This week, a ‘surprise’ birth led me to think about a secret formula the world’s smartest marketers use to sell you their products…and how it relates to magic.
Let’s begin…
It all started when our elderly neighbor told us to kill the pigeons.
Okay.
Let me back up quickly.
Here in my new apartment in Bitola (Macedonia), we have a balcony that a family of pigeons decided to make their new home.
Recently, we were accosted by an elderly lady who lives across from us.
Usually, she’s the sweetest lady, but this time, she wasted no time in telling us that the pigeons were making too much of a mess on the balcony, and they needed to go…ASAP.
I got the vibe that she didn’t care about how we removed these pigeons…only that they were gone by 6 am the next day.
But here’s the kicker…
There was an egg in the nest.
Being good hosts, we didn’t want to kick the pigeon family and their unborn child out of our balcony…but being good neighbors, we didn’t want to completely ignore the request.
We were at an impasse, so we decided to use the tactic where we forget about the problem and hope everyone else does too.
We successfully carried out this plan for approximately 3 days before we noticed something weird…
The egg was sitting on the balcony, cracked and empty.
In the nest was a baby pigeon.
Kinda like unicorns, baby pigeons are rarely seen by humans, so it was a pretty incredible moment.
It was weird to think that just a matter of hours before, that pink creature had been curled up inside a small white egg.
The whole thing got me thinking about ‘transformation.’
See, when I was knee-deep in the world of sales and marketing, one of the most often repeated maxims was as follows:
“Don’t sell the product…sell the transformation.”
What does this mean?
It means that whenever you want someone to make a purchasing decision in your favor, you don’t do the heavy lifting by talking about WHAT the product is, but WHO the customer becomes once they buy the product.
It’s the difference between saying “paper straws are made out of paper not plastic” and “if you use paper straws, you are helping save the environment, you hero”.
(not an incorrect statement, incidentally)
As a magician, it’s the difference between telling someone to watch your hands as you do an amazing magic trick, or rather explaining that you’ll use years of honed sleight of hand skill, born from years of illegal gambling to control the deck in ways they didn’t even know was possible and transform their notion of reality!
See the difference?
Awesome.
Personally, I think knowing that ‘transformation’ is one of our biggest motivating factors as humans is incredibly useful.
Not only does it help you motivate yourself & others around you, just being aware of how this works can help you prevent other people from using this tactic unethically on you.
Alright.
That’s it for this week.