Tricks of the Trade Aren't Enough

You better learn the trade first!

MYM Tip #34

Most business owners and marketers - maybe even you - have been conditioned to try to learn these little tricks and techniques mostly because that's the only thing being taught out there. Many people mistakenly say, "Teach me the tricks of the trade." But the reality is that you need to learn THE TRADE...in other words, the principles of successful advertising instead of just learning the TRICKS. Once you learn the grounding principles, you can move on to learning the techniques. There's a reason that you must go through all these principle-based strategies before moving on to the techniques and tips.

See, there is a big problem just teaching techniques...let me tell you a quick story a friend told me to illustrate why. His oldest son's name is Sam and sometimes they go to the McDonald's drive thru together and get french fries. When Sam was really little, like 2 or 3, sometimes the french fries would come out too hot for him to eat, so he'd ask my friend to cool them down. Well, how do you cool down a hot french fry when you're in the car? You hold it up to the air conditioner vent and crank it up for a few seconds until it cools off! They called this technique the "french fry cool down technique." I know you've done this - admit it! Well, his son, being smarter than most (at least that's what his Dad thinks anyway), he could do this technique all by himself, even at a very young age. He told me about one time, looking over at Sam and he was doing the french fry cool down technique without asking his Dad for any help whatsoever. He was just doing it. And his Dad was thinking, "Wow, he really is pretty smart." But when he looked closer he had to do a double take. He realized that there were two problems - first, the french fry wasn't hot and second, the air conditioner wasn't even turned on. See, Sam was executing the technique to perfection - it's just that the situation was totally wrong; he couldn't understand what conditions had to exist before that technique was necessary or would work. What we have here is a small child executing a technique to its absolute perfection without any understanding of the principles that made that technique work in the first place. He didn't understand the principles, just the technique.

And that's how it is with sales tricks and marketing techniques and advertising ghimmicks. Let me give you an example, direct mail. Back in the 70s, guys started coming out of the woodwork teaching techniques for tricking people into reading their junk mail. They'd recommend sending your sales letter in a plain white regular-sized envelope with no return address with a first-class stamp and handwritten address. People would get it and go, "Wow! A letter from someone who forgot to write their return address! I wonder who it is?" Then they'd open it. What do you do now when you get a white hand-written envelope with no return address on it? You pitch it without even opening it! You know it's junk. You know it's a waste of your time. But people are still using that technique - just like a 3 year old holding a cold french fry up to an a/c vent that's not even turned on!

Here's another advertising trick used by car dealers. They're notorious for using tricks because, at least typically, they haven't innovated their business sufficiently so they typically have nothing good to say. They don't have a good inside reality, so they try to trick you into believing they offer a better value. I won't even talk about the loss-leader trick, where they put a stripped-down, low-price model in their ad to lure you onto the lot only for you to find that model doesn't exist or there was only one on the whole lot. No, that's too obvious. Everyone knows that trick. How about this one: I saw an ad that featured the headline, "Pay No Tax On All New Models." You look at that and instantly draw a conclusion that you won't have to pay the sales tax, which on a $25,000 vehicle could mean a savings of a couple of thousand bucks. I saw that and went "Wow, that's a superior value, pay no tax." Then I saw the teeny, tiny type at the bottom of the page. It said, "Dealership will pay the INVENTORY tax on the vehicle, customer is responsible for all state and local sales taxes." Now I had just bought a new car and remembered seeing "Inventory Tax" on the final invoice. It was something like $55. Well whoop-dee-do. A $55 savings. Nice trick, guys. Now you tell me: Does that kind of a trick build confidence and trust...or does it build what we might rightly call contempt and hatred?

But that's what most advertising and marketing programs teach you to do - implement a bunch of little techniques to trick people into believing that there's some kind of value in doing business with you. Techniques, I might add, that frequently don't work when you try to use them in the real world. You can't just rely on tricks and techniques. You've got to build the inside reality of your business so that the outside perception at least has a chance of being genuinely good. Hey, if your inside reality is poor, or even if it's just about the same as everyone else's, what do you think the outside perception of your business will be? So-so at best. On the other hand, if you concentrate all your efforts on the "inside reality" but you can't do advertising very well, you're setting yourself up for frustration. You'll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out how anybody could be so knuckleheaded to do business with your competitors when your business obviously offers a superior value. Well, maybe it's NOT so obvious.