All Marketers are Liars (with a New Preface)

create demand. Instead of satisfying a need, you could actually create a want.

“What’s your story?”
“Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?”
“Is it true?”

Even extremely poor consumers in the developing world will prioritize their purchases to get what they want, often ignoring the opportunity to take what they need.

A worldview is not who you are. It’s what you believe. It’s your biases.
A worldview is not forever. It’s what the consumer believesright now.

Marketers profit because consumers buy what they want, not what they need. Needs are practical and objective, wants are irrational and subjective. And no matter what you sell—and whether you sell it to businesses or consumers—the path to profitable growth is in satisfying wants, not needs. (Of course, your product must really satisfy those wants, not just pretend to!)

Avalon experience begins in the store. It feels good to pick up the bottle. It feels good to know you can afford a luxury like this. It feels good to tell yourself a story about organic fields of rosemary. It’s a nice lie to believe that you’re giving something back to the planet by supporting this friendly little company.

The problem is that once a consumer has bought someone else’s story and believes that lie, persuading the consumer to switch is the same as persuading him to admit he was wrong. And people hate admitting that they’re wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book Blink, he proves conclusively that humans make decisions on almost no data—and then stick with those decisions regardless of information that might prove them wrong. We decide that a politician is just like us, and it doesn’t matter a lot when he misspeaks, makes poor decisions or even gets indicted. We’ve already made up our minds and we’re going to look at everything that happens through the rose-colored glasses we put on after that first meeting.

story they wish to tell is heard and believed and repeated.
Spending an inordinate amount of time and money on your sign or your jingle or your Web site is beside the point. It’s every point of contact that matters. If you’re not consistent and authentic, the timing of that first impression is too hard to predict to make it worth the journey. On the other hand, if you can cover all the possible impressions and allow the consumer to make them into a coherent story, you win.

The problem with first impressions isn’t that they’re not important (They are important! They’re crucial!) but that we have no idea at all when that first impression is going to occur. Not the first contact, but the first impression.
That’s why authenticity matters.
It doesn’t really matter whether a story we tell to a consumer is completely factual. If it’s a good story, if that story is framed in terms of his worldview, then he’ll tell himself the story and believe in the lie. The reason authenticity matters is that we don’t know which inputs the consumer will use to invent the story he tells himself.
If our sign is cool and our location is cool but our people and our products aren’t, we’re not telling a coherent story. Only when a business or organization (or person) is authentic can we be sure that the story that’s being told is consistent enough to impact the maximum number of people.
So here’s the deal:
1. Snap judgments are incredibly powerful.
2. Humans do everything they can to support those initial judgments.
3. They happen whether you want your prospects to make a quick judgment or not.
4. One of the ways people support snap judgments is by telling other people.
5. You never know which input is going to generate the first impression that matters.
6. Authentic organizations and people are far more likely to discover that the sto