others, and sociable.

The students who received the “cold” biography didn’t like him. They said he was self-centered, formal, irritable, and ruthless.

5 Ways to Apply Pre-Framing Today:

This is an essential part of ensuring that our message is received the way we want it to be. It can be challenging to know where to begin, but here are a handful of rules that I have found helpful:

1.????Know and adapt for your audience. It would help if you created your organization’s pre-frame through the eyes of someone who knows you well, someone who has heard of you, and someone who knows nothing about you. All this content should look, feel, and sound similar, but speak to them at their stage. It also needs to be appropriately deployed to reach that audience (ex: you should have several openings for decks – customer, prospect, and cold – you should not run a mass audience webinar with the customer intro, and you should not run a customer renewal conversation with a cold pre-frame).

2.????Chart a course for your customer. The purpose of the pre-frame is to set your audience in the right frame of mind to listen to your message. To paraphrase Joseph Sugarman – the purpose of your first message is to get them to listen to the second, and the goal of the second is to get them to listen to the third. Make sure your pre-frame builds a bridge from where your customer is today to where you want them to end up.

3.????Segment your buyers on the backend, pre-frame the next interaction. We are all familiar with the idea of market segmentation, and most of us have at least attempted to do this (even if it’s just for a board meeting…you know who you are). However, very few companies allow their customers to self-identify the type of buyer because they neglect to build a long enough funnel. What happens after your customer purchases with you? Do you offer them a special discount on a multi-year agreement? Do you make them a one-time offer to supplement or build upon what they just bought? Allow your buyers in the “most pain” to purchase from you quickly; let them solve all of their perceived problems with you. Finally, follow up with people who fall out of your funnel; research shows that 81% of purchases happen after the 5th follow-up. ?

Whatever you do, start paying attention to how you’re pre-framing each of your customer interactions today. If you do it right, results will not be far behind.

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

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