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Are you truly embracing your market?

Dr. Sam Ham called me a, “Weirdo.” He’s a professor at the University of Idaho who has developed an interesting approach to storytelling to provoke behavior change.

I first learned of Dr. Ham from a green marketer in Queensland, Australia. Greg Bruce is the Executive Manager of Integrated Sustainability Services for the Townsville City Regional Council down under.

He sent me a note after reading my blog, and said: “I found much of your text and content “thematically” written and thought provoking. So one conclusion is that either you have done “thematic interpretation/communication” with Dr Sam Ham… or you are intuitively as a social marketer tapping into thematic communication styles – which are opposite of the way most people (and marketers too) are taught, think, act and communicate – and I know as I deal with a lot of them (and they are not thematic communicators).”

Wow, do you think I was intrigued? So I started doing some digging on Dr. Ham. What I found is another body of work that backs up the theory that “Stories sell!”

In this case, it’s how you successfully promote behavior change in sustainable and environmental causes through the use of what the good doctor has coined, “Thematic Communication.”

In fact, I’ll let Dr. Ham do most of the explaining. Over the course of the next several articles here, you will meet Dr. Ham and learn ways to apply his approach of “Thematic Communication” in your campaigns.

Let’s start with my first question:

What is the number one mistake people make when trying to communicate or promote a particular behavior change?

Dr. Sam Ham: Professor of Communication Psychology, Dept. of Conservation Social Sciences, College of Natural Resources, University of Idaho

Dr. Sam Ham: “The biggest, by far, is that we assume we’re representative of the people whose behavior we want to influence.  This leads us to intuit messages out of the blue and to make arbitrary choices about communication appeals based on what we think would be “influential” to us.  Research and much practical experience tells us that people like us are usually very different from our audiences in how we think and feel about things related to the behaviors we promote.

Even a moment’s reflection should convince us that if all those other people really thought and reasoned like we do, there would be little need to persuade them of anything.  They’d already be behaving like us.

A further caveat here is that since “all those other people” outnumber us, that by definition makes them “normal.”  So we have to face the reality that we weirdos (in the statistical sense) have taken it upon ourselves to make normal people more like us.  Just a thought in the name of ethical humility.”

A good example of this communication deficit between the “Weirdos” and “Normal” people is seen the 1968 movie, “Planet of the Apes.” Charlton Heston’s character, Ulysse, crash lands his space ship on a far flung planet that greatly resembles Earth. Ulysse, in the world he came from, is of course the dominant species. However, he discovers in the upside-down world he now inhabits that humans have been reduced to ape-like beings, while the apes run the place. Ulysse, according to my loose interpretation of Dr. Ham’s thesis above, represents the green marketer. The apes are the market. It’s not until Chuck gets in the heads of his ape captors-soon-to-be-patrons, that his survival is assured.

I suppose the same holds true for any marketing effort.

As marketers, we often think we have all of the answers – we’re the normal ones – even as we haven’t taken the time to hear the important questions posed by our customers. We become bloated with industry jargon and tech speak, when what we really need is a good tale that reveals the truth about our cause and why people need to act. Only then, through understanding that comes with thematic communication, will we be effective and sustainable.

Ok, so Dr. Ham didn’t call me a “Weirdo” directly to my face. But I’ve been guilty of the “Know-it-all” marketing syndrome he references above.  Have you?

In my next post in this series, we will unveil the character of thematic communication through the eyes of Dr. Ham with great examples of how it works.