Erik Huberman is founder and CEO of Hawke Media, a full-service outsourced CMO and marketing consultancy, and author of The Hawke Method.
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Marketing is the literature of desire, and most of the world as we know it is built on desires. Desires can be defined as a strong feeling of wishing for something, is related to both needs and wants, and desires are often chased. Often, our desires are unexplained, nebulous emotions. They lack form and so, as marketers, we are charged with the task of taking these faceless feelings and giving them definition.
I believe in a framework of three principles of marketing—awareness, nurture and trust—that make any size brand scalable. Let’s take a look at these principles through the lens of desire:
• Awareness: Give a face to a desire.
• Nurture: Continue to define that desire and develop it.
• Trust: Present the solution to the desire and have the rapport to back it up.
For this piece, I want to focus on the “nurturing” aspect of your customers’ desires. Nurturing is how you begin creating long-lasting relationships with customers and build their high lifetime value (LTV).
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The Base Of Nurturing Desire
Awareness gives desire a face. From there, you need to intensify the desire so that a lead will want to act upon it. Intensification is where nurturing comes in. Nurturing serves to reinforce the desire via intensification of that desire. It makes you want what you want more. And where does that intensification come from? Distillation of the desire into a handful of keywords and a singular goal action. Then repeating that message in varying ways over and over (aka repetition).
Our basic desires are typically simple concepts. As James Altucher wrote in The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth, “Get Paid, Get Laid, Lose Weight—because those are the three things people will pay for.”
For example, say you’ve got a product that automatically sends text messages to e-commerce customers who abandon a cart. The base desire here is to “get paid.” Your potential customers know they are losing potential buyers in the shopping cart. Through a paid social media campaign, you decide to target brands and workers that deal with the conversion side of marketing. You build their awareness of the problem that losing customers in the cart is common and fixable with your solution. They sign up for your marketing messages, and you start to send user reviews and case studies. You’re nurturing their desire to increase conversions with this content.
Nurturing With Mimetic Desire
Mimetic desire posits that without guidance, our desires remain shapeless. We don’t know what we want, we just mimic what other people want. We see what others hope for, say and do, which shapes our own desires. That’s what we nurture with marketing.
That’s an interesting concept to be sure, as it forces us to examine where desires come from and how brands can form and nurture them. Through the lens of mimetic desire, we see why it’s so important for us to have peer review, “bestseller” labels and more. These are examples of nurturing desire and, therefore, creating customers that not only buy once but continue to buy over and over.
For marketers, I encourage you to put your reviews and testimonials at the forefront of your marketing efforts. Mimetic desires are built by seeing the success or desire fulfilled in another, which is proof that the desire can be satisfied.
Nurturing Desire Makes The Purchase Cycle Shorter
The shorter your purchase cycle, the more likely you are to make a sale. It’s as simple as that. Nurturing helps shorten the purchase cycle by repeating the underlying message that “this product will help you sate your desires.”
The Obstacles Of Nurturing Desire
There are three main obstacles when it comes to nurturing desire. They are:
• Lethargy: It’s too much effort to get.
• Skepticism: It’s not going to work.
• Price: It costs too much.
These are the three factors that prevent others from converting because they do not trust your brand. By nurturing desire, you overcome these obstacles by making the potential buyer feel their desires are valid, but also that they are priceless or at least worth the price you are asking.
Cultivating a strong enough desire, which is an emotion about a need or want, will overcome these factors fairly easily.
In Conclusion
Desires are what drive the world. Yes, we have needs and wants, but it’s our feelings about those needs or wants that cause us to buy things and keep the economy going.
Understanding that desire is something that can be nurtured is crucial to successful scaling and branding. Determine what desires your product solves. Those are usually pretty basic like more time, more money, more freedom, etc. Ask yourself how you can give a face to a desire, then intensify that desire in your leads and prospects. The final step is offering your product as a solution to those desires and having the rapport to back it up. Try setting your next marketing campaign around using awareness, nurture and trust to cultivate desire and watch your brand grow.
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Author: Erik Huberman, Forbes Councils Member
