By Jeffrey Hedquist
We’ve all heard the advertising phrase “product as hero.” For decades, advertisers have endowed their products or services with powers to help us overcome obstacles in our daily lives and bring us happiness. Advertising stories were about consumers obtaining these things outside themselves to bolster their own weaknesses and failings.
In this era of targeted marketing, niche marketing, and permission marketing, there is a more effective way to sell. Empower your target audience, the listeners.
As you create your story about the listener, have that listener become the hero. Make them the protagonist. Show them on a quest, overcoming obstacles, meeting challenges, finding love, fulfillment, hope, and happiness. Show them growing personally in the process of achievement.
The advertiser’s product or service then helps them achieve their goals. It acts as a catalyst to help the listener solve problems, save time, save money, get happy. Instead of being the hero, it becomes a tool, a method, a path that the listener is smart enough, brave enough, perceptive enough to choose.
Present the product or service as a choice, rather than commanding the listener to come in today, make that call, act now. Show the positive consequences of action and let them decide to take it.
Give the listener the power, treat them with respect, credit them with the wisdom to make an intelligent choice, and they will often choose what you have to offer and feel good about it in the morning.
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© 2003 Hedquist Productions, Inc.