6 Steps For Creating A Marketing Campaign

If there’s positive buzz
AND we offer hope
AND an enabling environment
AND a sticky solution
AND expanded comfort zones
AND the right inviter

This is the shorthand version of a change effort that Les Robinson depicts in the book, Changeology: How to Enable Groups, Communities, and Societies to Do Things They’ve Never Done Before. In the book, Robinson goes on to spell out these steps in greater detail and a short synopsis taken from the book:

Start a buzz:Change depends on the conversation, or at least interaction, between people in their own social networks. That buzz often begins negatively, as bitching and blaming others for the failures people observe around them. Then, as they feel more able to manage their risks, the buzz becomes positive and focused on the self, and change follows soon after. Surprise + emotion is the key to stimulating buzz.
Offer hope:We humans are motivated to live closer to our dreams and hopes. Unfortunately, life sucks, and the painful gap between our hoped-for selves and real life feeds our frustration, guilt and dissatisfaction. .
Create an enabling environment:Every behavior is enabled or disabled by the day-to-day environments in which people make their choices.
Design a sticky solution: Fortunately, it’s not hard to invent solutions to people’s frustrations. With a little creativity, most change makers can find ways to deliver on people’s universal desires for time, control and self-esteem, while at the same time achieving larger social or environmental gains.
Expand people’s comfort zones:Change is scary – it’s easy, for example, for bicycle riders to forget the terror that can beset those who have never ridden a bicycle before. Every change effort should, therefore, expand people’s comfort zones so they can act on their motivations without fear, especially without the fear of humiliation.
Find the right inviter:Who invites an action can be more important than the character of the action itself. The best inviters are passionate, similar, respected, connected, powerless and believe in the actors’ ability to implement successfully a change in their lives.

His concepts are extraordinarily simple to understand which oftentimes is half the battle. When I think of most marketing efforts, it always begins with how will we create a conversation (buzz) and normally it is investigating if there is a problem or an unmet need worth pursuing. When I think of this process way to often we move on from Step 1, to quickly. We want to offer hope practically immediately versus leaving that problem surface and fester a little bit. Only after that pain is obvious and keeps surfacing because now we are talking about it, do we offer hope. We move on through the next three, and I think most of us do a pretty good job through these steps. The last step, Finding the Right Inviter though is crucial. Surprisingly very similar thinking to the recent Sales buzz of the day, The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer, Who Can Multiply Your Results.

When reviewing the Challenger Customer and the Inviter, they are very similar in their respective qualities. They are at the very least good facilitators or as put in the Challenger able to gain consensus. What really interest me is the lack of decision-making capabilities they may possess. It is the one quality that every sales effort centers its greatest efforts. I may seem to have gotten off the path of a marketing campaign, but the simplicity of Robinson’s method is even more simple when we realize who we should be creating a conversation with.

I encourage you to take an existing marketing campaign, auto-responder and put it through these six simple steps: