2.0 Marketers: your job is Inception

One of the first lectures I attended after starting University began with the lecturer stating the following: “Since all of you have come here from different schools with different experiences and learning different curricula we’re going to start off slow with the easy stuff you probably know, and then get faster.” I recall the person sitting next to me remarking on the perversity of this statement: why not start quickly with the things most people mostly know and then slow down when we get to the stuff that no one has learned? In time I came to understand that a base of shared understanding can rarely be undervalued. I mention this now because in this chapter we’ll repeat the same sin of starting slow to establish some fundamentals and then build upon these the structures that underly scaling and operationalising inception for success.

When a person goes to make a purchase they will go through a number of steps. They will start by recognising that there is a problem, risk or opportunity. Then they will research the options they have and will most likely shortlist a small number of them. Eventually they will make a decision – that decision could be to go with one of the options, or it could be to do nothing. And eventually they will want to review that decision and decide if it was the right one. At every step they are making decisions. Is this a problem I need to do something about? Are these the best options for me to explore? Will this solution meet my needs? Has this solved my problem now? The more complex the decision, the higher the risks from making it wrongly, and the more inputs that need to be gathered to get a full perspective. At every step, though, there is still a person that needs to make a decision.

Influencing decision making is the basis of all Marketing and Sales. Decisions scale from ‘should I click this ad’ at the tactical end to ‘should I purchase this solution’. And the basis of a customer journey is that the decision to click the ad ultimately influences the decision they made on their final solution. We’ll be exploring the customer purchase journey in Chapter 4 but the important takeaway is that decisions build on other decisions.

How decisions are influenced is both incredibly simple and exceptionally nuanced. If there is an art to marketing, this section is it. Inception is the method of making someone think, feel or do something without telling them directly what to think, feel or do. It is giving them an idea without letting them know the idea came from you. If I tell you not to read this book in bed at night, your brain will most likely conjure an image of your bed where you are reading. Had I told you, ‘think of yourself reading this book in bed’, you would know that idea had come from these pages. Instead, I told you not to do something, and it was you that created the idea.

Alternatively, consider this backhanded compliment: “I’m really impressed you stuck with this, I thought you’d give up within a week like the rest.” What would that make you feel if it was said to you? Perhaps, ‘of course I can stick it out, just watch me keep at it’? Or maybe, ‘if no one else is sticking with this why should I?’ Depending upon your mindset or perception of the topic under discussion, that original sentence could precipitate a path of dogged determination or a path of torpid resignation. If you felt that you were always being judged for giving up, this might incentivise you to rebel against that perception and it may give you an impetus to fight on to prove yourself. If instead you had been actively looking for a way out of whatever commitment you were in, this might give you that exit: others have given up so it’s acceptable for you to do so too. Neither of these courses of action are recommended from the original statement. You aren’t being directed or given permission to act in one way or another. You are making a conscious decision. An idea is being implanted in your mind; an idea that grows and takes hold and from which you take action.

These are simple examples of inception. Effective communication – particularly communication that is designed to create inception – requires three elements to be successful: it has to communicate context, create resonance and connect to an action. These are the three areas we’ll explore in this section. The task at hand is now to do this across a full customer lifecycle, over an extended time span, to more stakeholders and with to a greater level of detail. But that’s for the rest of this book to cover. This chapter focuses on the fundamentals of communication and the psychology of influencing decisions.