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Marketing And Seven Levers For Changing Minds

It has long been a task of marketing to change people’s minds. Perhaps the most difficult task of all as people grasp firmly to their beliefs.

One way to move people is articulated by Dr. Dan Hill in his book Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success where he writes that, “Every brand needs to make a practice of reflecting beliefs. That’s because everything consumers see in the world gets ‘bent’ through the prism of the values they espouse.” He argues that by developing a beliefs strategy your brand will mirror customers’ preferences and therefore they will no longer think about which brand to buy as yours will be the only one considered.

Reinforcing existing beliefs through your brand is certainly the path of least resistance. But what if that is not an option?

In Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds, Dr. Howard Gardner discusses seven levers for persuading others to accept and embrace new ideas and beliefs:

1. Reason: You present all relevant considerations of an idea, including its pros and cons. These considerations have to be rational and make sense.

2. Research: You provide numerical and other information about your idea’s ramifications, or data relevant to your idea. These reference points should be based on research and unwavering evidence that people will accept.

3. Resonance: You and your ideas are convincing to your listener because of your track record, effective presentation, and sense of your audience. Your ideas align to their personal goals and situation. With resonance, the credibility of the messenger/source of the message holds great weight.

4. Representational Redescriptions: You deliver your message in a variety of formats, including stories, statistics, and graphics. The same information presented different ways is more convincing.

5. Resources And Rewards: You draw on resources to demonstrate the value of your idea and provide incentives to adopt your idea. There needs to be sufficient resources to make the change, and sufficient rewards, or benefit, to doing it.

6. Real-World Events: You monitor events in the world on a daily basis and, whenever possible, draw on them to support your idea. The overall context and situation can affect the viability of your influence or the change you seek. For example, during wars or recessions, people will have their focus elsewhere.

7. Resistances: You devote considerable energy to identifying the principal resistances to your ideas (both conscious and unconscious resistances) and try to defuse them directly and implicitly. The concerns, both imagined and real, must be addressed in your approach.

Your brand’s future depends on many things, but mostly on what people believe.

The Blake Project Can Help: Move People To Understand And React In The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

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