Retail Observer

April 2017

The Retail Observer is an industry leading magazine for INDEPENDENT RETAILERS in Major Appliances, Consumer Electronics and Home Furnishings

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RETAILOBSERVER.COM APRIL 2017 14 I nformation from marketers—whether packaged in TV commercials, banner ads, point-of-purchase promotions, or branding blitzes—has lost its edge on influencing customers. In our Google-driven world, customers overwhelmingly base their buying decisions on information from other sources, like Facebook "likes" from friends and rants from strangers. To regain a persuasive advantage, marketers must be willing and able to adapt their standard recipes for customers' digitally-altered habits and tastes. In Secret SAUCE: How to Pack Your Messages with Persuasive Punch, Harry Mills shows how to create marketing messages that stand out in the tsunami of information and capture the attention of online-obsessed customers. To make a decisive impact on buy-in, Mills argues, sales and marketing communications must contain the right mixture of essential ingredients: • Simple: one central truth, easy to grasp and picture • Appealing: different, valuable, and personalized • Unexpected: surprising, intriguing, and seductive • Credible: trusted, transparent, and verifiable • Emotional: warm, arousing, and plot-driven Devoting a chapter to mastering each of the five core components, Secret SAUCE also delivers: • A 15-question SAUCE test and a Heat gauge, with criteria and guidelines to measure the persuasive potency of any marketing or sales message. (Based on analyses conducted by Mills' firm, just nine % of marketing and sales communications are truly compelling—on both an emotional and practical level.) • Fascinating insights from neurological and behavioral research into buyers' impulses, biases, and motives, as well as the power of framing, cultural context, social proof, and more. • Eye-opening examples of successful, disappointing, and dismal marketing efforts from wide-ranging companies, including BuzzFeed, Geico, Google, J.C. Penney, and Motorola. B O O K R E V I E W SECRET SAUCE: How to Pack Your Messages with Persuasive Punch Author: Harry Mills is founder and CEO of Aha! Advantage, an international consulting and training firm whose clients include Unilever, IBM, Toyota, Oracle, and Astra Zeneca. An in-demand speaker, he is the persuasion expert at Harvard Business Review's Manage/Mentor program and author of two previous AMACOM books, Artful Persuasion and The Rainmaker's Toolkit. He divides his time between New York City and Wellington, New Zealand. Publisher: AMACOM books RO

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