Experian Marketing Services’ 2013 Client Summit started off with a bang when Peter Guber took the stage for his keynote address. Peter is no underachiever. He is CEO of Mandalay Entertainment , Owner of Golden State Warriors & LA Dodgers, NYT Bestselling Author of “Tell to Win – Connect, Persuade and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story,” and has produced films that garnered five Best Picture Academy Award nominations.
Among all of those successes, though, Guber stressed that it was his failures that got him where he is today. He said, “Success and failure are very, very close together. The more you handle failure, and the possibility of failure, the more likely you are to achieve success.”
One lesson he learned from his failures is the need to “create memorable and emotional experiences that engage your customers – and to get them to evangelize your product. This is a secret sauce – and it’s already in you, it’s in your DNA.” He stressed that while facts and data are important, they are not enough to stimulate and motivate an audience. And that’s exactly what customers and clients are: an audience. To really engage with them, marketers need to tell a purposeful story that moves people to action.
And we’ve heard that before. Humans are programed to be emotional creatures, and they more than often act upon emotion rather than pure reason. So how can we, as marketers, capitalize on the human experience and truly engage with our audience? Guber offered an acronym, MAGIC, to help us stay focused:
MAGIC:
Motivate. Move your audience to your goal. Maintain an internal discourse. Be congruent. Be authentic. Have skin in the game and demonstrate it during your interactions.
Audience. They are who you are moving and connecting with. The key is – you should not try to be interesting. You should try to be interested in what’s in it for them.
Goal. You’ve got to know what your goal is before you pick up the phone or tweet or email. Otherwise you’re just noise and they’ll lose all trust in you. Relationships trump transactions. Transactions are secondary.
Interactivity. We are all addicted to our devices and that’s because they enable interactivity. It used to be that your customers were passive; now they have to become active participants. When you’re telling your company’s story, engage them – let them have an actual experience during your encounter. The business you’re really in is the emotional transportation business. They’re not buying the features you offer, they’re buying the experience.
Content. The best kind of content is built around your experiences, but if you don’t have your own you can use other’s experiences to help create the content. And you don’t have to tell a story, you just have to “tell” and be authentic.
Any one of these elements can help you move a few inches closer to true marketing engagement. And as Guber said, the distance between failure and success is minimal. Any one of the above can take you to the next level in your marketing strategy.
Look out for more posts from Experian Marketing Services’ 2013 Client Summit, where we will be learning from and sharing ideas with some of the savviest marketers in the world.