Most folks create a service or product and then try to market it to people.

Wrong.

What a waste of time and money! The most effective way is to identify your niche market, find out their needs, create or find products/services that address *their needs*.

My Marketing Approach Is Not Unique

I recently posted to a discussion list to assist someone who said his business flopped. He didn't realize he was marketing backwards.

Another list member saw my post and responded:

"Joann's approach makes a lot more sense. It sounds similar to one Michael Gerber talks about in E-Myth Revisited. He talks about entrepreneurs scouring marketplace for an unfulfilled need. Then they create a product or service to fill that need."

My marketing approach definitely is not unique. It's just more effective than what most people do.

3 Steps To Market Forward

A magician using crudest of methods can baffle most intelligent of audiences. With a few simple props and an intriguing story, an experienced conman can make a fool of virtually anyone. And with proper delivery, a comedian can pry a laugh from even most stoic among us.

What skill do these people share that grants them their power over others?

They are masters of Psychological Ventriloquism. They have mastered art of inducing unconscious assumptions in others.

When a magician levitates his assistant he runs a hoop up and down her body “proving” nothing is holding her up. Of course, he’s proving nothing of sort, but he is leading us to assume such a conclusion. And as a result, “magic” becomes possible.

Con artists turn everyday items and circumstances into tools they can use to elicit our trust almost instantly. Documentation, credentials, circumstances, relationships. You name it, if we assume it trustworthy, con artists have ways to turn this trust against us.

How do comedians use our assumptions against us?

Consider this joke:

“My grandmother has been walking three miles a day every day for last five years and now we don’t know where hell she is.”

What makes this joke work?

It works because by time we hear “last five years,” we have unconsciously made an assumption that sets us up for punchline. We assume grandmother has been exercising. And this is exactly what comedian needs us to assume in order to make us laugh.

We cannot help but make assumptions. We take in information so quickly that we are constantly, and more significantly, unconsciously, making assumptions and too often fail to distinguish between what we “saw” and what we “assumed.”

This mechanism, which few recognize and even fewer appreciate, is responsible for persuasion in its most powerful form.

Why? Because of what I have coined our third tendency of human nature and that is:

People sometimes believe what they are told, but never doubt what they conclude.