How to Appeal to Your Customers' Perspective

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "All Marketers are Liars" by Seth Godin. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you understand your customers’ perspective? Do you know how to appeal to that worldview?

Seth Godin argues that it’s vital to understand your customers’ perspective—their worldview. He discusses what a worldview is, why it’s important, and how to appeal to a perspective using frames, euphemisms, and oxymorons.

Read more to learn about the customers’ perspective.

Your Customers’ Perspective

The key to good marketing is a good story. To tell a better story, it’s best to appeal to a worldview, the way someone sees the world. Godin’s first principle of modern marketing is that a good story starts with a specific worldview. When you can tell a story about your idea or product that aligns with a customer’s perspective or worldview, you’ll not only satisfy their wants and needs but validate their beliefs.

What Is a Worldview?

Godin defines a worldview as the set of beliefs, values, and biases that determines how a customer sees and interacts with the world. While everyone has the same basic wants and needs (food, shelter, to be happy, healthy, and so on), Godin explains that their worldview determines how they fulfill them.

For example, what’s the difference between someone on a Keto diet (which emphasizes consuming a high percentage of fat) and someone on a plant-based diet? Both people probably feel that they have found a dietary lifestyle that balances health and nutrition. They have found two different solutions to one common goal, meaning they have two different perspectives or worldviews.

Often, people with similar worldviews group into small niches or micro-communities. Godin says a marketer’s success lies in finding the right group of people with a shared worldview and telling them a compelling story that aligns with that perspective.

Understanding and Changing Worldviews

Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People suggests another way to define worldviews, which he calls paradigms. He defines paradigms as the lenses through which you see the world and that shape how you interpret your situations and surroundings. These interpretations dictate your behavior, much like Godin’s idea of worldviews influencing you to buy a product.

Our sense of self is often tied to our worldview. We usually have an automatic, defensive response to information that threatens our worldview, and therefore, our sense of self. We also tend to dismiss facts that don’t conform to our worldview (also known as confirmation bias). This can be tricky to navigate as a marketer. So how do you do it?

Covey offers an answer for how to change a perspective. He proposes becoming aware of your biases, identifying the worldviews you want to adopt, and shifting your perspective. While his writing is geared toward individuals wanting to adjust their worldviews, advertisers can tailor his ideas to their marketing story to thoughtfully address a worldview. Ask yourself: What bias are you addressing? How does your product answer that worldview? Does it offer a better solution or new reality?

How Do Worldviews Affect What People Buy?

Now that we know what a worldview is, let’s discuss how a worldview or perspective influences your customer’s shopping habits. Godin claims worldviews can affect three customer attributes: their attention, their biases, and the language they expect.

Attention

Your customer’s perspective is one factor that determines whether she’ll notice your product. For example, someone who’s vegan probably won’t notice your new steakhouse. Attention is hard to get, so it’s best to get the attention of people who want to give it—that is, those whose worldview aligns with your product.

Permission and Viral Marketing

Godin pioneered the concept of permission marketing in his book of the same name, where the marketer gets permission from the customer to send her product information. The idea is to get the attention of people who want to give it or who are already paying attention. It contrasts with interruption marketing, which was the old advertising method of fighting for consumers’ attention through active promotion. There are a few key elements to permission marketing:

It’s anticipated: Consumers expect to receive information from the marketer.

It’s personal: The information relates to the individual consumer.

It’s relevant: Consumers are interested in the information.

Permission marketing is often associated with email marketing, where consumers opt in to getting information from marketers. This is a more cost-efficient tactic because marketers rely on low-cost methods (like email or social media) to target interested consumers. This leads to a higher conversion rate of leads to sales, and it builds consumer trust.

Biases

Although Godin isn’t clear about how worldviews and biases interact, we can infer that our worldview makes us prone to certain assumptions. Take the previous example of the vegan and your new steakhouse. Because of their worldview, someone following a vegan diet will probably have a knee-jerk reaction or bias against your steakhouse. People carry biases that affect their initial impressions of products, people, and ideas. They like having their worldviews and underlying biases confirmed, not challenged.

Biases in Marketing

Godin uses “biases” to define “worldview,” but then he goes on to say that our worldview affects our biases, which is a bit confusing. Regardless, the key point is that it’s important to understand the various forms of biases and how marketers can overcome them.

A bias is an inclination in favor of or against an idea, person, thing, belief or group. Biases can be learned or innate, and we’re often unaware of them. There are also several different kinds of biases, as Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein explain in Nudge: anchoring, availability, representativeness, status quo, and loss aversion. We’ll talk about the status quo bias, because that’s the one marketers have to overcome most often.

The status quo bias is our tendency to stick with our current option or situation—usually for no good reason. Status quo bias frequently affects our decision-making. For marketers, this means that consumers are prone to keep buying the same products they always have. How often do you change the type of toothpaste you buy? You probably have a chosen brand and flavor. That’s status quo bias at play.

As a marketer, how can you encourage consumers to break out of their status quo bias and try your product? First, consider spending more time listening to consumer needs and feedback. Read reviews, and look for gaps in the market. Then, tell the consumer how the current status quo is a losing proposition and what they have to gain from your product.

Language

Customers expect to hear certain messages in certain ways. Think about perfume commercials—they follow a distinct format and theme.

Godin explains that language isn’t limited to specific words used. It can come in the structure of the message, the colors used, or the overall mood of your ad. Make sure the way you tell your story aligns with your customers’ perspective and the story you’re trying to tell. How you tell your story includes all of the text, images, design, and employees that go into selling your idea.

How to Appeal to Your Customers’ Perspective