“Welcome to the Proven, Practical, Profitable Innovation podcast! I am Richard and I thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. My goal is to make sure you get a high return on your time investment listening to this podcast. I want you to immediately be able to use the information in this podcast to help you sell more and make more. When you find that this podcast helps you, I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me a five-star rating and a written review. It helps us to become visible to more and more people who can benefit from the help in this podcast. Thank you in advance for your help with getting five-star ratings.
As I shared with you in the first podcast of this series, 75% of all new products fail, with most of them failing in the first 12 – 24 months. Many fail because the quality of their communication to potential customers does not clearly and persuasively communicate the product’s best possible story. So if you have an innovative new product or are bringing innovation to an existing product, this series of podcasts provides you with the proven science of persuasion powered by Merwyn Technology. Use this with skill and you will not have to worry if you have done the best job of communicating to potential customers.
Of the three critical elements in the science of persuasion powered by Merwyn technology, today we cover the second element– giving them a reason to believe you can deliver the promised benefit.
If after listening to this podcast you feel a need for more help, please contact me directly—my email is richard@i2ge.com. You can also go to my website—i2ge.com– where you can explore many innovation topics, especially check out the DIY Innovation Training on the menu bar. We customize all the training programs to our clients’ unique needs and circumstances.
Reason to believe communication – overview.
Merwyn Technology is used to evaluate actual product communication. When it comes to persuasively communicating a reason to believe the promised benefit, we know scientifically that the strength of your reason communication directly impacts your chances of success. Specifically products with weak reason to believe communication have a 18% chance of succeeding. If you increase it to strong you have a 29% chance of success. And best of all, if you increase it to very strong reason to believe communication your chances for success increase to 42% or more than double weak communication.
So with very strong reason to believe communication alone, you can have chances for success that are higher than the average 25% success rate for all products. In subsequent podcasts we will show how when you add communication of your differences that your chances go up even more dramatically.
Reason to believe communication 101: several important points
First, you need to address buyer skepticism regarding any benefit promise that you make.
Research study after research study clearly shows that 60% – 90% of people say they distrust advertising and claims made by salespeople. The only way you reduce the skepticism is to provide a highly credible reason to believe that your product delivers the benefits you promise.
Second, there are five proven strategies for developing highly credible reasons to believe.
First, explain how your product works to produce and deliver the benefit.
Think about a process – how it’s made and delivered and why the result is different from competition.
For example for a muffin claiming superior fresh taste: we add twice the number of berries, using only natural butter, and make our muffins fresh every hour.
Second, give people personal experience with the product so they can experience the benefit for themselves.
Examples: test drive a car, give people a free sample, the sensory feedback with Ziploc bags, a demonstration of your benefit – Bounty paper towels side-by-side demonstration of the quicker picker upper benefit claim.
Third, pedigree is a reason to believe.
Development pedigree: made with Idaho potatoes, patented, award-winning process.
Marketing pedigree: best-selling, choosy people choose Jiff, 50 years of satisfying customers.
Trademark pedigree like Disney.
Fourth, testimonials as a reason to believe.
Customers: nine out of 10 prefer, you can’t eat only one for potato chips.
Experts: Dr. preferred, endorsed by the American dental Association.
Media: movie critic quotes for movies.
Fifth, guarantee as a reason to believe.
Doug Hall: the power of your guarantee is directly linked to the level of risk you and your company are perceived to be taking.
L. Bean: our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if it proves otherwise. We will replace it, refund your purchase price, or credit your credit card.
A couple of simple examples.
Example 1.
Feature: Boat for sale
Benefit: Fast boat
Strong Benefit: Specialized racing boat for those with a passion for winning
Real Reason to Believe: Designed by America’s Cup champion boat designer
Example 2.
Feature: Fish for sale
Benefit: Fresh fish
Strong Benefit: The freshest fish in town
Real Reason to Believe: When you sell more fish, it’s fresher. We sell more fish than anyone.
A quick summary of what we have covered today.
You can double your chances for success with a product if you backup your benefit promise with a highly credible reason to believe your benefit promise.
There are five different ways you can create a credible reason to believe: tell how it works, pedigree, testimonials, personal experience, and guarantee.
The upcoming podcasts.
Dramatic difference: the most powerful part of the science of persuasion is communicating our benefit promise is better – hopefully dramatically better – then some, most, or all of the competitive options. You will learn how to communicate these differences with skill and persuasiveness.
The series will conclude by a podcast that pulls together the three elements and shows how they work best together.
Ongoing close.
With what you have learned today, the vast majority of you can immediately increase the persuasiveness of what you are communicating to customers by having very strong reason to believe that you can deliver your benefit promise communication. This is true for any new products you might invent and for existing products.
If you would like to see the key written points from this podcast, you can find them in my blog – i2ge.com/blog.
One of my six books is Proven Practical Innovation That Delivers Results. This very low-cost book is available at Amazon in paperback and has a Kindle book. Is truly packed with lots of practical help.
After the completion of this series, we move into a series you will not want to miss. We will have a series of interviews with the person who is probably invented more new products than anyone in America. If there was an innovation Hall of Fame, she would be in it.
Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to reconnecting with you soon.
