I’ve just finished Made to Stick by the Heath brothers, and I’m a big fan of how they’ve distilled marketing down into several easy to understand steps. Their acronym – SUCCESs – stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story. Those words form a template for over 70% of all successful marketing messages. What I particularly like is that they’ve used stories and messages from across the world, from Estonia to Zambia, and the six step process still works. One of the problems I’ve encountered working in emerging markets over the last 6 years is how to make people remember your message. It’s something I see big companies fail at all over Africa, especially NGOs and charities. They may be great at simplifying their message to donors, but they don’t have the same success with the people they are trying to help. In the financial tech world, it’s essential that messages are understood by customers. It’s hard to get a customer to hand over their money to you if you can’t explain the value proposition to them.
One great story that fits the model the Heath brother’s discuss is M-Pesa, the popular money transfer service by Safaricom in Kenya. They started out with a simple, emotional tag line; “Send Money Home.” It was simple and concrete, and it got to the core of what M-Pesa was trying to do. It was unexpected, “Hey why is a MNO helping me send money?”. It was credible because Safaricom was the biggest MNO in the market. It played on peoples emotions. You no longer had a reason not to send money back to your mother. And it was a story, it appealed to people’s self interest. “Send money home“. Who wouldn’t do that?
That first marketing message probably helped M-Pesa more than they thought. People often assume it’s their product’s great features that make customers start using their products. What I’ve learned from this book though, is that more often it’s a message. The features keep them coming back.