I don’t remember my dreams and I don’t give it a second thought. A good night’s rest is all that I care about. But when I watched the movie Inception, one of the greatest science fiction movies of our time, it kind of makes me never want to have a dream again. Whether I remember anything or not. At least not anywhere near a sleep lab.
The premise of the movie is that two or more people who are hooked up to a fictitious dream machine can share the same dream. The plot is based on the science of lucid dreaming, where an individual who is having a lucid dream can actually control what they are dreaming about. So the lucid dreamer can share their constructed or lucid dream with the natural dreamer, who is not conscious that they are in a dream at all. All the connections go through the fictitious dream machine. Thankfully, it would take some super advanced quantum computing to actually transcode and synchronize all those EEGs.
The storyline of Inception is about a team of lucid dreamers who are on a mission to implant an idea, by way of the dream, into the mind of a powerful oil executive. But when you look at the situation, whether it be a dream or reality, the right set of circumstances need to be created in order to get someone to willingly think about something, and consider the alternatives.
Now when it comes to marketing, there is no way around it. In order to get your message through, you need to get inside the head of the customer. You must know or seek to understand those things that are going on in your customer’s mind. You must think like a customer if you are going to introduce new ideas to the present situation. If you cannot somehow assimilate yourself into the conversation going on inside the customer’s mind, you cannot expect to get real attention for the ideas or solutions that you want to introduce.
When prospective customers are dealing with their problems, there is typically not a flash idea where a complete solution presents itself. Rather, ideas are planted in some manner, and they must germinate before action occurs. Here is a key point. For any idea to be planted, it must be relevant to that existing context of the customer’s situation. For the idea to germinate, there are bits and pieces of information or insights that get aggregated through different customer experiences. If you can connect with that train of customer experiences, through various touch points, you can place yourself on the path to consideration.
Now, this is not as simple as an autosequence stream in your marketing automation; although that could help. But, it is going to take more than your medium alone. Naturally this is where the outside world comes into play. There must be proof out there that your ideas are a viable way forward. And that proof must be perpetuating itself throughout conversations that are going. People may be wary of herd mentality, but somehow they still look to what the herd is up to.
So there you have it. To successfully market and sell your solution to a problem, your messaging must fit into the conversation that is going on inside the customer’s head. You can share their dream, their vision, and you can strive to extend the framework to include your solution. But you won’t be able to get there through your own efforts alone. Your messaging, and your solution must fit or complement with the big picture of where things are going. If they don’t, it turns into a nightmare.