I love this new Brand Camp cartoon from Tom Fishburne:

One observation and one suggestion:

Observation: The reality is that as marketers, we are so wrapped in our own product or service (in this case, pickle relish) that we don’t take the time to step back and really understand what our customer cares about. How often is pickle relish at the forefront of their mind? Maybe when you are standing in the pickle relish isle looking at options is it one of the few times it is on your mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout always used to say, “you position your product in the mind of the customer”. Well, how much of her mind can you honestly hope to occupy?

Suggestion: If you really want to create an evangelist, target what she really cares about. This is really where a cause comes in. Pick one of those big chunks of grey matter and provide value there. If you provide value to the customer, they will provide value to you. This means giving her something that she can really emotionally invest in and the result will be more sales of pickle relish. Take Roaring Springs, a local water park, for example. Instead of focusing on selling more season passes, they focused on giving mom’s daily meaningful activities for their kids. The result was more ticket sales, more food sales, and more merchandise sales.