Consultant Kare Anderson, writing for the Harvard Business Review, thinks comparisons, not cold facts, are the secret to holding customers' attention.
"We are wired to draw connections between things, even where there aren't any," she writes. If you want to hold your audience spellbound, put that wiring into service.
When you compare your product to something your customers already know, you do yourself a huge favor. Once you've drawn a comparison between your product and something familiar to your audience, Anderson says, "you have set the context in which people will view it and decide upon it, just as a general chooses terrain favorable to winning a battle."
Anderson offers these tips:
- Swipe someone else's slogan. A California hospital increased blood donations by asking the public, "Got blood?"
- Use numbers. Outdoor gear-maker REI's TV commercial depicts two women atop a mountain at night. The voiceover says, "Even the finest 4-star restaurant is no match for one with 4 million stars."
- Try humor. A Cuban who couldn't serve decent food to his guests blamed Castro's revolution: "The three successes were education, healthcare and sports. The three failures were breakfast, lunch and dinner."
