Back what seemed aeons ago, I wrote an article about the triangle that could build you a billion dollar business.
I’ve been thinking about that triangle a lot recently.
A few of the niches I’ve been working in over the past few weeks definitely fall neatly into a category of Maslow’s Hierarchy: it’s the self-actualisation section.
Many, many products we use are basically surplus to requirements. You don’t need a Rolex watch and you don’t need a Lamborghini or knowledge of high-end Vietnamese cuisine to impress all the cute girls.
Aghast, you say, “I wouldn’t learn about cooking for a girl and I bought the Lambo because I like cars!”
Allegedly, that’s when you know you’re into the self-actualisation section of the triangle.
But here’s my latest thinking: self-actualisation is a weird quirk of human psychology that probably doesn’t exist.
There’s probably a reason why we’re doing whatever we think we’re doing for the sake of enjoyment – whether we’re aware of it or not.
Is Selling All Just Sex and Money?
Before the dating industry evolved mostly into How to Get More Swipes on Tinder guides and YouTube pranksters approaching unsuspecting girls while dressed like Muppets, there was a weird counterculture movement.
Weirdly enough, that movement spawned the internet’s resurrection and adoption of olde-worlde direct marketing sales techniques. Fascinating stuff.
However, I’m bringing it up because in the early days of the weird little community, there was a theory that every single human behaviour could be attributed to one of two motives:
- Survival
- Replication
The theory seems to have originated in the easy-read version of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which incidentally is all about how that’s not the case.
Anyway, let’s keep with the story here: As you can imagine, in the early 2000’s dating advice sites were filled with probably-autistic guys who were wont to take everything at a literal level. What this meant was that tens of thousands of human interactions were catalogued and analysed according to the survival/replication dichotomy.
This included conversations with grocery store girls, adverts on billboards and political speeches made by the then-President Bush the Second.
Most of it was absolute rubbish; over-analysed micro-behaviours without regard to common sense. But in that brief history of one weird internet subculture, we can extract a valuable exercise for marketing campaigns which aren’t going as well as you’d hoped.
How To Sell Survival Gear
I wrote earlier in the week about the survival market and how the target audience isn’t what you probably think it is… it certainly isn’t what it thinks it is.
What’s interesting about the survival market in terms of this article is that you’d think it’d be lowdown on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. After all, it’s a market about the food, shelter and other base needs that a human has.
Like we discussed the other day, you’d be wrong.
In reality, the survival market is a self-actualisation market. It’s not about procuring food or putting a roof over your head; it’s about making sub-urbanites feel better about themselves.
Here’s a made-up statistic; 90% of guys watch Rambo and feel the overwhelming need to lift weights/shoot Russians/live off the land. That’s the target market for survival products.
What’s interesting though is that products in the survival market are advertised as though they were about survival/replication.
What survival marketers do – whether they’re conscious of it or not – is the same as the old Pick-up Artist forum experts did – they boil the market down to survival and replication.
When you think about a lot of markets, they’re exactly the same; drill down to the primal need and you’ll probably do better. It’s at least worth split-testing. As is how far you drill down.
For instance, you’re probably not going to use the same tactics to market a dating site as you are a new garden centre. (I haven’t tested it, but I’m assuming “This Trowel Will Get You LAID Tonight” isn’t going to cut it.)
Seek The Primal Need Split-Testing Exercise
Here then, we have the actual exercise.
- Take a product that you don’t know how to sell
- Roleplay as an amateur evolutionary psychologist and relate your product to sex and surviving
- Build a sales letter around some of those ideas
- Build competing sales letters with different gradients of evolutionary-psychology-nerd in there.
For instance, you could sell perfume. Realising that perfume isn’t really a need-to-survive scenario, you quickly realise that you’re into status territory for young girls and pure-enjoyment territory for the older lady.
Now, think about what your hyper-logical nerd would say:
- Girls wear perfume because they’re competing with other girls for male attention
- Women wear perfume because they’re evil and the perfume convinces men to do stuff for them
- Most perfumes have cinnamon extract which attracts males because cinnamon is rare in nature and so our primal instincts seek it out
And the best one:
- Back in the Stone Age someone was probably going to beat you to death and/or rape you, therefore perfume might have helped you live a little longer.
Now, ridiculous as those examples are, you’ve already got a gradient. Here could be some angles to work:
- Did you know that perfumes containing this rare extract remind us of our distant past?
- Studies show that people were 67% more likely to be hired when X ingredient was present
- Do you want to stick out from the crowd? Forget what you look like, how you smell is most important
- Her perfume literally saved her life when a secret admirer defended her against a gang of murderous thugs!
Again, equally ridiculous, but there’s a clear hierarchy of angles which you can test against each other. If you think through the angles, you can apply them to almost any industry.
Final Thoughts
It’s Sunday so this article is a bit silly in its construction and examples. However, behind all that there’s a reasonable exercise to try out, and it fits nicely into a wider framework of building angles for a product, sprinkling base-instincts into your work on a wider scale and working out how to get into your customer’s heads a little bit more.
As always, questions welcome and let me know how you get on.