Advertising Lessons From Mad Men – Lesson #3: Finding What Customers Want

Yup …

Another clip from Mad Men with some lame link with marketing – just what you needed.

But, this one is not just another video –  it is one of the most important topics.

See, from the times of Claude Hopkins to this date, there are few core concepts that haven’t changed and few processes that have been digitized, but still exist.

For example – all of em expect us to dive deeper into the deep desires and emotions, pains, and joys of our target audience.

And do you know why? It’s not because it’s so much fun to dive into someone’s pool of personal and inevitable ****, it is because when you understand your customer’s pain and joy, you get to understand what they might want from a product like yours and this lets you approach them in the best possible way.

In the combination of clips that you can watch here, Don Draper tries to find out what women want because if he gets the best, no BS answer, he gets to open a door into the mind of his target market (women who buy deodorants for their men).

So, how to get into your target market’s mind?

There is more than one way to do this.

For example, you can research the market and make a buyer’s persona.

Or you can skip the big thing (at the initial stage) and stick to one of the processes that you have to follow while defining/finding out your target customer’s avatar.

That process is the voice of customer research – more precisely, review mining.

You mine reviews given by your target customers (even if those reviews are for your competitors’ products), you analyze that data, you find some themes and you divide the data between two most important parts:

A) What are your target market’s pains, agonies, problems, and fears?

B) What are your target market’s joys, deepest desires, and emotions that need to be fulfilled?

Once you extract all that data (just like I did in the video), you can understand what your customer wants.

Then you have to make another important decision – you need to decide between two important questions:

A) Is the target market more focused on getting rid of its pains, problems, and fears? or

B) Its major emphasis is on the fulfillment of a particular deep desire, servicing a particular emotion, or achieving a certain joy?

As Dan Kennedy said, pain is a motivator bigger than joy: hence the popularity of PAS (pain, agitation, and solve/solution) formula.

Once you decide what moves your target market faster towards the “Buy Now” button, you get your angle, you can then dive deeper and make other decisions like how you’d brand the product, how the copy will follow, and other such details.

The Google sheet that I used for this video was a shortened version of the sheet that my friend and one of the best SaaS copywriters Joel Klettke used for the voice of customer research when he and another amazing SaaS copywriter Josh Garofalo were writing copy for Hubspot.

Wait a minute, who’s the buyer again?

So, this detail is kinda tricky.

Just like it was in case of Playtex bras (another episode of Mad Men). While women use bras and maybe they form the majority of buyers who buy bras, they basically buy them for their men. They buy bras to please men (sorry ladies, 60s logic brought to you by Mad Men).

So at the end of the day, their men’s approval matters a lot. Thus Playtex copy had to be written keeping in mind those who actually judge the product.

Likewise, in this case, Gillette deodorant is actually made for men. But the research showed that the biggest number of buyers are not men, but the women who buy these products for men in their life.

All you have to do is pick the reviews from the kind of people who’d buy the product and NOT NECESSARILY from those who’d use it (unless they form the biggest chunk of buyers). In this case, the buyers were mainly women so I picked reviews written by women who bought these deodorants for their husbands and sons.

This is it for now; I’d be back soon with another lesson from Mad Men.

If you want to share any feedback, or you have any questions or suggestions, kindly let me know in the comment box below 🙂

P.S. Here’s the list of marketing lessons from Mad Men so far:

Marketing Lessons from Mad Men – Lesson #1: The Voice of Customer Research

Marketing Lessons from Mad Men – Lesson #2: The Unique Value Proposition