Month: October 2023

The Reading Rainbow Theory of Marketing

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In many ways, I believe Reading Rainbow is the greatest children’s TV program ever.

The philosophy that drove the show also applies to marketing.

The threefold purpose of Reading Rainbow was to:

  1. encourage an interest in and love for reading
  2. diversify the voices you’d consider listening to, and
  3. point viewers to specific books worth reading.

The show accomplished these purposes by inviting viewers into new worlds, exploring different experiences and getting you excited about learning more.

Then it told you where you could learn more.

The show used an influential medium popular with children (TV) to direct them to another medium (books).

This, of course, was all done by our loveable, trusted guide, LeVar Burton.

(Gurus in every niche could learn a lifetime of lessons from LeVar, by the way).

Marketing does the same thing.

You should move people from social media to your email list.

You move them from email to your sales letters.

From search ads to product pages.

And you’ll do it with copy that does the same thing an episode of Reading Rainbow does:

Invite viewers into your world… show them an opportunity to experience something better than their current reality… and get you excited to learn more and ultimately to make a choice to act.

But don’t take my word for it!

Outsourced Thinking (and Why It’s a Good Thing)

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Thinking is hard work. Most people avoid it at all costs.

If you can earn someone’s trust, he’ll gladly allow you to do some of this thinking for him.

If you can display deep expertise on a topic he’s interested in, he’ll happily outsource some of his thinking to you.

If you can minimize the perceived risk or difficulty of changing perspectives/approaches, you may find you have a loyal convert… and a paying client.

[I took this picture earlier this month after speaking at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the city’s largest university.]

This may all sound kind of negative or “manipulative,” but there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing brain work. In fact, most people are craving this kind of leadership.

Nobody can know everything, and even if we could, it would take a lifetime to learn it.

Why do that when we can just plug into someone who’s already an expert?

With that in mind, you may want to:

1) Build your trustworthiness.

2) Demonstrate your expertise.

3) Think about how the person you want to persuade perceives risk as it relates to the topic you want him to think differently about. Can you minimize the risk or reframe it to make it less frightening?

Take these steps and you’ll amp up your persuasive abilities in a major way.