Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Feelings seem to be the entrance to our existence

Just been immersed in marketing for awhile now. However, another cross-over datum has come to light.

In "The Secret", several of these teachers held that Feelings were the key to monitoring your thoughts - in order to be able to produce the manifestations you want. This is how they explained the Law of Attraction.

Now, in copywriting, one author pulls this same point: "It's the gains, the feelings and the avoidances attached to them, the advantages of carrying out such a task and succeeding that matter. If you're not selling those feelings, and those advantages and gains, your product on reading your sales letter will seem more like an empty shell with no meaning, than an exciting product that everyone wants."

In short - they are working to get us to use our feelings to buy their stuff.

But people can't be made to want. Their wants can be excited and amplified, but no one can be made to want something. (I did run into one author who said the purpose of marketing was to "Create Want", but factually - and if you run through the rest of his work, it backs this up - you are actually only finding out what they want and then telling them that your product will fulfill that want.

And it's our feelings that tell us when we are close to getting what we want.

The trick is that for most of us, our feelings have been out of our control - so we are more reactive than creative in our lives. (Just change the R and C...) And to that degree, Madison Avenue triumphs with its psychobabble ideas of subliminal influences.

A lot of their studies probably point back to Pareto's Principle. You know, the one that says 80% of your problems are created by 20% of your staff - that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients?

This really goes back to the Bell Curve, which has another point - a repeating statistic is somewhere around 3-5%. Serious crime is committed by just that percentage of the population in any given city. Bulk mail (and spam) are built on this particular percentage of people buying whatever you send them. You just have to increase the amount of contacts and then you can make more sales.

Then I hit an author writing on sales pages saying that almost any sales page will turn over 2-4% into purchases.

Now these two (Bell Curve and Pareto Principal) tend to tie together loosely. 20% of 20% is - yes - 4%. Another mental health program author stated that of the people who get sick, 20% do so on a regular basis and are connected to 2 1/2% of the population who are out to get them in one fashion or another. (What he didn't cover, the obverse, would be that a different 20% rarely get sick and would be connected to a 2 1/2% who are so supportive as to be either saints or angels.) However, that author made his millions off people getting better - not the ones who didn't need his help. Not so oddly, an analysis of his organizational statistics show that only about 3% of those who started were still with that organization (or its many franchises) after 5 years, the bulk (80%) dropping off within the first three years.

These numbers - 80, 20, 4, 96 - keep coming up. Bob Proctor, in "the Secret", said that it's not by chance that about 96% of the world's wealth is controlled by 4% of the population.

But back to our feelings.

So if Madison Avenue studies are on these perpetual buyers, their studies are bogus. Of course you'd have to review these tons of studies to find out. (Oh, and by the way, it's interesting that one recent study said that 50% of scientific studies contradict the other 50%!)

As well, consider modern polls. Even though they take several hundred or over a thousand people in their questions, this still represents far less than one percent of the population in this country.

Bottom line is that people really don't know what gets people to buy anything.

I bring up feelings at this copywriting author says that this is the way to get people motivated. By reminding them of their feelings.

Now if you plug that into the other datum of using feelings to monitor your thoughts - then you can see how to help others with their lives. Feelings probably monitor thousands of thoughts. But there are a few bands of feeling which are common to every person.

Fear, for one - the chronic feeling which permeated the world's Great Depression. Anger/Hatred - there's another which will make you sick if you stay in it. Worry - an off-shoot of fear - causes various illnesses.

However, various and numerous Law of Attraction authors tell you to "seek the Silence" - to relax and let the Universal/Divine/Nature enter you and fill you with bliss and contentment. And these authors then say that this is the way you are able to most quickly manifest what you want.

Ok - let's roll this the other way. Let's say that maybe 4% of this planet know how to do this trick of controlling their emotions and so being able to manifest on a routine basis anything they actually want. They seldom get sick and rapidly get well. These are the people you not only want to sell to (they have more money available), but you also want them to invest in your business and become part of your team.

Say we could get these few (who also probably control vast amounts of wealth - or could) to organize between themselves to want the same thing? Like discovering a cure for key diseases. Or enabling countries to become prosperous. Or getting behind having real Human Rights for everyone on this planet (which would end wars as we know them).

And it would be through continually reminding people about how good they felt when...

Might as well use this for world peace, since they are selling any number of useless widgets with it....

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