The A-Ha Moment

What do you call the moment when a clinically obese woman realises she has to stop eating and lose weight?

Let me explain…

I watched a woman on TV who’d been previously clinically obese, tell her story. Her friends and family and colleagues had nagged her and begged her to stop eating and start to lose weight as it was getting dangerous. Her trigger point, or her ‘A-Ha’ moment was none of those things. It was when her four year old son asked her to drop him off a few blocks down from where the school was because he was embarrassed of having her take him right up to the gate.

So why is this an important lesson in our sales and marketing?

There’s a simple rule and it’s this; certainty isn’t persuadable.

What that means is simply this. It doesn’t matter how bad someone’s situation is, telling them a reality that they already understand won’t get them to alter their behaviour. This is why health warnings on cigarette packets often fail to change anyone’s behaviour because someone already knows that smoking’s bad for them, therefore, just repeating this information won’t get them to do anything different.

If you want to sell or market your products and services effectively, you have to think about what is the A-Ha moment?

What is that piece of information you can give a potential customer that really gets them to think, that alters their reality and, therefore, makes them see things in a different light.

For example, everybody knows that Rolls Royce is a luxury car, that it’s the height of comfort and sophistication, so when David Ogilvy was charged with getting that information across, he had to say it in a way that would give people the A-Ha moment, that would surprise or delight. His advert read, “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise inside this Rolls Royce will come from the electric clock.” This is new information which delivers insight and, therefore, can persuade.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English