I’m a big fan of how the Heath brothers distilled marketing down into several easy to understand steps in their famous book “Made to Stick”. Their acronym – SUCCESs – stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story. According to the two brothers, 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. For someone who isn’t marketing oriented, I’m glad I read this book. 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 for the people they are trying to help.
If I think back on the success of M-Pesa, they started out with a simple, emotional tagline; “Send Money Home.” It was simple and concrete, it got to the core of what M-Pesa was trying to do. It was unexpected, “Hey why is a telecom helping me send money?”. It was credible. It played on peoples emotions. You no longer had a reason not to send money back to your ailing 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 great features that make people use their products. What I’ve learned from this book is that more often than not it’s the message.