A Spoonful of Sugar

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…” Mary Poppins

In today’s communication-cluttered environment, this is advice worth remembering.

There are a lot of relatively inexpensive communication choices available to today’s marketers, which has led to consumers being barraged with sales messages. But consumers have more “filtering” tools available than ever before—DVRs, Do-Not-Call registries, anti-spam software, email opt-outs, and satellite radio, just to name a few. They don’t have to listen to those messages.

Many marketers have responded by making their messages as intrusive as possible. They want to make people listen, and they’ll employ celebrities, humor, nostalgic song clips, dancing elephants, and anything else they can think of to get the consumer’s attention.

The problem with this approach is that these marketing messages are still full of what the marketer wants to say rather than what the consumer necessarily wants to hear. This is where the spoon full of sugar comes in.

If you are targeting a well-identified pool of prospects or customers, you should have some idea what their needs and interests are. So you can wrap your sales message (which people are likely to be only marginally interested in) with “value added” content (ie. “sugar”).

This can take the form of education, testimonials, anecdotes, links to other material, tools like calculators, and anything else that your target market finds useful or interesting.

As your prospects and customers find value in your communications, they will become more likely to read them and less likely to filter them out. And while absorbing the content they are interested in, they will be more receptive to the sales messages accompanying that content.

The alternative is to force your marketing message down people’s throats, with the likelihood that they won’t find it useful or interesting, and will therefore be indifferent or hostile toward your company (and more likely to filter out future messages they identify with it).