The challenge many organizations have is separating or differentiating themselves from the competition. We have discussions about our unique value proposition or unique selling point but with many organizations once they get down to explaining it, it all sounds the same to the customer. It seems that everyone can be anyone with “good marketing”.
Looking for a reputable source to solve this dilemma, I was reminded of the best source when talking to John Terninko in a recent podcast, The Power of 3: QFD, Taguchi, TRIZ. He quoted a statement from the book series, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue. A few of the thoughts that I gathered browsing the book.
The Marketing Lesson from God can be summed up by applying this basic rule:
Our message is always created from
Our Highest Thought, Our Clearest Word, and Our Grandest Feeling.
Anything less is unacceptable.
The book gave these guidelines to follow:
- The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains Joy.
- The Clearest Words are those words which contain Truth.
- The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call Love.
This is all very interesting, but applying it is a different matter. The first thing that the book helped with was defining the word talk which they expanded to communicate. Their feeling is that communicate is a better full-bodied word versus talk and emphasizes the fact we cannot communicate by words alone. They state the most common form of communication is through feelings. The difficulty we have as sales and marketing people is to discover and understand the customer’s feelings. Why is this important? From the podcast, Need Customers, Create an Effortless Experience with Matt Dixon, he said:
What we found in our study was two thirds of what accounts for the level of effort that a customer feels has nothing to do with the things they actually literally have to do, but they actually have to do more with what the customer feels about the interaction. That’s actually the emotional component. It’s not whether I had to endure a difficult process or “I got transferred multiple times,” or I had to call back or these kinds of things, but rather, “How did I feel during that interaction?”
Our most important form of communication with a customer is about how we make them feel. Again, asking for guidance, from the book, Conversations with God:
My most common form of communication is through feeling. Feeling is the language of the soul. If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look to how you’re feeling about it. Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover—and often even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth. The trick is to get to those feelings. I will show you how, again, if you wish.
I told God that I did wish but that right now I wished even more for a complete and full answer to my first question. Here’s what God said: I also communicate with thought. Thought and feelings are not the same, although they can occur at the same time. In communicating with thought, I often use images and pictures. For this reason, thoughts are more effective than mere words as tools of communication. In addition to feelings and thoughts, I also use the vehicle of experience as a grand communicator.
And finally, when feelings and thoughts and experience all fail, I use words. Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood. And why is that? It is because of what words are. Words are mere utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols; signs, insignias. They are not truth. They are not the real thing. Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience.
You have heard me expand in other posts about when we have conversations with a customer, we should enter into them with the thought of what we want customers to Know, Feel and Do. I also think it is important to define what we want to come away with. What does the provider, us, want to Know, Feel and Do?
Should Behaviors Drive our Personas?
We place so much importance on trying to write copy and other verbiage trying to get someone to “buy” that we often forget about the experience. One last lesson from Conversations with God:
I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings, and so too thoughts. Now the supreme irony here is that you have all placed so much importance on the Word of God, and so little on the experience. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around. Your experience and your feelings about a thing represent what you factually and intuitively know about that thing. Words can only seek to symbolize what you know, and can often confuse what you know.
Is Customer Experience important? Should we say less and do more? How can we transfer better experiences into our sales and marketing? How can we transfer Truth, Love and Joy into Know, Feel and Do?
Our message is always created from
Our Highest Thought, Our Clearest Word, and Our Grandest Feeling.
Anything less is unacceptable.
Joe, your last two questions hit the nail on the head. How?
Adam, I was the one asking?