The secret desire that fuels successful marketing

👉 we all have it...will you harness it?

I went to our online grocery order yesterday to cancel some "healthy" granola we had on regular subscription.

Today a brand-spanking new box of mocha granola arrived.

Not a mistake. I'd been tempted into buying it simply because it was a new flavour. And novelty is one of our strongest behaviour drivers as humans.

Especially for me it turns out.

Proponents of the OCEAN model of psychological traits would say I'm an extreme O. And certainly that's where I show up whenever I do a test.

But a desire for novelty is a strong motivator for almost everyone, not just me. I'm just an extreme case :)

You should harness that desire in your marketing too.

Now the chances are that - unlike granola - your clients aren't going to stump up hundreds for a course or thousands or more for coaching and consulting just because it's new.

But they will pay attention to your marketing and listen to your ideas if they're fresh and new.

In fact, studies of attention have shown that the thing that turns fleeting, instant attention into more sustained concentration is novelty.

(Captivology by Ben Parr is a great layperson's read on this topic by the way - I thoroughly recommend it).

That's exactly the kind of attention you need when you're marketing a complex product or service.

Novelty-driven attention is what gets you to read a full email. If you've got this far in mine, it means there was enough interesting and new information to keep you engaged. And that gives me a chance to get across my ideas and hopefully build some credibility and trust.

Novelty-driven attention is also what gets you to open an email in the first place. So it means the "secret desire" subject line I used promised enough novelty to pique your interest.

Did that subject line flow magically from my brain before I started writing?

Absolutely not. I wrote the email, then went back to the subject line thinking "what would be an intriguing subject line that implied you'd learn something new and interesting if you read this email?".

I noticed that I'd used the word desire in the email a few times to describe our attraction to novelty. And it's not something that's talked about a lot. So "secret desire that fuels successful marketing" was the obvious choice.

I do recommend you do this with your emails. A lot of people say you should brainstorm 10 or 20 subject lines before writing. But I find I come up with better subject lines if I write the email first then go back and write one based on what's in the email, but deliberately aiming to invoke curiosity.

Kind of like writing the feed line to a joke. Get people wanting to know the punchline without telegraphing it in the setup.

- Ian