HWW #21 – Marketing is Educating (or maybe Re-Educating)

Hey folks,

Welcome to the all new, all different HardWorking Words Newsletter.
It’s leaner. It’s meaner. It’s . . .uh . . .just plain text in an
email and a lot less likely to get kiboshed by overambitious spam
blockers.

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hwwords@aweber.com or point them towards
http://www.haddadink.com/newsletter.

In today’s big issue (number 21 for those of us who are counting),
I’ll dig around in the marketing toy trunk and talk about teaching
old customers new tricks.

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Why Marketing and Educating are the Same Thing
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My keyboard is like some weird sort of alien steering device.

People who pop by HWW central and try and type something usually
get this glazed and confused look on their faces. Very occasionally
they pass out. And that’s always hard to explain.

You see, a few years ago I was suffering from horrible and
debilitating tendonitis. Using my mouse was like being repeatedly
bit on the wrist by an overzealous ferret. And trying to type was a
plodding and painful affair that usually ended with me icing my
wrists and trying to peck out prose with my nose.

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So I decided to do something about it.
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First, I bought my weird alien steering device keyboard (made by
the fine folks at Kinesis, who make damned good products and do
damned bad marketing.) And second, I decided to learn how to type
in the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout.

Now, for those of you who aren’t nearly the geek I am, Dvorak is a
layout developed back in 1936 by a guy named August Dvorak. It’s a
lot more efficient and comfortable than QWERTY and makes your
fingers “travel” less as you type away. Less travel. Less work.
Less pain. Sounded good to me.

So I downloaded a typing tutor (it had a Viking. I called him the
typing Viking) and got to work learning how to write all over again.

*And within about five minutes I had an aneurism and collapsed into
a frothing-at-the-mouth mess on my office floor.*

Because, you see, I wasn’t just trying to learn something new, I
was trying to *unlearn* something old. I’d spent more than 20
years tick-ticking away on QWERTY boards, and as I tried to follow
along to the typing Viking’s instructions, I could literally feel
the gears in my head grinding up against each other, sparks and
smoke coming off, pathways in my brain resisting every stroke.

Sitting there with my keyboard staring up at me, I think I got a tiny,
tiny taste of what it’s like for stroke victims who have to
learn how to talk again.

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SO, WHY AM I SPENDING SO MUCH TIME TELLING YOU ABOUT MY TYPING
HABITS?
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Oh, come on, dear readers. You’re a smart bunch. I bet you’ve
already figured out. When you get right down to it, good marketing
is educating. You need to *teach* prospective customers why it
is that your product or service is the one that’s going to bring
the biggest benefit to their lives.

And what’s the biggest obstacle to teaching your customers
something new? You got it. All that old stuff–all those old ways
of doing things, old ways of thinking about things and
misconceptions–that are already clogging up their heads.

This is why cool technologies like RSS, podcasting. . . uh. . cars
. . . take a while to catch hold. To the technorati and the geek
set the big benefits are obvious. But everybody else already has it
set in their head how they get news and listen to the radio and get
across town.

If you’ve got a product that challenges the way people
have done things before, you’ve got do all the hard work of teaching
your customers what’s so great about it and hold their sweaty hands
as they go through the gear grinding phase of taking all that cobwebby old
stuff out of their brains and replacing it with your shiny, new and
hopefully better way of doing things.

The upside? Once you’ve done the edu-ma-cating, you’ve probably got
a customer for a good long time (I’ll never go back to QWERTY.) The
bad news? Teaching your customers takes time, effort, multiple
hits, long copy and a willingness to stick your mud and believe in
what you’ve got to offer through all the objections, naysays and
curmudgeonly grunts.

Fun, huh?

If you want to talk about this more, shoot me a line at chris@haddadink.com

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See you next month, folks. In the meantime pop on by the Hard
Working Words Blog at http://www.haddadink.com/blog or listen to my
dulcet tones at the Biznik Podcast at
http://www.biznik.com/podcasts. And keep an eye out for my new
blog, podcastmarketingtricks.com, launching sometime next week.

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©2006 Haddad Ink. Copywriting Services. All Rights Reserved.

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