Learning from Comics

I have had advertising clients in the past that I could not help. I tried, I really tried, but at the end of the day, I had to admit to them and to myself that the PEF cancelled out the advertising.

PEF stands for Personal Experience Factor.

People heard the ads and many were persuaded to sample my client’s product or service. Then, tragecally, the PEF was not what I promised in the ad. My goal is to make people like and feel good about my client before people need them. When they need them they will think of them first and call them. Think about this and then read Seth’s latest blog post…

In between frames

Scott McCloud's classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.

A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we're as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.

Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.

Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad... but the consumer's take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.

Marketing is what happens when you're not trying, when you're being transparent and when there's no script in place.

It's not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It's marketing when your people don't respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It's not marketing when I use your product as intended. It's marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.

It's not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It's marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.

Consumers are too smart for the frames. It's the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.

---Seth Godin

For Precision Tune Auto Care, good marketing is what happens when the unexpected happens. People expect to be “talked down to”, they expect they will be sold something they didn’t really need and they expect they will be waiting longer that they were told they would have to wait.

What are your customers experiencing between the frames?