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Оглавление“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
—Albert Einstein
Scene: This really happened1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTxGC1OiWFs). It’s the mid-1970s, and Doug Henning is re-energizing magic with his own form of magical wonder. He walks onto a Broadway stage, his pants one of those strange 1970s colors, and he’s holding a newspaper, reading it, and turning to the audience: “The only thing a magician really does is to ask one question: ‘What’s real, and what’s illusion?’”
Henning pages through the newspaper and says: “Now, the illusion begins. I call this an illusion because I never actually tear the newspaper at all.” He rips the paper in half, and again, and again, and again, five times in total. Each time you see and hear the newspaper tear. “In fact, some people even come back stage after the show.” Henning admits. “And they say: I could have sworn you tore that newspaper…. But they’ve been deceived, because I haven’t actually torn the paper at all…. You can’t trust your senses. You don’t believe me?” “Oh, look!” Henning instantly restores the entire newspaper! Or did he ever tear it at all? The audience gasps and claps, but still Henning’s question runs in their mind: “What’s real, and what’s illusion?” 2
This is the same question a now famous “scientific and experimental film about perception” inspires. You may have seen it: Three people in white shirts and three in black pass a basketball back and forth. Viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass
the ball. When the short film is over, audience members argue amicably over the number. Fourteen? Thirteen? Fifteen? Not one of them, however, comments on the man, dressed in an absurd gorilla costume, who strolls back and forth through the frame, even pausing to pound his fake gorilla chest. They are all “victims” of what psychologists call “inattentional blindness.” Asked to count basketball passes, basketball passes are all they perceive. Asked whether Doug Henning is really tearing the newspaper, seeing and tearing the newspaper is all they perceive. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.3
The hair of Mad Men’s Don Draper was reality from the late 1920s though at least half of the 1960s. If you watched cable television anytime between 2007 and 2015, you are intimately familiar with the thick, slick, shoe-polish black hair of actor Jon Hamm as the 1950s-1960s Madison Avenue ad man: unbearably handsome, impeccably stylish, and so thoroughly put together that not a single follicle or shaft was ever out of place. Never mind Don’s tortured, alcohol-soaked psyche, that hair was the apotheosis of Euro-American manhood—and had been since the third decade of the twentieth century. For at least two or three overlapping generations, this tonsorial state was not only reality, but a very desirable form of the status quo.
In truth, human hair does not naturally assume such a sleek, shiny, and shellacked shape on the human skull. From the hairline up, the reality of the Don Draper look was real, but unnatural—and for good reason. It was manufactured at the County Chemicals Chemico Works, Bradford Street, Birmingham, England. The plant was owned and operated by Beecham, Ltd.—establishing its place in the world by turning out, beginning in 1842, Beecham’s Pills, a concoction of aloe, ginger, and soap advertised to “Dislodge Bile, Stir up the Liver, Cure Sick-Headache, Female Ailments, Remove Disease and Promote Good Health.” It almost certainly did none of these, but the undeniable reality was that Beecham’s Pills were one hell of a laxative, managing to keep British bowels in motion until 1998 when the successor to Beecham, SmithKline Beecham, shut down production after a run (as it were) of 156 years.
In all fairness to County Chemicals’ hair product—introduced in 1928 and called Brylcreem—it did not issue from the same assembly line as the laxative. It was a pomade consisting mostly of water and mineral oil held together by beeswax and dispensed from a jar—or “tub,” as the cosmetics industry calls such vessels—that fit comfortably in the palm of the adult male hand. (Today, as manufactured by Unilever, it comes in a tube.) If you are fortunate enough to be too young to recall the 1950s and 1960s television commercials for the product, several are available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube and Dailymotion.com. By the television era, Brylcreem was promoted with the jingle-borne injunction, “A little dab will do ya.” At least one TV spot earnestly cautioned that “Brylcreem has a most extraordinary effect on women. (Young, pretty girls are especially susceptible.) So once again, as a public service, we’d like to caution all serious men to use just a little dab.” This ad depicted a young fellow enduring the caresses of a mildly assaultive woman who just cannot keep her exploring hands out of his hair.
“This man dared to use two dabs. Now he’s in trouble!”
The thing is, anyone who has seen Tyrone Power or Cary Grant in films of the 1940s—a time when dashing pilots flying for the Royal Air Force (RAF) were called the “Brylcreem Boys”—knows that old-school users could not confine themselves to a little dab or even two little dabs. Just look at photos of our last old-school president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, a lifelong user of the product.
Advance to 1962, the year Bristol-Myers gave Vitalis to the world. This product challenged the hegemony of the Brylcreem status quo and thereby changed reality. Vitalis was radically different from Brylcreem. It came neither in a tub nor tube, but in a bottle. It was not a “hair pomade” or even a “hair dressing,” but a liquid “Hair Tonic,” charged with an essence denominated V7, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office identified as “Polyglycol for use in a hair tonic.”
We can reveal here that the current Vitalis formulation consists of SD Alcohol 40, PPG 40 Butyl Ether, water, benzyl benzoate, fragrance, dihydroabietyl alcohol, D&C Yellow 10 (CI 74005), and FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake. Whatever this formula does or does not do for human hair on the cellular or molecular level, what it did to Brylcreem is what Kryptonite does to Superman. In truth, we don’t believe it’s the SD Alcohol 40 or the FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake or any other chemical constituent of Vitalis that undermined the reign of the earlier reigning hair product. We are convinced the decline began as soon as Bristol-Myers decided to call out its incumbent rival neither by its brand name (Brylcreem) nor its generic name (pomade), but rather to redefine, revile, and dismantle it utterly by slurring it as “greasy kid stuff.”
Here’s how it worked. Both in print and on TV, the typical Vitalis ad was set in a locker room and depicted one pro athlete staring slack-jawed at the hair of a teammate. Barely suppressing a tone of contempt and nausea, athlete A demands of athlete B: “You still using that greasy kid stuff?”
Like Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” the question struck a sustained chord with the public. In bars, at work, on the very streets of America, men asked one another, “You still using that greasy kid stuff?” Through the analog Web of predigital pop culture, Vitalis advanced against Brylcreem with the speed of Patton against Rundstedt. In 1962, honky-tonk song-writer Cy Coben wrote a tune called “Greasy Kid Stuff,” giving one-hit wonder Janie Grant her single Top 40 hit, with lyrics invoking Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, Stanley and Livingston, Sampson and Delilah, and Nikita Khrushchev and JFK—all of whom, the song complained, used “greasy kid stuff.”
The following year, greasy kid stuff found its way into comedy stand-up routines and culture and became an even more embedded part of our popular consciousness.
Forget Reality, Focus on Perception
It would be fair to say that reality changed in 1962 when Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into “greasy kid stuff.” It would be fair to say, that is, if you look at the world from the magician’s perspective—reflected here in a three-word sentence: Perception is reality.
This in and of itself is hardly a fresh insight. “Perception is reality” is at least as old as Plato’s Republic, a product of the fourth century BC. In a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and Plato’s mentor Socrates, Plato (through Socrates) describes people who have lived lifelong as prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. They observe shadows projected on the wall from objects that pass in front of an unseen fire that burns behind the prisoners. The chained cave dwellers name each shadow, thereby identifying these mere shades as reality.
Now, Plato’s Socrates is trying to sell Glaucon on the benefit of becoming a philosopher. His point in presenting the cave allegory is to demonstrate that prisoners in a cave mistake shadows for reality, whereas the philosopher understands the shadows for what they are because his mind has made him the freest of all men. This has enabled him to see the world of sun and substance outside the cave.
So now we arrive at the difference between the philosopher and the magician. The philosopher scorns and rejects the shadows and what the prisoners make of them, but the magician, while he is not deceived by them, doubles down on the shadows. Philosophers reject as false a “reality” that chains prisoners to impressions received via the senses. Magicians embrace and exploit these impressions because they regard them as something more than Plato believed them to be. They are not shadow impressions passively received, but shadow impressions actively endowed with reality by the human mind.
This brings us to the reason Gustav Kuhn, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of London, argues that “magic is so well-suited to explore human cognition and perception.” It “comes down to one of the weirder facts of being human: Every experience we have in the world—everything we can see and hear and taste and feel, and everything we remember about it afterward—is in some ways virtual.” That is, our picture of reality is created in our cognitive interpretation of reality—the way in which we sort through bristling fields of ambient data to understand what’s happening to us. As Kuhn puts it, “magic happens to us all the time—our whole experience is a massive illusion, we’re just not aware of it.”4
Well, some of us—namely, we magicians—are aware. “Magicians,” Kuhn says, “are trying to find loopholes in cognition, and they’re trying to exploit those loopholes to create their illusions.”5 Vaulting from the fourth century BC to 1962 and the transformation of Brylcreem reality into greasy kid stuff reality, the magician says perception is reality, adding to that formulation the clause or might as well be. For the Platonic philosopher, nothing but reality will do. For the magician, perception is where the action is. Plato’s Platonic version of reality may or may not exist. No one knows for sure, because the only way out of the cave is to imagine a realm outside of the cave. In other words, Plato’s reality exists only in the mind when the mind is, by an act of will, isolated from the senses, those portals to the unreal (and therefore, for the philosopher, valueless) shadow realm. But the magician’s reality is perception—or might as well be—because perception is all we really know.
Another “forget reality” example. In the drawing below, a simple question: not counting the arrows, which line is longer?
Answer: both are exactly the same. This is the famous Müller-Lyer illusion referenced in Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book, Thinking Fast and Slow. In his comprehensive work, Kahneman details dual parts of our mind, our system of perception, which he calls System I, the “faster” part of our brain that by necessity gathers information almost instantly, and System II, the “slower” and more powerful part of our mind that puts logic and reasoning to work. As we’ll see below, great magicians operate inside both these systems, but at their best, they have an innate and almost Darwinian advantage in affecting and even temporarily controlling both.6
In a similar vein, John McLaughlin gives his graduate students an image from an illusion contest held at McGill University in 2007. It is the so-called Leaning Tower illusion.7 Even though the two towers in the photographs are the same, the one seems to lean more than the other, and the eyes and brain are incapable of seeing the reality. The creators of the illusion explain that the brain insists on seeing the two sides as part of the same visual scene. The point for students in a course on intelligence and foreign policy is to always be skeptical of what they perceive as reality or truth. McLaughlin urges them to ask questions that challenge conventional wisdom.
Placebos—Cups and Balls
Placebo is a Latin verb form that requires a pronoun and two verbs to translate into English as “I shall please.” That makes placebo more than a magic word. It is a magic spell. Doubtless, physicians in ancient times were familiar with the “placebo effect”—the way an inert pill or tincture or sham surgical operation or therapeutic procedure, or even a judiciously administered lie, can cause suffering patients to report amelioration of their condition or even experience clinically demonstrable improvement. The term placebo was not defined in any medical text, however, until it appeared in the 1811 edition of Lexicon Medicum, a medical dictionary published in 1717 by the English apothecary John Quincy, which was both plagiarized and expanded by Robert Hooper, a London physician. Hooper viewed placebos in much the same way as the Platonic philosopher viewed shadows—as a fraud to be scorned, calling the placebo a medicine “adapted more to please than to benefit the patient.” It was not until December 4, 1920, in an article for the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, that the physician T. C. Graves described the “placebo effect” in more positive terms, as producing “a real psychotherapeutic effect.”
Modern research shows that not only do 30 to 50 percent of placebos have a positive effect, but that the placebo effect may account for half of the efficacy of “real”—physiologically active—drugs. That is, drugs tend to work about 50 percent more effectively when the prescribing physician tells a patient that she will feel better by taking the medication.8 Rather more astoundingly, placebos appear to be becoming continually more effective, especially in the United States. The reason for this improvement is unclear, but some researchers believe it may be due to saturation advertising of prescription drugs, especially in the U.S., and perhaps also due to the demeanor of the personnel who administer the placebos. Friendly medical personnel tend to be associated with more positive placebo effects.9 Eric Mead, a magician and theorist, cites studies suggesting that the better-looking the placebo is, the better it works. White pills work, but smaller white pills work better. Better still are smaller blue pills with a logo stamp on them. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and colored capsules work better than plain capsules. The higher the indicated “dosage,” the more effective the inert placebo is. But the biggest placebo effect of all is produced by injection.
The mere presence of a physician has a placebo effect, for good or ill. A white lab coat confers authority and authority confers confidence, but most people are also familiar with the “white coat syndrome,” whereby the presence of the physician’s lab coat measurably raises a patient’s blood pressure. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
The exterior of a capsule reveals nothing about the chemical composition of the powder or crystals inside it, let alone the physiological or therapeutic effect of the substance. Likewise, the shadows on the cave wall convey little or nothing of the substance of the objects that cast the shadows. Nevertheless, the senses and the mind work together to create a reality known as perception. They don’t start from scratch each time we see a capsule or a shadow. For better or worse, we come to every encounter prepared.
Penn & Teller, the renowned magic/comedy team, started performing together in 1975 as magical buskers on Philadelphia street corners and at Renaissance festivals. After one gig, they stopped to eat at a New Jersey diner. Raymond Joseph Teller—that is his full original name—sat at the table practicing Cups and Balls, a close-up magic trick at least as old as the conjurers of ancient Rome and a routine that is performed all over the world. It is a series of vanishes and transpositions. In one common version of the illusion, three balls are placed on top of three inverted cups. The magician picks up one ball, vanishing it “into thin air,” only to see it reappear beneath the cup. Experienced magicians will work numerous variations on the pattern, with multiple balls appearing under one cup or with small balls turning into one or more big balls or—as Penn & Teller sometimes do it—the balls becoming several potatoes or objects or pieces of fruit. That evening in the Jersey diner, Teller had no props, so he used what was at hand, wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses. In a traditional performance, opaque cups are used. With clear glasses, anyone watching could follow the wadded napkins as Teller palmed them and moved then from cup to cup. Common sense dictates this would make the illusion impossible. But no. The illusion persisted. As Teller explained later, “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them. Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn’t grasp it.” Today, Penn & Teller perform the illusion on stage, using clear glasses. It never gets old because the reality—the source of the illusion—is not in the props, but in the structure and physiology of the human brain.
We create the reality our brains prepare us for. Most of the time and in most situations, this preparation is useful. There are three opaque cups on a table. You have placed your house keys under the middle cup. You leave the room. You return an hour later. You need your keys—fast. Your memory, together with your life experience (reminding you that inanimate objects don’t move by themselves), prompts you to lift the middle cup instead of wasting time by looking under all three. You lift that cup, retrieve your keys, and are on your way. But if those keys had been placed by a skilled magician well practiced in so-called sleight of hand, your brain might well fail you. The keys you saw the magician put under the middle cup are now under none of the cups. Your brain, prepared to see the keys go under the middle cup, failed to see them disappear into the magician’s hand and thence into his pocket.
Spotlight Attention and Change Blindness
Natural selection is a brutally straightforward evolutionary concept. Variation exists within all populations of organisms. Some variations produce characteristics in individuals that promote survival in an environment. Others fail to promote survival. Call the former variations “favorable adaptations” and the latter “unfavorable adaptations.” Over time, more individuals with favorable adaptations survive to reproduce, whereas fewer with unfavorable adaptations survive to reproductive age. Eventually, the result in such a species is a population exhibiting only the favorable adaptations.
We human beings are equipped with brains that have acquired, through natural selection, certain characteristics that contribute to our survival—at least under most conditions. Among these characteristics is something we might call spotlight attention. The world bombards us with stimuli, potentially and quickly overwhelming us, leaving us vulnerable to harm from a plethora of sources—were it not for our unconscious ability to focus exclusively on (or “attend to,” as psychologists put it) those inputs that are most likely to affect us for good or bad. Without this narrow-beam spotlight focus, we are doomed. When we cross a busy street, we are attuned to traffic—not to the sound of a random bird or the hum of an errant bumblebee. For this reason, we stand a good chance of getting across the road unscathed. Spotlight attention works very well in “normal” situations, but when the status quo is disrupted—as it is when a magician performs—spotlight attention can create what psychologists call change blindness.
A classic example was videotaped in 2007 by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. It shows the psychologist performing what he describes as the “amazing color-changing card trick.” Seated at a table, he introduces himself and Sarah, the woman sitting beside him. He spreads the cards out in front of Sarah, face down. The backs of the cards are blue. He instructs her to pick any card and push it toward the camera. Wiseman gathers up the remaining cards, narrating the action all the while. He announces that he is going to ask Sarah to show us the card she selected. She picks it up, turns it toward the camera, and announces that it is the three of diamonds. The magician puts the card back into the deck, which he now holds fanned out in his hand, cards facing toward the camera. He spreads the cards face up on the table and pulls out Sarah’s card, the three of diamonds. He turns it over and shows that it has a blue back.
“Not particularly surprising,” he says, “but what is more surprising is that all of the other cards have changed to red backs!” He flips them over to reveal this. “And that is the amazing color-changing card trick,” he concludes.
What Wiseman does not draw our attention to is the fact that his shirt, Sarah’s shirt, the tablecloth, and the backdrop behind them have all changed color, too, because Wiseman and his assistant changed them and the decks—without any camera breaks—when the angles allowed. We never noticed these far more dramatic color changes because we were focused—narrowly, like a spotlight—on the cards and the magician’s ongoing patter. “Change blindness” is a side effect of a favorable evolutionary adaptation, spotlight attention, and it can cause us to miss a huge transformation in the reality that, although right before our eyes, remains beyond our perception.
The Truth? Pigs Fly!
Focusing, as we normally do, on the status quo—the expected and the anticipated—we miss some truly amazing thing, like pigs flying. Throughout most of 2015 and 2016, the answer pundits and other experts reflexively gave to the question, “Will Donald Trump be elected president?” was “When pigs fly!”
As it turned out, the pundits, who focused exclusively on the expected and anticipated, were afflicted by change blindness. They did not see what many voters saw in Donald Trump, a candidate capable of bringing the change they deeply craved. Therefore, the pundits did not—because they could not—believe what many voters believed, that Trump should and would be president. If voters (assuming you are in the punditry business), consumers (if you are in the making, advertising, or selling business), or audience members (if you are in the magic business) believe pigs fly, it’s time to get out your pig-proof umbrella.
What’s the point of all this? Pundits, business strategists, and magicians must start from a simple and ineluctable understanding: The voter, the consumer, the audience is boss. We play by their rules at their party on their terms. As the brilliant magician Tommy Wonder once challenged, “Imagine what the audience thinks.” Like great magicians, great marketers know how to put themselves inside the simple, daily reality of their customer’s world to understand what is missing, to understand the opportunities, to understand what this customer may “need”: You get up, go to the bathroom, shake off whatever sleep you found, ponder, sit, shift this morning’s stupid urgencies away from the strategically important, hear your email beeping, jump onto your computer, check Facebook, hear about another scandal in Washington, D.C., and you realize you “need”….
This is what the great marketers understand—these perceptions,
what consumers need but don’t have, and how to get ahead by fulfilling those needs.
The first corporate client David Morey’s company served, Steve Jobs, had this in mind when he answered a hostile question from the audience at a 1997 Q&A. In the fullness of time, the question has ceased to be important, but the answer remains valuable—and always will. In developing a product, Jobs explained, “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.” Jobs went on to explain that in trying to come up with a vision for Apple, he and his team asked, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with ‘let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we gonna market that?’”10
This is even more “right” in what today is often called our “reset environment,” in which disruption is the norm, and where change is not only accelerating, but accelerating exponentially and unpredictably. It is an environment in which outsiders are the new insiders, winning power, and governing nations, and where companies such as Uber, Lyft, Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, and Bitcoin are creating industries unimagined just a few years ago. Beginning and anchoring business strategies—not to mention life strategies—with perceptions is today’s new reality.
Fortunately, magicians give us secret tools to do this. They challenge our sense of what is “real,” of how we define real. By challenging our assumptions, they prompt us to do as they do: figure out how their audience thinks, feels, and acts—and how this relates to what we want them to think, feel, and do. Somewhere in the dialectic between these two hows is our reality. The late eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant divided reality into what he called the Ding an sich (the thing in itself) and the Ding für uns (the thing for us, or the thing as it appears). These days, magicians, marketers, and political strategists have pretty much given up on finding the Ding an sich and have instead settled for the Ding für uns—because perceptions rule, and it is the magician’s, marketer’s, and strategist’s job to begin with, understand, and shape these perceptions.
Brylcreem was the key to the kingdom of civilized virility until it became greasy kid stuff. Bounty was just another paper towel—a dull commodity—until some ad man or ad woman pronounced it “The Quicker Picker-Upper.” Now it is the nation’s leading paper towel product. The phrase is a magic word, an incantation, a spell, endowed with its magical power through a combination of language and the context of “information” created by incessant advertising. The lilting “Quicker Picker-Upper” pricks our memory of TV sequences showing Bounty absorbing several times as much water as any competing towel soaks up. This perception, reinforced by the incantation, is our reality—as solid as the image of a Volvo calling to mind the magic word safety or the vivid blue, red, and orange of a Southwest Airlines jet evoking the incantatory utterance—value.
The Marketing-Magic Nexus
We marketers and magicians may not always like what the audience thinks and believes. As the late Arizona congressman and presidential candidate Mo Udall proclaimed the day after losing an especially close election, “The people have spoken…. The bastards!” David Morey particularly recalls how a client, a famous (but nameless here forevermore) high-tech CEO, banged on the soundproof two-way mirror of a focus group session, impotently yelling at the truth-telling consumers inside: “These…people…just…don’t…understand!”
Well, they don’t. But their misunderstanding was my famous client’s problem and responsibility, not theirs. We report to them—consumers, constituents, audience, voters. They are the boss.
So how do we discharge our responsibility and solve our problem? Let’s break it down.
The very first thing in both magic and marketing is to provide a context for and a summary of the perceptions you want your audience or your customers to have. This is crucial because—remember—perceptions are reality, or might as well be. To provide both context and summary, both magicians and marketers exploit the concept of brand. Bestselling author, entrepreneur, and marketing guru Seth Godin defines “brand” as a set of “expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that in combination drive the decision to choose a particular company, product, or service.”11 David Morey describes “brand” as a bucket into which we pour our expectations and our sense of relevance, difference, and credibility, along with the thousands of images we gather about any leader, country, company, product, or service. Either way, a great brand sums up and reveals to the world how you or your product are different, special, and better.
Next, having contextualized and summed up your merchandise (product, idea, whatever you are selling) in a brand, apply the rules magicians follow every time they perform. David Morey and his business partner, political and marketing consultant Scott Miller, have developed a framework around consumer and voter perceptions that has added exponential business value and won global elections. They call it the 6 Cs.
These days, with more choice on every shelf and in every brick-and-mortar and online store, it is harder than ever to know what consumers will decide. But it is relatively easy to know how they will decide. Six factors drive the decisions of consumers, audiences, and voters. Luckily for us, all six happen to begin with the letter C: Control, Choice, Change, Customization, Convenience, and Connection. Behold:
•Control is at the center. Consumers make decisions that will give them a greater sense of control—over their personal safety, their economic security, their health and wellness, and in opposition to the influence of powerful institutions. A soda pop, piece of software, or athletic shoe can give a consumer the feeling of control. It’s a matter of product development and positioning. Orbiting Control are the five following satellite factors.
•Choice provides more consumer control. It does not limit or force the hand of today’s increasingly knowledgeable consumer, but instead provides cost, quality, and value comparisons. Technology is an enabler here. The Internet has trained us all to expect Choice. If we aren’t confronted by what we have been taught to expect, we quickly find Choice on our own.
•Change usually leads to more and newer choices. Change used to induce anxiety in many people, but ever since Steve Jobs revolutionized personal electronics, consumers have anticipated change positively. These days, the negative dynamics of political leadership have been making change especially attractive to voters. “Anybody but” has become a viable—and often winning—candidate everywhere.
•With more Choice and more Change, Customization is now more attainable than was ever before anticipated. During the bygone era of mass marketing, consumers accepted the tube sock dictum of “one size fits all.” With the technology-driven penetration of the controllable search concept, consumers now accept, embrace, and demand the idea that “I can find that one size that fits just me.”
•Convenience is a known decision driver. It is taken for granted in a world of increasing Choice. Although early adopters will seek out a new idea, once they adopt it, they expect to find it distributed ubiquitously. What is more, in contrast to the early days of the personal computer, they expect the initial usage experience not to give them too many headaches. Nor do they want the burden of thick instruction manuals in seventeen different languages, none of which ever quite come across as native to anyone.
•Connection is not a new driver, but it is now empowered by new tactics and new media. The urge to associate with “people like me, people I like, and people I’d like to be like” still pulls consumers toward brands and voters toward candidates.
These six factors are essential today to great marketing and are at the core of how great magicians manage audiences and their perceptions. In fact, the greatest magicians take command of these 6 Cs. Take, for example, the legendary Spanish card magician Juan Tamariz. His virtuoso performance allows the audience to feel in control, even as he fools them badly and beyond any logic. He offers anyone and everyone just the card they want, he constantly changes the tempo and jolts the audience with ongoing surprises, he acknowledges every helper by name, creating almost intimate connection and making it all seem completely and utterly simple; and finally, he brings the audience to a sense of connection, earning a standing ovation every time. For Tamariz, all 6 Cs are on magical performance overdrive.
Or consider the late, great Harry Blackstone Jr. When he asked for children to join him on stage, he ceded control to the audience—any kid who could make it to the stage was welcome. Every parent within reach of the stage could choose whether to let their child join. Then Blackstone, stepping out from the wings carrying a small bird cage and canary, invited the children to place their hands on the cage, on the top, bottom, back, front—on all the sides. By the time every kid stretched out a hand, the cage and even most of the magician were covered. Then, in a flash, the cage and bird would vanish from Blackstone’s hands and the children, who were invited to look under the magician’s coat—still more ceding of control—could find nothing. Imagine the connection Blackstone made with a vast swath of his audience literally touching him. At that point in the show, his audience was prepared to suspend disbelief and come along for the ride. They were sold.
In business, the 6 Cs are the instruments essential to performing an autopsy on a dead brand or business:
1.Did the deceased take away that sense of Control (as the major airlines so often do)?
2.Did the cadaver before me narrow choice (in the whole category or in its own portfolio)?
3.Did the victim stop changing and refreshing?
4.Did the stiff insist on positioning itself as “one size fits all?”
5.Was this floater inconvenient even for its most loyal users?
6.Did the dear departed discourage the connection of one user
to another?
The 6 Cs will help you engage and hold today’s most difficult audiences, consumers, and voters. And in our hyper-challenging environment, we need all the help we can get.
Finally, we need to delve more deeply into magic by asking how we can learn from the stage instincts of today’s great magicians so that we can better understand how each member of our audience—our consumer—thinks, feels, and acts. Magician, marketer, political candidate, we each sell something to somebody. So how can we “think ahead” (as magicians put it)—think one step ahead—to understand and thereby influence the purchasing process through which audiences/consumers/voters are led by their perceptions?
How? Get the answers to the ten questions that follow. (Magicians get the answers through long experience and close observation. Marketers—well, marketers simply ask consumers.)
1.What surrounds your customers’ world? In what context do they live? Overall, what are the most critical dynamics, forces, changes, products, services, and brands that touch them every day? How do they perceive that world? Every magician asks: Who is my audience? It’s one thing to perform for a group of children on Saturday afternoon, but quite another—as John McLaughlin has done recently—to work corporate events for audiences of electrical engineers, information scientists, or mainline journalists and government officials.
2.How do they see the future? Is it headed in the right or the wrong direction? Remember to ask your customers the classic question Ronald Reagan planted in the minds of voters to win the 1980 election: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” What do they expect from your company or brand in the future? What do they expect from your competitors? A great magician will always try to understand how his or her audience experienced magic in the past—in order to aim his or her show toward the future. Has this audience seen an excellent magician before, or a magician that in some way disappointed? And how has this conditioned their expectations?
3.What do they dream about? What is their ideal product, service, or offering in your category? Since 1984, David Morey has worked with partner Scott Miller and political pollster Pat Caddell as they developed the groundbreaking “Candidate Smith” research, which asked voters not to react to existing candidates, but to construct their own perfect, ideal candidate for president. Once you understand your customers’ ideal product and service brands and brand relationships, you can probe ways to fill in the gaps. For a magician, the relevant question is: what will your audience perceive if they believe you really can do magic?
4.What’s in their hearts? What emotional drivers are most important to your customers? Because more and more decisions are being made impulsively, more and more of marketing is driven by emotion. For example, in politics, one of the most telling measurements of any campaign is the degree to which people believe that a candidate “cares about people like me.” Behind this question is a combination of curiosity and cynicism. “Can this person understand my life? And can I understand this person and the way she or he makes decisions?” They want to know the same thing from the companies and brands that they decide to deal with in the marketplace. In magic, the best magicians, such as David Copperfield, don’t have to deal with quite the same factors, but they do work hard to show they care about and treat their audiences well; and, too, they seek to establish an emotional context for their illusions—to touch the audience’s hearts as well as their minds and embed illusion in a meaningful framework.
5.Where is their pain? What are your customers missing that they most need? What do they worry about at night? For example, in the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s and the recession of the late 2000s, far too many companies received funding—without being able to articulate what specific marketplace “pain” their offerings uniquely addressed. Chances are those companies’ stock certificates are about as coveted today as two-day-old sushi. Similarly, the magician’s job is often to take his or her audience away from any pain they feel in their lives, even if temporarily, and at their best, to inspire and help these audiences to rise above pain, and to help relieve it by the wonder of magic, all the time working to entertain and astonish.
6.What’s relevant and different? Value is created by relevant differentiation—by the benefits you provide to targeted customers and the way you provide them uniquely among all market choices. To achieve relevance, you’ve got to know what matters most to your customers. Most importantly, you must know what attributes communicate and prove differentiation for them. Consider using a “laddering” technique that asks customers to rate a product’s or service’s most important attributes in order of importance to them. If you learn only one thing from market research, that one thing should be how your target consumers define relevance and differentiation in your market segment. For magicians, this is a variation of “know your customer”—what is it that this audience will find especially relatable, different, and astonishing?
7.Are they movable? What are your customers’ attitudes toward your product, service, or company? Are they experiencing hard opposition? Soft opposition? Undecided? Soft support? Or are they hard supporters—that is, loyalists? In other words, ask your customers to tell you if they should be a prioritized marketing target. Get your customers to help you order your targeting priorities. Don’t waste time and resources trying to move the unmovable. On this score, the magician asks: am I facing a group of skeptics…are there people in this audience who don’t like magic, find it challenging, or want to think only like engineers and understand how it works? If so, how can I bring them around?
8.How can you over-deliver on their expectations? What are your customers’ current expectations based on today’s market choices? What would constitute an over-delivery on these expectations? And when and how should you claim this success? How can you clearly define expectations in line with their perceptions, over-deliver on them, and then remind customers of your success at delighting them? These are the most constant questions magicians ask themselves—how can I exceed my audience’s expectations? How can I give them an experience of wonder that goes beyond what they know?
9.How can you best define yourself? In the end, how must your customers see you? What must you stand for? And how can you define your competition most advantageously? (Ideally, positioning yourself to advantage will result in positioning the competition to disadvantage.) With a consumer company/brand, as with a political candidate, people are interested not only in what they decide to do, but in how they decide to do it. Self-definition tells consumers what they can expect from the candidate or the company/brand in the future. Great magicians think constantly, “Who is my character? Who am I portraying on stage? (Recalling the words of the famous nineteenth century French conjuror, Robert-Houdin, that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.’) How do I want my audience to remember me?”
10.How can you control the dialogue in your favor? You must understand and objectively evaluate the effect of your competitors’ claims in the marketplace. If the competition consists of the incumbent market leaders, chances are that they have control of the market dialogue. The question is, how can you take it away from them? What perceptual opportunities must be seized to turn consumers’ attention to you? What core message and themes will help up the ante in the marketplace? The magician is competing not so much with other magicians as with the audience’s version of reality—and the magician constantly asks how they can control all the elements of their performance and bring an entire audience to a state of wonder, delight, and surprise.
Before a performance, John McLaughlin always looks at his favorite magic poster—one from the early 1900s depicting the greatest British magician of that era, David Devant. He does this to remind himself of why magicians perform and what they can give to their audiences. The poster is titled “All Done by Kindness,” and the audience it depicts shows every emotion of delight, skepticism, and expectation that we’ve just discussed. Overwhelmingly, what we behold is a happy and satisfied audience, and although Devant may not have consciously asked himself the foregoing ten questions, we are sure he answered them successfully.12
Practice, Practice, Practice
The moment you embrace the equivalence of reality and perception, you feel a rush. But then you start thinking, and then the rush yields to doubt, self-consciousness, and even a tinge of guilt. David Morey had been an avid magician in childhood since the age of five; to his surprise, he returned to the study of magic as an adult, after a twenty-five-year hiatus. What struck him was the “fragility” of the initial embrace. When you try to learn, or relearn, magic, you become self-conscious about the reality-perception equivalence, so that you tend to see it not as an equivalence, but as a dual reality. You yourself know how you are doing a sleight-of-hand effect, and that self-consciousness will kill the magic, if you let it. So, if you are serious about continuing with magic, you adapt by shifting 180 degrees until your natural inclination is to think from the perspective of the audience’s reality.
This takes practice. You know where the card is hiding, so the challenge becomes erasing all guilt about this, trimming away any blinks or tics or other tells that are signs of something else at work, anything that signals to the audience that, no, perception is not reality. You need to practice until all your tells are purged. The thing is, the audience, like Agent Mulder in TV’s The X-Files, wants to believe. Operating inside their own reality, they want to believe it is reality, period. It is the job of the magician—and the marketer—to oblige them by fulfilling, not fighting, their desire to believe. This is not deception, because perception is reality—or might as well be.
As an aspiring magician, how do you know when you have practiced enough? Our sense of the “fragility” of the perception-reality equivalence often lands in the very mirror before which we magicians begin to practice. We start fooling even ourselves, because our minds simply cannot follow our own tools of deception and sleight of hand, and, in this, we fully assume the role of the audience member or the consumer. We become the audience. At this point, practice has nearly made perfect. The next step is to stop using a mirror altogether and instead perform in front of a video recorder. Watch yourself onscreen in recorded time—unreal time, rather than mirrored time, real time—and you will see the magic happen. Never mind that you are the magician, you will begin to wonder how you did that. When you cannot honestly answer how the magic happened, you have practiced enough.
In magic, the great effects go far beyond “fooling” people. They rise high above simple deception. Here is the secret of the world’s greatest magicians: their magic does not trick the mind, it transforms perceptions—disrupting our preconditions, assumptions, and prejudices. The magic of the great magicians is like the physics of the great physicists. When Einstein showed us that space and time were equivalent, he felt no guilt—though he was obliged to remind us that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” and that “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” When the marketers of Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into greasy kid stuff, they did not repent but rejoiced. Great marketers, like great physicists and great magicians, do not deceive. They transform perceptions—of their marketplace, their product, their service, their brand, and the very future of their industry, sometimes even of their culture and their world.
