How to Purchase Your Customer’s Attention

Hungry people look for food.
Sad people look for hope.
Ambitious people look for opportunity.
Oppressed people look for escape.

But if food is available and you are neither sad nor oppressed and your ambition is – for now at least – satisfied, you are contented.

Contented people look for entertainment.

The company that wins more of the customer’s time is the one most likely to win their money.

What currency do you offer your customer in exchange for their time?

Do you offer them information?

Information holds little interest for persons who aren’t currently in the market for your product.

Information is valuable only to a customer who is currently, consciously in the market for a product they haven’t already chosen in their heart. This is when the search engine optimization energy of all your competitors will wiggle and wink at your customer from 46 different directions.

SEO is a last-minute, last-ditch attempt to win the affections of the undecided and uncommitted.

Why not win your customer’s heart before they need your product?

Great ads make customers think of you immediately – and feel good about you – when they finally need what you sell.

Would you like to win your customer’s time and attention?

Give them entertainment.

ENTERTAINMENT: “A thing to which a person chooses to direct their attention due to the pleasure it brings them.”

We direct our attention to many things each day that do not bring us pleasure: the obligations that come with employment and the ambushes that come with life; tax returns and kids in trouble, lawsuits and medical problems.

Entertainment is a currency.

You would be amazed at what you can buy with it.

You may recall that last week’s Monday Morning Memo ended with these lines:

Weirdly, Wizard Academy doesn’t advertise. The only way you’ll hear about the Academy is from an alumnus who thinks you belong.

And guess what?

You do belong.”

I was able to say “you belong” because you were entertained enough by the subject matter to read it all the way through to the end.

And now you’ve done it again.

This makes me happy.

It’s a clear indication that you are a self-selected member our tribe.

Welcome.

Roy H. Williams,
with Indy Beagle and
All the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy.