Happy people aren’t desperate to fix themselves.
That’s obvious, right? I mean happy people are happy and they basically just bounce along being happy and doing things that make them more happy.
No. It’s the desperate, anxious and sad people that want to buy happiness. They know there is something, out there, outside of them, known as happiness, that, because they know about it, they are desperate to buy.
And because there’s always lots of unhappy people ready to pay money to fix what’s wrong with them on the inside, there is always a market for a happiness fix.
A recent example was this idea of throwing shit out and organizing your house so that you could be happy. Okay. There’s something to this – but, a movement?
Never underestimate the capacity of your market to become infatuated with a simple idea. Because the simpler it is, the more they can talk about it with authority. And as a bonus, the bigger your market reach because simple is easier to sell to lots of people.
The author Marie Kondo wrote a book about this concept of throwing shit out to achieve happiness. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by itself, is a candidate for case study treatment in our How to Create Million Dollar Products program.
It’s a perfect title! There is a clear offer in the name, so you know what it is. The mechanism is “tidying up”. The magic, really is a mixture of several items. First, there’s the strong contrast in the name, how do you go form the simple act of cleaning up to life-changing? Then you have the intense marketing blitz that occurred around Ms. Kondo, and you also have the Mystical Asian element, included in such concepts as asking things if they spark joy (really?), as well as thanking things for their service before throwing them out (c’mon!).
It’s important to note that one of the main reasons Ms. Kondo got so much free advertising in the form of publicity is because her idea is so simple – you can be happy by throwing shit out. Wrap that up in hushed tones with a dash of Mystical Asian hoo-ha and you have a candidate for talk shows and women’s magazines and websites.
Anyway, the main point I want to make here is about the emotional triggers. Yes, she is promising joy. But you can’t sell joy to a joyous person. No, you have to sell joy to people who are sad, who have a niggling feeling that something is wrong, who are anxious and looking around like a scared mutt.
So the sales pitch has to start with misery and take the prospect on a journey to the promise of joy.
You have to start by saying, things like, “feel like your life is out of control?” “Are you sad for no reason?” “Feel like the walls are closing in?” And so on.
Bottom line – if you want to sell emotional transformation, you have to take them from an obviously undesirable state to one equally obvious as a preferred outcome.