This blog continues our series on Merwyn Technology. Merwyn Technology has two major ways it helps you achieve greater innovation success. First it helps you craft the single most persuasive message for your innovative idea. Second, Merwyn Technology then evaluates the strength of this message by giving you feedback on your chances for success in year one sales potential.
Here is an overview of what we will cover on how to craft a strong reason to believe that you can deliver the benefit promise to customers.
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.
Here are several important points to keep in mind as you craft a strong reason to believe.
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.
Here are 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.
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- 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.
If you want help with your innovation program, we can help you achieve dramatically better innovation results in 90 days or less. Guaranteed. We help businesses of all kinds and sizes to consistently double their innovation success rate by creating innovative solutions that are dramatically better than all of their competition. We can consistently do this because Innovate2Grow Experts is the only innovation consultancy using the eight most proven innovation best practices.
At Innovate2Grow Experts we can help you in two fundamental ways. First, we can collaboratively work with you in a variety of ways on a specific innovation need. Second, if you are interested in being trained at a high level on the eight most proven innovation best practices, you can start for free.
Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to reconnecting with you soon. Have a great day.
Richard Haasnoot, Head Coach, Innovate2Grow Experts/i2ge.com
Founder and Producer, Innovation Best Practices podcast i2ge.com/podcast