Five emotionally intelligent marketing tips

The meaning of a message is what the recipient makes of it

This means that it isn’t good enough to ‘know’ you have the right message – it’s essential to confirm what the people listening to the message understood from it. A particularly important lesson is that, if the prospect thinks you’re pushing your message on them, then you’re pushing. It doesn’t matter that you don’t believe you’re pushing – be interested in the feedback you receive, otherwise you’ll create resistance which wasn’t there until you created it.

Winning is not the same thing as being successful

Competition is always a distraction from success. By investing time and resources competing, we are literally wasting them, diverting attention from the client and prospect, and from growing the business.

People do not buy benefits – they buy the solution to a problem

No sane person purchases a power tool solely for the purpose of owning it: they buy the means to make holes in the wall, enabling them to put up bookshelves. More truthfully, they are probably buying the means of stopping their spouse nag them about putting up the bookshelves.

Seek not only to understand the customer but also your relationship with them

People do not exist in isolation, at a real level they exist in terms of their relationships with others. There is a relationship between the marketer and the client or prospect, so it isn’t enough to consider individual interventions, messages, campaigns. One needs to address continuity through time and be careful about consistency and authenticity. Bearing in mind that everything is communication, the marketer/prospect relationship is often undermined because the marketer didn’t remember that every experience the prospect has, however beside the point, is added to the relationship.

The outcome of any communication is what we intend it to be

This tip, which apparently contradicts the first one, speaks to the fact that, in any communication, there is always a subconscious component of which, by definition, at least one party is unaware (and it’s usually the communicator). You can infer what you must have communicated subconsciously from the reaction you get.