I love this TED talk by Simon Sinek. In it, he explains about his Golden Circle concept which is, in essence, the process of communicating from the ‘inside’ out.
In the video (sorry about the poor quality), he shows how to reverse your message so that instead of going on and on about what you do and how you do it, you talk instead about why you do what you do: why you set up your company, why you’ve created this service or that product, what makes you different… what you care about.
Sinek says that you can give people facts and figures until you’re blue in the face, but if things don’t feel right, they won’t buy. He asserts that buying is a decision made in the limbic part of the brain, and is a gut decision. This is particularly true of the types of customers known as ‘early adopters’ — they almost always buy because they are drawn by the ‘why’ of what you are doing.
So, if you own a business and you’re wondering how to get the right people to buy from you, this video is worth twenty minutes of your time. Then you can ponder on how to bring the ‘why’ into all your marketing — your website, your leaflets and so on, asking yourself,
Why should anyone care about what I do and create and sell?
Towards the end of the video, Sinek reminds us that people followed Martin Luther King because they believed in his ‘why’. They followed because he proclaimed,
‘I have a dream’…
not because he said, ‘I have a plan’.
(You can read more about Simon Sinek at Startwithwhy.com).
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