Marketing Goes to the Movies: The Power
Tangent Alert: The following movie summary gets around to the subject of marketing in pretty much the most roundabout way possible.
Having delivered that warning, I wish to report on a movie I watched a few days ago, a 1968 George Pal oddity entitled The Power. In it, a scientist played by George Hamilton (I told you it was an oddity) is wanted for murder after members of his research team begin dying in all manner of eccentric ways. It seems that one anonymous member of the team registered extremely high on some sort of psychic-power test, and George suspects this mystery person of bumping the others off telepathically. (Meanwhile, certain others on the team suspect George of the same thing.) I won’t give away the ending, but there’s another wrinkle in the plot that George discovers while he’s on the run — a mysterious guy named Adam Hart, who seems to be manipulating events from the shadows.
Our psychic murderer can do more than kill; he can alter people’s feelings and erase memories. Hamilton’s character finds the widow of one of the murdered scientists blissfully drinking at home only a few days after the tragedy. She comments that not only did her feelings of grief suddenly disappear overnight, but she’s puzzled that she can barely remember what her late husband even looked like….
Okay, now I can go on to the marketing stuff. Or as Bill Cosby used to say, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”
When our target audience reads our marketing copy, we can have no way of knowing what state of mind that person is in at that moment. Angry, sad, distracted, cheerful — we have no clue where we’re treading. So we have to launch into our spiel by commanding that the reader engage in the emotion of our choice. “Hey, you know that bill payment you were fretting over just now? I order you to forget. You will now stop being fearful and depressed and become excited and happy.” You have to lead off with a statement so strong, so fortified with the emotion you wish to evoke, that it shakes the reader out of whatever other state he may be in.
Hypnotists refer to this technique as a pattern interrupt, but you don’t have to be a hypnotist to use it. We interrupt our own patterns every day. You might be whistling a happy tune one second, then struck with sudden fear as you realize you’ve missed a big appointment. One emotional state gets slapped out of place by another.
That’s what good marketing does — it takes control of the reader’s inner conversation immediately and creates its own emotional state. Yes, a gentle, reasonable argument might persuade your audience eventually, but only if the reader is already in an ideally receptive state of mind. If you don’t want to take that chance, you’d better hit the pattern-interrupt button with your first phrase or sentence.
There. I did warn you.
