WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

 

 

Recently, someone was asking my old creative partner, Gordon Smith, how to get a book published.

Gordon told them: “You should do what my mate Dave did.”

I asked Gordon what he thought I’d done that was so good, so he reminded me:

Whenever I did a talk I’d say to the organisers, instead of a fee I wanted them to buy a copy of my book for everyone in the audience and leave it on their seat.

This worked several ways:

First: With the author’s discount, and the reduction for bulk purchase, the organisers get the books for half price, but the audience think they’re getting a free gift at full price.

Second: the publisher will be happy because he gets to sell 200 – 500 books every time I do a speech.

Third: I’m happy because people are likely to read the free book, if they like it maybe they’ll buy another copy for their friends.

Fourth: the publisher will be very happy to publish my next book, knowing he’ll sell a lot of copies whenever I give a talk.

This is what Gordon told his friend I’d done, and I’d forgotten about it, it seemed so obvious to me.

Because two things are usually playing in my head, something my dad used to repeat, an old east end phrase: “Use your loaf”.

And my personal belief about getting what you want: “If you set the game up right, everybody wins”.

I believe the working-class understand advertising better than the middle-class and I’ll tell you why: I was brought up in east London then I went to college in Brooklyn.

Both these are working-class areas, people from all races, religions, nationalities living together, you learn growing up that not everyone wants the same things.

So you don’t start any negotiation by telling the other person what you want, why should they care what you want?

Before you start, you work out what they want: “What’s in it for me?”

Then you reframe what you want so that the other person gets what they want.

That’s why the working-class tend to be better at advertising than the middle-class, imo.

The middle-class have been taught to do things the ‘correct’ way.

Everybody follows the same rules of correct behaviour, protocol if you will.

“What’s in it for me?” sounds crude and greedy to them.

But the working-class grow up simply learning how to get a result.

So you approach each problem starting at the answer you want and work backwards.

For instance, George Lois was from the Bronx, a rough, working-class part of New York.

His ad agency had to sell the previous year’s Renault cars in a hurry, how the dealers normally did this was by offering $500 off.

The problem was, no one wanted to buy last year’s car.

So George got a tin of Band-Aids and a pen knife, and he went around all the Renault dealers putting a little nick somewhere in the bodywork and covering it with a Band-Aid.

Then he ran an ad saying: “If you can spot the imperfection on one of our Renaults we’ll give you $500 off”.

The cars sold out the same day, because everyone thought just by spotting the little nick they’d found a bargain.

The point is you don’t approach the problem with a formula.

The middle-class way of approaching a problem is via a formula: “What do we believe the consumers ought to be interested in?”

They follow the latest trend: emotion, brand purpose, behavioural science, AI, whatever.

The working-class way is much more human: “What’s in it for me?”

In the main, the working class haven’t been to university, so they haven’t been taught to chase the latest trends in herd-thinking.

They just do plain, one-to-one speaking to ordinary people (even if strategists see that as dinosaur thinking) because the one thing that doesn’t change is people.

They are much closer to Bill Bernbach’s maxim:

“It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary.

It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man.”

 

In other words: what’s in it for me?