Words can move customers minds

Seven. It’s just a number like any other, but it does seem to come up on a fairly regular basis. There are the Seven Wonders of the World, the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Dwarfs. Phone numbers are seven digits, and they say the optimum brand name should be no more than seven letters long. Seven, it seems, is a magical number, as the average human brain can only grasp seven things at a time. Funny, my wife says I can’t keep my mind on anything for very long.

So I’ve been thinking, what are the seven most important words associated with marketing. I’ll give you a hint: Search, Engine and Optimization don’t make the cut. So what words do make the list? What are the seven words that will make your website worth viewing?

By some really bored person’s count there are 171,476 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, plus another 47,156 words that have fallen out of favor. This of course doesn’t count the 9,500 additional permutations that don’t deserve their own special attention. What about slang?

Fifty percent of these words are nouns, 25 percent are adjectives, and 14.28 percent are verbs, with the rest made up of all those other things, the purpose of which most of us have long since forgotten. I told you the guy who counted all of this had to be really bored.

Of the several hundred thousand words to choose from, the average person recognizes less than 10 percent, while the average teenager seems to only be able to handle about half that amount (if you count slang, instant messaging jargon, or the ever-popular four-letter variety teens have twice the vocab of normal people).

Why the heck are there so many words if we all refuse to use them. I mean, why waste all those perfectly good words on English teachers and college professors. By the way, they say swearing is the refuge of the feeble-minded, people who can’t express themselves in a more articulate manner, but to be honest, I really don’t give a damn.

Here’s the thing, words have meaning and impact, and they provide the emotional context of our communications, to which we can add subtlety and nuance through their delivery by means of tone, cadence and gesture.

So as important as words are, the way they are delivered is even more important. The delivery of words can persuade a customer to buy from you as quickly as the wrongs tone can send a customer away. There are seven things to keep in mind in marketing: communication, audience, focus, language, performance, personality and psychology. If you keep those seven things in mind when you are writing your print campaigns, you have won the battle before it begins.

I will go into those seven miracle words in my next post, until then if you have any questions, I would like to hear them.