Today’s market is so competitive that it’s often hard to make your voice heard amongst the sea of other brands.
To do this successfully, you need to identify the forces of mass desire that relate to your offering.
What kinds of mass desire are there?
Constant Desires
To find this type of desire, look at patterns of behavior in your clients or just human beings in general.
For example, in B2C, a couple of constant mass desires are the ones to get healthy and remain attractive. No matter what changes in the world, these desires are constant.
In B2B, a desire is to be seen as professional and competent by one’s peers. That’s a constant desire because it never goes away.
Desires From Change
This type of desire is creating by the waves of change. At all stages of a change, there are areas you can harness desire.
You want to get in on the rising tide of a change. For example, there’s a reason that most new cell phone providers focus their marketing and advertising on the camera. There are “trendy” styles of photographs on Instagram, and those trends have driven cell phone cameras to become better and better.
In this way, social media drives the mass desire for better cameras in smartphones.
How do you actually harness these mass desires?
Find Out Which Mass Desires Work
The first step in harnessing the power of mass desires is to identify them. Sit down and write out five mass desires your product can fulfill.
If you can’t think of these five desires, you have an issue. Maybe your product doesn’t fulfill any mass desires. That’s an issue with your offering.
Or perhaps you just have never considered what mass desires your product solves.
To figure this out, consider what your product does. Look at a list of its features. Then figure out what problems those solve. Then, zoom out your focus and determine what mass desire you satisfy by solving those problems.
If you work for a company that sells cybersecurity solutions, a list of mass desires could look something like this:
- Most people want their computer/networks/database to work properly
- Most people don’t want their data falling into the wrong hands
- Most people don’t want to lose their jobs
- Most people want their internet to be fast
- Most people want to be able to work from anywhere
Choose the Most Powerful Desire
Look at the list you made. Some of the desires on this list are more powerful drivers than others.
What determines the power of mass desire?
- Urgency
- Intensity
- Degree of demand
- Staying power of desire
- Degree of repetition
- The ability to sate the desire
Using the example above, you could focus on “most people don’t want their data falling into the wrong hands” or “most people don’t want to lose their jobs.”
Both desires are very strong. When you go to create a marketing campaign, choose just one to be the driving desire behind your efforts.
Highlight and Reinforce the Desire
One of your copy’s first jobs is to reveal and highlight the mass desire. You want to bring that need or want to the attention of a potential buyer.
Then you want to make sure that they know that need or want is valid. Do this by giving them facts or other evidence that they’re justified in their desire.
Present Your Offering as the Solution
After completing the steps above, frame your brand or offering as the solution to the desire you chose.
If you’ve picked the most powerful desire to drive your demand generation efforts, this should be easy. Depending on where you are in the marketing cycle, you either want to present your content/brand as the solution to the problem or, if leads are later in the cycle, you can direct them towards the purchase of the product itself.
The most important thing to remember about using desire to drive marketing is that you cannot create desire. You can only harness the desires that are already there. That’s where so many marketers go wrong. They try to create a market for their product, which leads to products that don’t have a market.
Ride the wave of the desires of your audience. They will change and ebb and flow as technologies, best practices, and paradigm shifts occur. Notice what is becoming hot and ride the wave, or float atop the constant desires.
See if thinking of demand generation and content creation in this way improves or changes your marketing. Let us know how it goes.
Let us know what you think:
- Have you used this method to market your offering?
- What went well?
- What went poorly?
