Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing [With CDROM]

It turns out one size doesn't fit all. The customer revolution produced a new breed of consumer - one that is savvy and particular and expects to be sold according to his or her individual personality. Enter "Persuasion Architecture" - a method for "speaking to your customer in the language of the customer." The Eisenbrothers, with Lisa T. Davis, have written a book as clever as its title, about what could be a complicated subject - persona-based selling - and made it accessible to anyone in business.

Customers drive marketing, not the other way around. No longer do customers accept products as designed. They expect and demand products to be molded to their needs. Just like you can't turn a cat into a dog; marketers can't turn a customer into a buyer by convincing them that they need product or service `as is.' "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark" is a fitting title for this book. Cats tend to see the world revolve around them while dogs are eager to please their masters by doing whatever they want. Today's customers are in charge-much like cats. "As is" might work in the bargain bin, but not in the majority of today's markets. The authors guide the reader in reaching the audience, persuading them to take the right action and feeling confident about that action, and giving the audience results that match their demanding expectations. Those growing expectations come from the Web reaching new levels. You may have heard a lot of talk about Web 2.0. No matter how anyone feels about the term, one thing it is clear -- the Web has reached a new stage: interactivity. Users do something, and the Web page immediately reacts to the user's commands. It's also about creating online experiences, which often represent site's brand. All of this together adds to users' increasing expectations when they're online. Marketers can lend a hand to their sites' visitors with persuasion architecture, a concept the Eisenbergs developed. Fancy words, perhaps, but the only words that will do. Before starting any marketing effort, the authors recommend asking three questions: * who is it you want to persuade? * what action do we want them to take? * what information is needed to motivate them to take that action? Building effective persuasion architecture requires more than knowing who your audience is -- but who they represent. The authors show how to create audience personas and weave the persuasion architecture to satisfy the different personas' needs. The first chapters dig into the changes in the marketing world; how and why marketing has changed. The middle chapters uncover the minds of customers and why they've changed as they respond to products and services. The latter part the book enlightens the reader on persuasion architecture and how to use it to influence customers. The book closes with a chapter on getting started with persuasion architecture, which, in practice, shrinks the gap between customer and marketer. What differentiates the authors and the book from others is their treatment of marketing and the Web as one? Too often, marketing and Web design teams don't work as a unified group and end up banging their heads. Organizations that plan to use the Web to market products or services stand to reap rewards in terms of user actions and higher profits with the advice from the book. The book comes with a CD containing 80 minutes of the authors in a question and answer session (here's a clip), the full-text of the book in PDF format, online sales and mark

This truly is the blueprint to match your selling process to your customers buying process... and measure its effectiveness! Applying the concepts in this book helped boost one of our client's bank account to an all time high. Read the book and take action on the book and you'll pad your cushion. The Eisenbergs and Lisa Davis share a powerful way to create a left-brain selling process while greasing the gears for your emotional buying, right-brained consumer; all while giving you the means to measure your persuasive and selling systems effectiveness! I'm not sure what business would not want to create a system that speaks to their customers and allows them to measure its effectiveness?! The methodology in this book, which is written in plain and simple English, can be used on your website, in your marketing material, in your store, with your staff, and across the board. If you use them, you will have stronger and better relationships with your current customers and with your future customers. To put it another way, your customers will thank you with their money. They will thank you because you will no longer be speaking to them but with them... to them vs. with them.

One of the most gratifying things about Waiting For Your Cat To Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis is that their observations of the buying process are equally applicable both on and off-line. In fact, this book isn't a marketing book at all... it's much more than that. This book is a guide to how business will be done in the age of the consumer. If you're not taking your customer's personality into account, if you're not salient, of you're not letting the customer take charge and tell you how she wants to do business with you, you're about to be left behind.

When I was a kid, the Reader's Digest published an article that described how to build a mechanical computer and "teach" it to play hexipawn, a really watered down version of chess in which each player's pieces consisted of three pawns on a nine square board. The mechanical computer had to be told every possible move to make. One programmed it by removing the bad choices that led to losing the game. The remaining good choices let the computer become exceptionally good a winning. I hadn't thought of that Reader's Digest article in at least four decades, until I opened Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa Davis' Waiting for Your Cat to Bark to Chapter 10, The Design of Persuasive Systems. The authors describe a customer clicking on to a web site, and then not finding the next click to help her buy what she's trying to buy. Why does this happen? Because the web designer isn't thinking like a customer. Because the web designer built a logical, linear, sequential model of the selling experience, and the customer needed an intuitive, non-linear, non-sequential buying experience. And just as the Reader's Digest mechanical computer proved, it's not enough to eliminate the bad moves; one must provide the good moves to "win." The authors have described the good moves. They've told exactly how to determine who your customers are, what influences their decisions, and the way they negotiate the buying process. They call the process Persuasion Architecture (Chapter 16). It's a discipline which integrates the buying with the selling processes and ties it all together with communications flow. The focus is always on persuading the customer to take action. In 243 pages Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa Davis will take you step by step through the Persuasion Architecture process, and help you convert more web site visitors into web site purchasers. If you're marketing on the web, or if you intend to, you need this book.