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Right Message, Wrong Time

If Potential Lasik Patients Are Terrified Of The Procedure, They Won’t Care How Good The Doctor Says He Is.

If Potential Lasik Patients Are Terrified Of The Procedure, They Won’t Care How Good The Doctor Says He Is.

The Best Marketing In The World Will FAIL If Your Prospect
Isn’t Ready To See It.

By Rich Harshaw

Me: “Nobody cares that you’re the best. Seriously. Nobody cares.”

Lasik Surgeon: “Yea, but we’ve done over 40,000 procedures. Everyone knows us. We’re the best.”

Me: “Then why are you coming to me asking why your advertising quit working?”

Lasik Surgeon: (awkward silence)

Me: “Let me put it to you this way: If 90% of your potential market is scared to death by Lasik, then the fact that you are the best at doing what scares the heck out of them doesn’t really help much.”

Lasik Surgeon: “But… we’re… the best.”

Me: “You have to convince people not to be scared; that there is no danger; that there is no pain. Once they start to believe THAT… then they might care if you’re the best.”


Most companies view marketing as a competitive sport, and gear their ads, brochures, and websites to convince prospects that they’re the best choice in a sea of competitors. Differentiation, innovation, and uniqueness are viewed as the key to marketing and advertising success. And rightfully so.

But in many cases, your true competitors are actually NOT other companies at all. Instead, the real marketing challenge is to convince prospects that they need what you are selling in the first place… or to overcome their preconceived objections that are keeping them from buying your product or service from anyone.

The type of messaging that should be featured in your marketing depends on several factors, including what type of industry you’re in, where the prospect is at in the buying cycle, and what the overall goal of your marketing efforts are. You’re about to be introduced to several common-sense principles that you probably haven’t considered before, but can make a major difference in your marketing results.

Communicating to your target market through marketing really isn’t much different than communication in any relationship. You have to make sure you’re saying the RIGHT things (hot buttons). But you also have to make sure you’re saying the right things at the right TIME.

Having a conversation with your kids about the birds and the bees is absolutely the right thing to do—that’s saying the right things. But having that conversation when they are three years old is probably the wrong time. It’s too early. Or when your teenage daughter tells you she’s pregnant—that’s probably too late. You have to choose the right time to talk about certain things. Similarly, there’s a right time to bring up certain hot buttons with your target market. And like I just mentioned, we use the principle of the Educational Spectrum to know what you should be saying to your target market at a given time.

Think of the educational spectrum as big horizontal line with a POINT A on the left hand side, and POINT Z on the right hand side, and all the other letters of the alphabet in between. When a person first gets the inkling of an idea that they might want to buy what you sell—not necessarily from you—but just the product or service in general…when they first entertain the idea… which often occurs when they first become aware that a product exists, they are way over on the left side of the spectrum, at point A.

Click to enlarge

As people learn more and more about the product or service, they progress down the Educational Spectrum… point B, C, D, E, down to F, eventually into LMNOP… and so forth. Sometimes the movement is inadvertent—they happen to hear or learn about products from TV or internet or a friend. Sometimes it’s very deliberate—they go out and actively research in an effort to learn more about a product or service; maybe online, at a store… or they might solicit an opinion from a friend.

If they have objections to buying, they look for more information to help overcome the objection. If the objection can’t be overcome at the moment, they might decide NOT to buy at all, and retreat back to the left side of the spectrum. As people’s interest and urgency to buy something increases, they move closer to the right-hand side of the educational spectrum—down to the T U V W X Y Z portion. Generally the T-U-V areas are full of heavy research regarding WHO they should buy it from, and W, X and Y are where decisions are made until finally, point Z, when the transaction actually happens and money changes hands.

When it comes to your marketing, you’ve got to understand where people are at on this educational spectrum—not as individuals, necessarily, but as a group—when they’re seeing or hearing your message. If your product or service is new to the marketplace, a large percentage of people who are seeing your ad will be on the left side of the spectrum… as a result, trying to talk them into buying it from you would be a waste of time.

Instead, you would need to focus on why they would want to own what you sell in the first place, or in other words, focus on hot buttons that address the Benefits of Ownership.

On the other hand, if your ad is reaching a part of your target market that’s already on the right-hand side of the spectrum and they already know they want what you sell and now they just want to figure out who to buy it from—like in the case of an internet search—you’d better focus your message on why they should buy it from you instead of your competitors. Those hot buttons are what we call Vendor Selection. If you run an ad that reaches a lot of people who might be in the middle part of the spectrum—trying to learn about your product, you might want to focus on objections they might have, and overcoming them… or what we simply call Objection to Ownership hot buttons.

So about that Lasik Eye surgeon. He was one of the biggest players in Denver, and spent more money on advertising and had done more procedures than most of his competitors. He told me, however, that both his lead flow and sales volume had dropped by TWO-THIRDS compared to two years before.

In an attempt to diagnose the problem, I asked about the competitive landscape—had a bunch of new competitors entered the market? Or had the existing competitors cut prices dramatically and forced prices down in the area? He said no—everything was basically the same. Then I asked how many people in the area were good candidates for Lasik, and how many had already had the procedure done. He said about 700,000 were candidates, and about 70,000, or roughly 10%, had already had Lasik done.

Since he was heavy into radio advertising, I asked him to let me hear his ads. They gave a lot of good reasons why people would want to choose him to get Lasik: they talked about how he was the foremost Lasik surgeon in the area, how he had done over 40,000 procedures, he had the best equipment, he offered a “20/20 or it’s free” guarantee… and how whenever other doctors or any professional athletes in the area needed Lasik, they always came to him. In short, the radio ad did a pretty good job of separating him from competitors, telling prospects precisely why he was better, and why they should do business with him. His company was reasonably innovative and had done a good job of getting rid of the platitudes, and was communicating powerfully.

But even though his ad was written powerfully and hit the important and relevant issues with specificity, I told him, it was failing because he was saying the right things but at the wrong time.

He had an Educational Spectrum problem on his hands. Think about Lasik for a minute—at the time I had this conversation with the doctor, Lasik had already been around and popular for well over ten years. Just about everybody with bad eyesight already knew about it, had looked into it, and decided whether or not they wanted it. They’d gone from point A on the Educational Spectrum clear down to QRSTUV… and only about 10% had decided that “yes, this seems like a good,” solution and bought it, and about 90% determined, “no thanks, none for me,” and didn’t buy. Are those numbers astonishing to anyone else but me? For less than five grand—and in many cases, MUCH less than five grand—you can spend a few minutes under a knife and have perfect vision from then on… and never have to worry about glasses or contacts. But still, 90% of the people who knew that chose to take a pass. Unbelievable.

Here’s an important marketing question: WHY would 90% of people who could benefit from Lasik decide they don’t want it?

Well, there are really only two basic reasons: #1 is price—they simply couldn’t afford it. But the second reason is the biggest one—and that’s that Lasik scares the ever-living daylights out of people! Simply put, it’s FEAR. The thought of cutting their eyeball and the possibilities that it would hurt or that something might go wrong scare about 90% of the people out there to the extent that they’d rather not risk it!

We already settled the issue that you have to hit the prospect’s hot buttons in your marketing. But here’s the key: what is important and relevant to somebody can change dramatically depending on where they are on the Educational Spectrum. Marketing’s main job is to facilitate people’s decision-making process and persuade people—but you’ve got to know what it is you’re trying to persuade people to do.

If your product is new or unfamiliar to the marketplace—if they’re not even on the Educational Spectrum, or if they’re just barely sitting there at points A B or C—the biggest hurdle is just to get them to understand why they should buy what you sell in the first place. You’ve got to preach benefits of ownership. That’s why when Lasik first came out in the mid-1990s, all the ads focused on benefits of ownership. In other words, the ads back then needed to persuade people that they needed this newfangled thing called Lasik: Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to wear glasses anymore? What if you could see the clock clearly in the middle of the night without having to squint? Or go skiing without worrying about your eyewear. That’s benefits of ownership—persuading people that they should buy what you are selling. Again, not necessarily from YOU, but just in general.

But then after a couple of years, the vast majority of people with eyesight problems had already heard about Lasik and were sitting there somewhere in the middle of the educational spectrum. There were so many people that were investigating Lasik that the messaging quickly shifted to “sure you want Lasik, but who are you going to buy it from?” So now, instead of persuading people that they should get this great new procedure called Lasik, the focus of a lot of the advertising switched to persuading people that they should buy Lasik from one doctor over another.

When familiarity is high, when people already have a pretty good idea what they want but they’re just looking for somebody to buy it from, when they’re firmly in the middle part of the Educational Spectrum and checking out their options, we call this category of hot buttons Vendor Selection Standards: What are the standards you should expect from a company—or a vendor—that you would buy from? What should you look for—and look out for—in terms of pricing, service, expertise, timing, experience, turnaround time, and so forth. You know, all the “usual” marketing stuff.

But then after a few more years passed—once everybody already knew about Lasik, and the majority of people who wanted it had already purchased it—there was still a huge market full of people who weren’t buying because they had objections… like FEAR. Remember the 90% we just talked about!? They had traveled down the Ed Spec, gathered their info, and at some point decided they didn’t want it, so they retreated to somewhere back on the middle to left side of the spectrum. “Thanks, but no thanks.” To reach these people and to hit THEIR hot buttons—to talk about things that are important and relevant to them—you have to talk about the reasons they don’t want to buy, or in other words, their Objections to Ownership. You have to persuade them that their objections are not valid, and attempt to get them to buy, despite, in the case of Lasik, their fears.

So by way of summarizing the principles, there are three major categories of hot buttons that coincide with the Educational Spectrum. “Benefits of Ownership,” “Objections To Ownership,” and “Vendor Selection Standards.” The first category of hot buttons is called Benefits of Ownership and it answers the question of “Why would somebody want to buy what you sell in the first place?” Second, Vendor Selection Standards, answer the question of “why would somebody want to buy what you’re selling from YOU instead of your competitors?” The third category, Objections to Ownership is all about identifying and overcoming the objections that people have to buying what you sell.

I told the doctor instead of only talking about how wonderful he was, he should try talking about fear, pain, and problems. Realize, I’m only talking about Lasik here—I DID NOT just tell you that in your businesses you should talk about fear, pain, and problems. That might be the right solution, but it might NOT be the right solution. Each business has to be looked at and evaluated individually. My job is to give you a set of principles that will allow you to make those evaluations.

For the Lasik doctor, a radio ad would be VERY effective that starts off by saying, “Have you ever thought about getting Lasik but were scared to death because you thought it would hurt, or that it might cause long-term vision problems, or you were just plain afraid to have a laser cutting your eye?” Pop Quiz: Take what you’ve already learned here and tell me why that would be so effective. (Answer:) It’s because the reticular activator would hear that, it would be FAMILIAR AND IMPORTANT AND RELEVANT and therefore the prospect would not only be interrupted to pay attention, they would also become engaged in the ad. Why? Because the very nature of the headline suggests that there’s a solution to the problem. After all, why would a doctor even bring the problems up if there wasn’t a solution? We did indeed run this revised ad, and the doctor’s phone volume went up immediately, and I do mean immediately, and by a significant percentage. Twenty-five times, to be exact.

Here are some mocked-up ads to consider…. Read them and see what you think.

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In my next blog posting, Right Message, Wrong Time Part 2, I’ll give you even more examples to help you with your contractor marketing.


Marketing Checkup: Want to know if your marketing will work? We’ll perform a contractor marketing plan analysis and give you a number grade from 0 to 100 so you’ll know for sure. Just fill out this form and we’ll contact you to schedule a time to discuss. Important! Please DO NOT fill this form out if you do not intend to actually meet with us to discuss. We have to invest a substantial amount of time and work into preparing these reports. Thanks!

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© 2015 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.

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