Remember that time Dave Chappelle went to the internet?
Last Friday, I felt like I did the same thing.
I went to a food and wine event with all these different booths hawking their stuff.
There weren’t nearly as many free samples as you get at the beer festivals in Boulder. So I went to all these different wine booths looking for a bottle to buy.
You walk up to a booth and hear the same thing over and over.
“This is a Merlot made in SOME FANCY COUNTRY that uses WHO CARES grapes and BLAH BLAH BLAH STUFF ONLY WINE NERDS CARE ABOUT.”
Then I found a booth that did things differently.
For starters, all other booths were set like a bar — so there was this barrier between you and the people working.
This didn’t have that. It felt more like you were walking into someone’s living room. And it was easier to get sucked in and start chatting.
I asked about a bottle of wine, doing my best to pretend I cared and wasn’t just trying to finagle a free sample out of them…
The woman points to a bottle and says:
“This is the wine of friends…” Then went into a story on how it became a wine people drink around friends.
Then she pointed to the next bottle:
“This is the wine of lovers. In the 1500’s there was a princess who was in love and something something something she jumped off a cliff” (The woman spoke Spanish so I missed a lot of the story.)
Then she showed me the wine you drink for business deals. Which had its own story.
And a fourth bottle I completely forgot about.
Now I was in a fun/party mood, so I went with the “wine for friends.”
Why?
It had a cool story for me to get behind.
I had taken a lot of the woman’s time and started feeling guilty if I didn’t give her anything.
I had been at a wine festival for 30 minutes and barely had anything to drink. It was time to buy a bottle and get to work.
The grapes and temperature they were grown at didn’t matter to me. At this point, I just needed something red, dry-ish and sweet-ish. Which is pretty much my only standard for wine.
What does this have to do with anything?
Let’s flip it and see how this sequence applies to the online world we spend our days in.
First, give people MULTIPLE COOL STORIES. It helps you stand out and gives people a chance to identify with one or more.
Second, give value so they feel that itch of “reciprocity”.
Third, give them the chance to buy because damn it, sometimes they don’t care about scarcity/deadlines. They have their own reasons to buy it immediately.
Oh hey, you can do all that with the case studies I keep yammering on about 🙂
Holler if ya need a hand with that.