We were at the bank today dealing with some stuff and I got into a detailed conversation with the bank manager regarding what we are doing. Because our media sites are dealing with a specific link between men and women (not porn and not dating!), I’ve been running my elevator speech past people to get their response, primarily with women, who tend to be a lot more pragmatic about business ideas.
This kind of research works if you are targeting regular people not web 2.0 geeks, bloggers and other technocrats. When targeting the man or woman on the street you don’t get to explain things, teach them about your idea or even spend more than a few minutes on it. You have to get right to the benefit, i.e. what’s in it for them?
Even better, once you’ve laid out your beautiful concept they should immediately start doing two things:
- Thinking of how their friends and family might use your service
- Offering ideas for helping you get off the ground
The woman at the bank did both. She loved the idea and immediately said she would tell her son about it, ‘because he does everything on the Internet’ and she offered some great feedback on a feminine response to the idea.
Now I’ve probably ran this concept past ten people in the past week and the response was completely the same. So even though it may not be the most technologically sophisticated idea we’ve ever had, it has the broadest market imaginable and people get it in two seconds, very often interrupting me to tell me what a great idea it is.
So what practical purpose does this serve beyond ego-gratification? I’m a marketer and I know that marketing a complex story to a wide audience is practically impossible. Telling about a very simple solution that anyone can benefit from is a lot easier. For example:
- Google. Go to a page, enter a question, find a good answer.
- Apple. Their current ad for the new iMacs has no messaging- just a beautiful flight around the elegant thing. Their iPhone launch ads showed exactly how easy it was to do stuff with it. Dead simple and they had everyone talking, not just the gadget freaks.
We don’t want to fight for attention. We just want to simply explain what it does and why you’d care. My ‘research’ is telling me that is going to happen. I’d recommend the same approach to anyone with a new idea for a business. If a regular person has no idea what you’re doing, you need to refine your message unless your target audience is nuclear physicists or uber-geeks.