JOHNA BURKE: Hello, everyone, this is Johna Burke with BurrellesLuce, and I’m here at the PRSA Counselors Academy. I’m here with Carol.
Carol, will you please introduce yourself?
CAROL GREENWALD: Hi, I’m Carol Greenwald. I’m the owner and president of Marketing Partners. And what we do is three kinds of things. We work with people on targeting and strategies so that they can get richer faster and more effectively. I do research so that we can ground decisions in fact instead of fancy. And I do coaching to help people learn better selling behaviors.
BURKE: Can you talk about, for those people that weren’t privileged enough to be able to be in your session moments ago, what’s the most important thing that marketers can use when they’re talking to prospects and clients about identifying and creating some attachment to their brand and to their product?
GREENWALD: What they need to remember is, is that there is no such thing as a rational decision. Decisions–the best decisions are made in the context of emotional thought that brings together all past memories, past experiences, past activities, past responses, brings them together so that they focus on whatever the decision is. So if you have a brand and you want somebody to do something, what you have to think about is what is the context in which you want them to do it? What’s happening in their world that’s relevant to this?
What kind of goal would they have to do it? What kind of past memories would they need so that they could understand what it is that you want them to do? Everybody understands new knowledge, new thoughts, in the context of old knowledge. That’s why whatever your mother did when you were five is probably still relevant today because memories are built up. Every time you have a problem or you face something, your brain goes back into the unconscious memories, pulls out the ones it thinks are relevant, tries to create a pattern that is similar to the pattern that you’re facing; then the cognitive part, the smallest part and the youngest, the most fragile part of your brain, the cortex, takes those patterns that’re offered to it, takes the best one of them and says, `This is the one we’re going to use because this is the one that answers the question, fits how we feel about the past and moves us forward into the present.’
So as a marketer, as a PR person, as a communicator, you have the ability, by setting the entire emotional stage, to influence not only how people feel about your product, but how they use it, what they do with it and, finally, if they buy it.
BURKE: Carol, thank you so much. Can you tell us your website, or where else people might be able to find you?
GREENWALD: Sure. www.greenwaldconsulting.com.
BURKE: Great. Thank you so much.
GREENWALD: And I’m on Facebook.