Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo Personification Puts the Power in PowerSelling
Your heart tells you who you are. Your heart contains all your beliefs.
PowerSelling radiates outward from the pulsating fact that people don’t bond with companies; people bond with people; personalities that share their beliefs.
Your company needs a personality if you want your customers to feel a connection to it. Does your company have a personality?
Are you communicating that personality in your advertising?
Personification puts the power in PowerSelling.
When you speak about something that cannot think as though it can think, you are using the art of personification.
“The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
and thought of doing something to the shore
that water never did to land before.”
When you speak about something that cannot ask questions as though it can ask questions, you are using personification.
“My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
to ask if there is some mistake.”
When you speak about something that cannot move as though it can move, you are using the art of personification.
“It rained endlessly and the forests wept.
The darkness fell and the trees moved closer.”
When you can breathe life into something that is not alive, you are a god.
Robert Frost and John Steinbeck were able to provide us with those examples of personification because they are Nobel Prize-winning writers. But we couldn’t write like that, could we?
“Your house will giggle with glee when it sees the smart thermostat you bought for it.”
Your logical mind tells you that your customers wouldn’t fall for that, but they’ve been falling for it all their lives. Superman is merely ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but your customers know that Superman can fly, squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond, and that he is in love with Lois Lane.
The book of Genesis tells us that God spoke our universe into existence, then it tells us that we are made in the image of God.
Did it ever occur to you that you speak new worlds into existence in the minds of others every time you describe a possible future?
Personification is powerful because it uses magical thinking to open a portal into that world of imagination where hope is alive and well and singing in the shower, where the glass slipper fits the foot of Cinderella, and a wooden puppet named Pinocchio becomes a real live human boy.
I am now going to shake you by the shoulders to wake you up. What I am about to say is hard to hear, but I am saying it because I love you: If you believe a brand is a logo, a color palette, a slogan, a visual style guide, and a company name that people have heard of, then your company is just another dreary, drab, and bland corporation in an ocean of bland corporations. Your company has no soul.
Remember: People don’t bond with companies; people bond with personalities that share their beliefs.
PowerSelling happens when you win the customer’s heart, knowing that their mind will follow. Their mind will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.
This is what you must learn to do if you want to create a bond with your customers:
- Breathe life into your company through the skillful use of personification in all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.
- Employ magical thinking to deepen the public perception that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.
- Bond with customers who believe in the same things that your company believes in.
- Create a magnetic personality for your brand.
- (If you can name the highly conflicted defining characteristics that animate your brand and cause it to think, speak, act, and see the world the way it does, then you have studied under David Freeman or you learned it at Wizard Academy, where David taught it to the Wizards of Ads.)
If you are a business owner, I will show you how to do all 4 of these things for free.
Start the New Year right. Spend an afternoon with me.
Roy H. Williams
After 28 years as a cornerstone of Fox News and Fox Business, Neil Cavuto, 66, made headlines with his unexpected resignation. Roving reporter Rotbart has known Neil since the beginning; the whole 28 years. This week, hear the first-ever podcast airing of a 2020 conversation Rotbart had with Cavuto and hear about Neil’s blueprint for success — quick lessons in determination, adaptability, and excellence that you will be able to immediately apply. It’s a behind-the-scenes, friend-to-friend look at one of business journalism’s most iconic figures. Where else, but MondayMorningRadio.com?