Why Thinking Differently is Hard

I recently chronicled my struggles to build a communications and marketing campaign around a just in time training product.  The main issue was that the produce required the purchaser to evaluate training using a different set of criteria.  Rather than evaluate it based on topic and price, we were asking the purchaser to place the product in the broader context of their core training curriculum and how this product can fill the gaps in that training in a cost effective way.

My sense is that the biggest problem people were having was making this switch to looking at the purchase decision from a completely different perspective.  It’s not that our product wasn’t filling a need, it’s that we needed to help the client better understand their need.

I came across an interesting piece in the NYT today on something called “cognitive fluency,” which basically says that people like to think about things that are easy.  For example, did you know that companies with names that are easy to pronounce significantly outperform those with hard to pronounce names?

This tendency to go for the easy means that people look for the familiar and find it difficult to think about something new.  It becomes even more difficult when you ask them to think about something they know very well (in this case, purchasing CPE) from a completely different perspective.

When you’re selling something new, don’t underestimate the effort it will take to get people to wrap their minds around it.  You have to be patient and you have to keep messaging in a way that moves them to frame the issue the way you want it framed.  You can’t begin your marketing campaign until that is accomplished.

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