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Book Review: Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?

Written by: Jay Hamilton-Roth

Article Overview: The subtitle of this book (”Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing”) gives a hint about its purpose: how to appeal to your prospective customers. While the book can be enjoyed by any small business owner, the information is a bit more sophisticated than the usual “here’s some simple ways to improve your business’ marketing”.

Book Review: Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?

The subtitle of this book (”Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing”) gives a hint about its purpose: how to appeal to your prospective customers. While the book can be enjoyed by any small business owner, the information is a bit more sophisticated than the usual “here’s some simple ways to improve your business’ marketing”.

The authors have developed Persuasion Architecture™ which attempts to overcome the traditional obstacles to connecting with your customers:

1. Uncovery : Identifying the key benefits for your customer.
2. Wireframing : The steps of the marketing “experience”.
3. Storyboarding : The mock-ups of the marketing experience.
4. Prototyping : The “final” marketing pieces.
5. Development : Ensuring that the prototype matches the wireframe experience.
6. Optimization : Measuring the results and refining the message.

Persuasion Architecture attempts to figure out all the different ways a prospective customer would need information, and provide it to them ahead of time. They’ve extended the traditional business school model of AIDA (Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action) to AIDAS (Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action -> Satisfaction), since satisfaction is what generates word-of-mouth mentions.

For me, the best parts of the book were chapter fifteen (”Personas” - which described the different filters people use to get information) and chapter 20 (”The Human Operating System” - which described the basic 4 ways people ask questions).

The key points about personas:

* Topology: How is your product used? What are the competitors? How did people solve the problem before your product came about?
* Psychographics: How do different people behave (based on lifestyle and personality profile)
* Demographics: Where are our customers and what do they look like?
* Empathy: How can you “do for others as they would like it done to them?”

The 4 ways people ask questions:

* Methodical: focus on HOW (”What are the details? What’s the fine print?”)
* Spontaneous: focus on WHY or WHEN (”How can you get me to what I need quickly? Do you offer superior service?”)
* Humanistic: focus on WHO (”How will your product or service make me feel? Who are you? Can I trust you?”)
* Competitive: focus on WHAT (”What are your competitive advantages? What are your credentials?”)

I would have liked to see some specific step-by-step examples of applying the Persuasion Architecture to existing businesses (rather than identifying some businesses that use a feature or two of the process). Nonetheless, the book can serve as a good checklist for developing (or improving) your marketing strategy.

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Article Tags: action satisfaction, aida, attention interest desire action, business school, different ways, empathy, mock ups, personality profile, persuasion, prospective customer, prospective customers, prototype, school model, small business owner, subtitle, topology, traditional business, traditional obstacles, ups, word of mouth



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