How to "hack" marketing

There's something interesting about IT and computer culture that most people in Marketing haven't picked up on...something that may very well hold the key to persuasion strategies, and ultimately to selling a product or service:  Hacking.

Good IT developers take as a given that there are two steps to getting what they want.   

Step one:  figure out how a system actually works.

Step two:  figure out how to use that system to make it do what you want it to do.

Those two steps seem rather obvious, until you realize that great IT developers are most often"hackers" in disguise.  That is, they instinctively look for weaknesses, loop holes or structures that allow them to "game the system".  When a developer learns how a system works, they are less interested in the appearance of an application, but rather the gears, principals, and underlying code that make it work in the first place.

In the old days, hackers were seen at best as anti-social - at worst as criminals.  But now, the richest and most powerful men and women in the world are hackers.  Bill Gates is, perhaps, one of the richest and most well known, but hackers are running everything from our financial system, world-wide logistics and shipping, media and military security, to on-line retail to phone systems. 

And hackers aren't just working computers.  Hedge funds made a lot of money by hacking financial systems to come up with new financial structures. Southwest Airlines hacked the commercial airline business by understanding what was really driving costs as well as customers - then using it to their advantage.  The best real estate developers hack neighborhoods to find value in a parcel of land that no one else sees.

Unbeknownst to most people, every discipline and every industry has "hackers" - and almost always, they are the ones running things.

However, it's usually not too difficult to spot a hacker if you can watch them solve a problem. Most people when solving a problem will start by asking, "What did we do before?"  a hacker will ask, "How does this system really work?", followed by, "What do we want to get away with?" Once a hacker understands how a system works, then they can use or manipulate the systems rules to solve their problem.

Let me illustrate with a classic marketing hack:

One of the oldest rules of advertising has been Repetition.  The more you repeat something, the more likely people will believe what you say and act upon it.  That's why we see the same ads over and over again - why the same words, the same images and the same benefits are shown repeatedly.  

Here's how it works:  As a survival mechanism, people forget far more than they remember. Part of how we survive is by constantly editing what is important information and what is not.  If we weren't able to do that, we wouldn't be able to discern between information that leads to survival - such as where the good food is or how to avoid the hungry lion and information that we don't need, such as how a grey pebble at your feet looks just like the grey pebble that you stepped on two seconds ago.

However, if you keep seeing that grey pebble over an over again, especially if that grey pebble is fundamentally different from the white pebbles you usually see, you will pay attention to it - and you may remember it as important.

By repeating, "grey pebble" over and over again, the brain starts to register "grey pebble" - and if enough significance is created, it will be rememberd - and even cause someone to act upon it.

A blunt tool that most marketers use is:

Say the same thing, the same way, over and over again until people get it.

Sometimes this can work - but sometimes it can mostly annoy people.  Rarely does it actually build a brand (see my last posting).

A sophisticated hack - one that takes into account how the brain actually works - is to talk about the same thing, in different ways, from different people/sources,  at different times until people conclude that it is important.

In order for a repetition to really mean something, there are a couple of things that should be in place:

1. It has to be different.  If your grey pebble looks like all the other grey pebbles I'm walking on, and nothing of interest happens whenever I step on one, there is no reason for me to remember one over the other.
2. Information needs to come from multiple sources in a credible way. In other words, if one person keeps babbling on about grey pebbles, it can only rise to a certain level of importance.  It may even drop in significance - as one wonders why this person is so obsessed about grey pebbles.  If several people you meet during your day talk about the grey pebble, if there is debate about the significants of grey pebbles, if there are even disagreements about what it means  - then it must be important and true.  It's more credible if it isn't "sold" to you.  It's more important and more believable if you engage in a "dialogue" about it.

Instead of following a formula, instead of looking at how something was done before, instead of just marketing, one may want to consider hacking the market - and in the process begin the "dialogue".