Heroes, pt.1

The Hero’s Journey, Part 1. (Spoiler, you’re not the hero.) 

“67% of the buyer’s ‘decision’ is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales.”  

- SIRIUS DECISIONS 

“Marketing does two things. We tell stories that engage prospective buyers. And we look at data on how people responded to those stories, so we’ll tell better stories next time.” 

- ME 

Most professional services firms start out by telling their story in their marketing. It goes something like this. 

We do stuff that’s too complicated for you to do. Lots of people work here, and we have a lot of acronyms after our names! Plus, check the photo of our building. Shiny, isn’t it? Here’s a stock photo of old people on a sailboat: it implies that we will get you on that boat.  

The message? Because we solve the problem and save the day, we are the hero of this story. Consumers don’t want you to be in charge, though. In any story, there’s room for only one hero.  

And the hero isn’t you 

Studies – and a conversation with any old acquaintance from high school – shows that peoples’ favorite subject is… themselves. If it’s not a business setting, go ahead and talk it up: have a brag battle of who has had a better vacation, career, and kids.  

But in a business setting? The very best thing you can do is get the prospect to talk about themselves and aid them in telling – and envisioning – their heroic, triumphant life story. 

How powerful is the need to talk about oneself? 

In order to investigate the possibility that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding, researchers from the Harvard University Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This research tool highlights relative levels of activity in various neural regions by tracking changes in blood flow; by pairing fMRI output with behavioral data, researchers can gain insight into the relationships between behavior and neural activity. 

In this case, they were interested in whether talking about the self would correspond with increased neural activity in areas of the brain associated with motivation and reward. 

In this study, answering questions about the self always resulted in greater activation of neural regions associated with motivation and reward (i.e., NAcc, VTA) than answering questions about others, and answering questions publicly always resulted in greater activation of these areas than answering questions privately. 

Bottom Line: Everyone’s favorite topic is the same. We all love talking about ourselves. Next time you find yourself deep in conversation, be sure to listen too. Odds are, if you let the other person talk a lot about themselves, they will think you are fascinating. 

The Neuroscience of Everybody's Favorite Topic 
Scientific American, March 7, 2017  

Another widely reported study gave financial incentives to listen, with no incentive to talk. Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information. "We joked that this was the penny for your thoughts study," Ms. Tamir said. 

Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much 
Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2012 

Startling, isn’t it? In my next post, I’ll share some of the principles of The Hero’s Journey (pick up a Joseph Campbell book if you want to do deeper reading) and the company Storybrand, which does a good job of turning this into practical tools for business development and sales. 

Now I’ll stop talking about myself. What do you think? Write me at rickweissinger@rickweissinger.com .