real reason Archive - The Art of Communicating

Getting to yes

We’ve all been there: The perfect argument that completely fails to land.

→ You nailed that pitch, but never heard anything back.
→ You presented a brilliant idea, but it was immediately shot down.
→ You made a perfectly logical case, but it was met with nothing but blank stares.

But why?

Here’s the hard truth:
What makes sense isn’t always what feels right.

But when it doesn’t feel right, no amount of sense might be able to save your idea.

To circle it back to yesterday’s post:
Good reasons make sense.
Real reasons feel right.

Look for the real reason!

It isn’t always obvious. It’s often hidden in emotions, fears, ambitions, and goals that people don’t always articulate.

But when you uncover it:
→ resistance fades,
→ ears open up, and
→ the conversation changes completely.

You can stop persuading and start resonating.

The real reason

J. P. Morgan once said that “every man has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

So, if your pitch is not getting you the results that you hoped for, could it be that you’re focusing too much on the good reasons?

If you care for what you do, you’ll always have enough good reasons that speak for you.

But.

Is this really how the decision maker makes the choice?

The real reason is why they choose you. The good reasons are merely there to justify the choice.

So focus on the real reason first. Understand what truly matters to them.

Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll always have enough good reasons that support it.

Rational decision

Reminder: As humans we love to rationalize our decisions – rather than make rational decisions.

That’s true for your customers, too. Therefore, it’s useful to understand how their decisions are actually formed. When you understand the real reasons behind their decision, enough good reasons to justify the decision will usually be there (if your product is any good, of course).

How to charge 8x the price

This Moleskine notebook costs €13.

At your local grocery store, you can get a double pack of similarly looking, similarly equipped notebooks for €3.

Why would anyone pay 8 times the price for a Moleskine?

Because it’s not the notebook that they buy but this story that Moleskines come with:

“Moleskine is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. This trusty, pocket-size travel companion held sketches, tones, stories and ideas before they were turned into famous images or pages of beloved books.”

A notebook is a simple tool. Yet, there’s a lot to say about it. We can speak about the size, the build quality, the material, the features, the variety, the price, and many more aspects …

Moleskine, the maker of that notebook, chose not to speak about any of those. Instead they told a story.

A story that turned a small Milanese publisher called “Modo e Modo” into a beloved worldwide brand. What started as a small independent book publisher now is exclusively devoted to making notebooks. The initial production was 5,000 copies of their notebooks. Today, the company has changed their name to “Moleskine” and runs signature stores in all major cities of the world. They sell millions of their notebooks each year.

For €13!

As I said, you can get a double pack of similar looking notebooks of similar build quality in our local grocery store for 3€. Again: Why on Earth would anyone pay 8x the price for a notebook? Isn’t it just a bundle of blank paper?

No, it’s not.

Because it’s not just any notebook. It’s the same kind of notebook that creative geniuses like Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used to scribble down their ideas. At least that’s what the story suggests. And just think about what became of them …

What Moleskine has achieved with this story is that this is not just a notebook, anymore. It’s a notebook for creative people. And if you are creative, too, then you need a notebook for creative people, right? It’s what all the great creatives used. Creatives can’t just buy a notebook from the supermarket. They must buy a notebook for creative people.

This is a real masterpiece in communication that achieves two things:

Moleskine didn’t change what people wanted. They didn’t make customers want a more expensive notebook. They made customers see that they are creative. And so, essentially, if you are creative, you don’t even have a choice. You can only buy their notebook. Because that’s what creatives do. Creatives use notebooks for creatives. Moleskines help creatives get what they want: feel creative.
So, essentially, they bring the future into the present. They make creatives visualise themselves becoming even more creative by using a Moleskine notebook. Just write your scribbles into a Moleskine and soon you’ll be becoming even more creative. And – who knows – even famous? This notebook makes creatives feel even more creative.

The 14 and a half reasons your product is superior

Maybe it’s even 17 reasons. It doesn’t really matter. Because no one cares.

When you’re at reason #7, we don’t even recall #2 anymore.

The more relevant question to ask is what’s the real reason a customer would choose you.

Part of the brilliance of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign was that they made that exact shift from a plethora of good reasons to one real reason.

Make no mistake, each of the 323 spots that had been shot for the campaign focused on one of those good reason for why a Mac would be better than a PC (66 of those actually aired, source).

But they were not about the good reasons.

For one, I’m sure for each of those you can find people willing to dive into a heated discussion about whether that reason would even be valid.

Apple skipped that discussion and went straight into an argument about the real reason: Mac users are cool while PC users are not.

When you resonate with that message (which you might not, I know a lot of cool PC guys), the beauty of that approach is that the good reasons are all there.

This is the crucial aspect: The good reasons are never the problem. If you’ve done a great job and built something that’s actually amazing, you’re always going to have enough good reasons on your side (if you don’t, it’s probably better to fix your product before you fix your communication).

But any of these good reasons will always be considered in light of the real reason that makes us choose one product over another.

If you ignore this and instead only focus on the good reasons, even 66 good reasons won’t be enough to convince your audience.

Finally, if you need 66 reasons, or even just a dozen, to tell me why you are the superior choice, you’re devaluing the weight of each one of those reasons. Give me one heavyweight reason and we’re playing a totally different game.

What’s the real reason people choose you?

Why you buy what you buy

The phone you own, why did you buy it? The career you chose, why did you pick it? The coffee brand you obsess over, why that one?

It’s good to reflect at times on why we, as a customer, really choose one thing over another. I’m not talking about all the good reasons we use to justify the decision but about the real reasons that pre-determined the decision. Here are a couple of the more common reasons:
– loyalty: we always buy from this brand
– recommendation: a friend who we trust recommended it to us
– bad experience: we tried something like this before and it didn’t work, so we’ll never buy from them again
– ethics: we refuse to buy from this sort of business
– sympathy: I don’t like you
– budget constraints: my boss won’t approve the budget so I need something cheaper (and won’t say so)
– status: this thing will boost my status
– belonging: my friends own this, too
– aesthetics: it looks gorgeous
– fear: bad things can happen if I don’t buy this
– … and many more

When we choose a thing – for whatever reason – our brain is super good at finding all the good reasons for why this is a good decision. Yet, these are hardly ever the real reasons we made the decision in the first place. It turns out that, as humans, we’re pretty good at finding good reasons for the things we do – as opposed to doing what we find good reasons for.

The same is – of course – true for your customers.

Marketing gets way easier if you understand the real reasons why your customers buy from you.

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