What's In A Name?

One day a philosophy professor gave his class an unusual test.

Standing at the front of the classroom, he lifted his chair onto his desk and wrote: "Prove that this chair does not exist."

Most of the students began composing long-winded, complex technical explanations…

However, one student only spent thirty seconds completing and handing in his assessment, drawing surprised looks from his classmates and the professor.

The following week, the class received their grades for the test, and the student who had finished in thirty seconds was found to have the best score…

His answer had been, “what chair?”

There is incredible power in the human capacity to attach names to things and ideas. Names allow us to wrap our hands and minds around an idea to create a shared sense of meaning.

Too often, marketers and leaders leave this valuable tool out of their marketing strategy by failing to name the shifts taking place in the lives of their customers…and I believe we do so at our peril.

The Power of Naming

In the Biblical account of creation, the very first task God assigns to Adam is the naming of all the other animals. I have always found this to be an extraordinary element of the story – why is it Adam’s job to give a name to the animals that God just created? Why does it matter what Adam calls the animals?

Whatever you believe about the Bible, this foundational human story suggests that there is innate power in names, language, and labels to contextualize and re-frame reality.

Researchers from UCLA conducted a study where they found that when people are shown photos of faces expressing strong emotion, the brain shows higher activity levels in the amygdala – the part that generates fear. However, when asked to NAME the emotion associated with the images, the brain activity moves to the areas that control rational thinking.

In other words, naming an emotion takes the raw, chaotic power of that feeling and allows us to conceptualize rational structure around it so that we can make sense of it.

What This Means for Marketing

Some of the most successful companies in the world have leveraged this insight to launch incredibly powerful movements that have changed our society.

For example, when Marc Benioff created Salesforce and launched the entire category of cloud computing, he employed the most potent forces of naming and language to create one of the most successful companies of our time. When Benioff went out to evangelize the new point of view for his company, he:

-??????Defined the old game as “on-premise software.”

-??????And called the new game “cloud-based software.”

As a result, the entire tech industry adopted these new naming conventions to communicate about the problem they were experiencing, and Salesforce rose to be the massive success it is today.

The company that owns the problem’s name and the solution's name in the customer's mind is the company that will capture the vast majority of the value in that space.

It’s The [Problem], Stupid

In the 1992 US Presidential race, James Carville created one of the most compelling pieces of modern campaign messaging when he coined the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 1992, the country was in the midst of a recession, and the incumbent president, George HW Bush, was widely perceived as out of touch by voters.

These underlying issues laid the groundwork for the campaign to hammer on the economy under Bush and the pain it was causing everyday Americans…and it is widely seen as a critical piece of Clinton’s win.?

Notice - the message alluded to a unique point of view and pointed toward a visceral pain point millions of voters across the country felt.

Today, many companies selling agtech know they have a problem. Perhaps sales are slowing, adoption has not taken off how we forecasted, and we begin to question our strategic direction. At this moment, leadership teams often turn their attention towards messaging for hope.

The thinking goes that if we can get messaging right, then our commercial operations will scale.

The problem with this is that truly great messaging flows from the unique point of view you have on the problem set facing your customers and is tethered to how you solve that problem.

When we say we “need messaging,” we tend to promote potentially damaging activity inside of our organizations…we focus on the words and how creative we can sound with no focus on the customer or the problem we’re solving.

The “just fix our messaging” mindset is why GE spends $162 million every year promoting “imagination at work” and why Lexus promotes the forgettable and meaningless “experience amazing” year after year. These are the definition of empty marketing slogans. They could be for anybody.

Instead, here are some ideas on how to re-think your messaging and build a story that sticks in your customer’s mind:

1.????Start by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

a.????What is it that your product changes in their lives?

b.????Spend time with customers and look for patterns other companies are missing.

2.????Take a step back and look at how your customer’s world has changed (or is changing) over time.

a.????How did they solve their problem before?

b.????What changed in their world so that your company is necessary?

3.????Name and define your category by framing and contextualizing how you help your customers solve their problems.

a.????The category is important to name as a signal of differentiation in and outside your company. (ex. Drift coined “conversational marketing” to set themselves apart.

4.????Name and define the old way of doing things.

a.????CRITICAL: It is essential to employ what author and FBI negotiator, Chris Voss, calls tactical empathy here.

b.????You don’t want customers to keep doing things this way, but you understand why they acted this way.

c.????Use the change you named in step 2 as a wedge for why this no longer works.

5.????Talk about how this new way helps your customers win and show them what life in paradise looks like.?

6.????Talk about how the people stuck in the old way of doing things will struggle – this is what Hell looks like.

7.????Prove it. Here are some people just like you who have done this (or are doing this).

8.????Make your messaging a way of life, not a slogan that’s revisited when sales are slow.

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

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