Getting Inside The Mind Emotions Of Your Customers

Marketing should start upstream and influence product design itself — products designed with customer needs in mind are much easier to market than products designed as good ideas

Eben states that 'It's a lot easier to sell something that was designed with customer needs in mind than it is to sell something that was designed just because it was a good idea or with your needs in mind'

Maslow's deficiency needs (survival, security, approval, sex) are experienced like hunger or physical pain and are more motivating than higher being needs like self-actualization

Eben references Abraham Maslow's hierarchy and explains that 'deficiency needs are experienced kind of in the way you experience hunger or physical pain' while being needs are 'experienced as kind of more positive, expressive ways of being'

When powerful needs arise, people regress to primitive thinking states that are far more motivating than higher-level needs — like a mother gaining superhuman strength to lift a car off her trapped child

Eben provides the specific example: 'you hear stories of, you know, a child becoming trapped under a car and a mother picking the car up, you know, to free the child' and explains this demonstrates 'different levels of motivation, different levels of strength when our kind of more primitive drives take over'

Customers seeking products are driven by life changes that trigger new needs, and they experience these as urgent deficiencies that must be met

Eben explains 'if they're out looking for a product or service it's probably because something has happened in their life there's been a change in their life that has triggered a new or different type of need to arise and your customer is probably experiencing it as a need'

Humans will do twice as much to avoid losing something as they will to gain something — making fear and loss prevention twice as motivating as desire

Eben cites 'psychological experiments' showing 'human beings will do twice as much to avoid losing or to avoid something that they fear as they'll do to gain something'

It's ethically necessary to talk about pain, fear, and loss in marketing because that's the reality your prospects are experiencing — avoiding this creates a disconnect

Eben states 'if I don't talk to that fear, or I don't talk to that pain, or I don't talk to that possibility of loss, then there's going to be a disconnect because what I'm going to be talking about and the reality that they're going to be experiencing are very different'

People prefer instant gratification and won't invest in long-term prevention but will take immediate action when a problem manifests

Eben gives the specific example: 'Most people will not go out and eat a bunch of you know green spirulina and blue algae and, you know, kale and chard and spinach to get nutrients to prevent heart disease and cancer and diabetes in the long term. Most people won't do that. What most people will do, though, is if they have cancer, they will go through very uncomfortable and painful treatments to solve it'

In dating advice marketing, men want instant conversation starters and immediate results, not years of personal development — even though both lead to the same outcome

Eben shares from his dating advice business: 'if I say, here's a magic 10-word phrase that you can say to any woman in any situation that will start a conversation with her and definitely not get you rejected, that is going to grab the attention' versus talking about becoming 'all you can be' over 'a few years'

Successful marketing focuses on what prospects are already seeking and alert to, not what you think is important about your product

Eben teaches 'it's important to focus on the aspects of your offer that your prospect is seeking, that they're already alert to, that their minds are looking for, not just to the things about your product or your service that you think are important'

Emotional power words that trigger strong responses are the currency of the mind and far more effective than descriptive words

Eben explains 'words are really the currency of the logical part of the mind' and gives specific examples: 'shark' has much higher emotional value than 'fish', and 'snake' triggers more emotion than 'reptile'

For weight loss marketing, 'belly fat' or 'fat ass' trigger much stronger emotional responses than the neutral word 'weight'

Eben provides the specific progression: 'you could take the word weight w-e-i-g-h-t you could say okay what's a much more powerful much more emotional word than weight and you might come up with the word fat and you might say could could i even make it more powerful yeah i could add the word belly to it belly fat, you know, or the word ass, fat ass'

Rate words on a 1-100 emotion scale where 'fish' might score 5 while 'shark' scores 80-90 due to primal fear responses

Eben gives the specific scoring system: 'the word fish, you know, that might have an emotion value of like five or something might trigger a little bit of emotion. Whereas the word shark, okay, that has an emotion value. oh, I don't know, of maybe 80 or 90'