2 Vital Laws of Attraction Missing From Your Marketing (Part 2)

Last week, Kanye broke the record for the highest-grossing US tour, not based on ticket sales, but “based on merchandise alone.”* 

It’s not just Kanye breaking records, but merch is breaking records too.

Of course, it is Kanye, and hardly another artist can pull off that feat, but still, everywhere we turn, merch is having a moment. A recent Forbes article published under the title, “If You Notice Branded Merch Everywhere, You Are Not Alone—Here Is Why,” cited many reasons why modern culture has embraced our medium, and some of you already know about our interview with Adam Bluestein, author of “How Supreme-Style Merch Drops Took Over Corporate America.” 

Given the street-cred of branded merch, there has never been a better time to be in the business. Our category, long a second-cousin to other forms of advertising, has sky-rocketed past other forms of advertising when it comes to acceptance, celebration, identity, and reform.

But as you survey the large percentage of marketing in our industry, we’re not quite encapsulating the magic of the merch moment happening all around us culturally. It seems (on average) we’re not connecting the wonder that is happening with merch in culture with the magic we’re creating on behalf of clients. 

It’s as if the world sees merch as this incredibly inspirational experience but we still see ourselves largely as sourcing agents. The average distributor’s website is littered with randomized products, search engines that make the customer do the work, and messaging that reflects more an identity crisis than a UVP.

And mostly, there’s an obvious lack of inspirational stories powered by merch. This is ironic, given that within every distributor’s book of business resides dozens (if not hundreds) of fascinating stories worth sharing. (Think of all the fundraising merch responsible for raising millions, the employee kits shipped across the world in 2020 that united, bonded, and inspired employees everywhere, just to name a few examples).

In our intro to this series “Marketing is the New Sales” we shared the shift that has occurred with B2B buyers that reflects an almost exclusive embrace of digital marketing as a front line for sales. Couple that with the cultural zeitgeist involving merch and the highly visible street cred, our marketing should both reflect the magic of the moment and arrest the attention of buyers. 

But before we get into the mechanics of how to build a marketing engine that drives sales, we must first embrace the most basic part of the sales funnel, including two vital laws of attraction.

First and Foremost: Be Alluring 

Marketing, when done right, is a lead-gen magnet. Note that word: magnet. Good marketing pulls you in.

But pause and think with me for a minute: When a first-time visitor hits your website, (your new front door), what do they feel? What do you evoke?

Forget what you do, forget even what you want them to do for a moment, that’s like skipping essential ingredients in a multi-part recipe, you can’t just skip to the cooking part or the eating part without first whetting the appetite. 

Lee Fine with Juice Marketing says often, “we eat with our eyes first.” Our business is first and foremost a visual and emotional medium. It’s driven by the senses. It stands to reason then that our marketing should also be a highly visual and emotional experience. 

The classic lead-gen funnel is revealed in the acronym AIDA: awareness, interest, desire, action. Forrester claims the funnel is no longer a funnel but a waterfall. Hubspot simplifies the sales/marketing funnel into three steps: attract, engage, delight. 

Regardless of how you classify the breakdown of each level, at the very top of every example is the same: awareness, attraction, and interest. Or what I prefer to call by its more evocative cousins: intrigue, curiosity, and allure. 

Let’s leave the boring world of business nomenclature for a moment and think about prospecting like dating, and think of dating through the lens of the sales funnel (attract, engage, delight). Attraction is firstly, unequivocally, sight-driven. Something about someone catches your eye. Which then piques your interest. Which ultimately fires your curiosity. 

And it’s this insatiable curiosity that drives you: Who is this person? Where did they come from? What do they do? Where do they live? It’s basic, innate sense perception, and it makes us dig deeper. 

Do visitors to your website find you alluring? Recent examples of brands in our industry that are alluring are Advoc8 and TwelveNYC. And outside of our industry: Velocity and Wildish & Co. 

Is your marketing, first and foremost, and in the language of dating culture, desirable and attractive?

Second: Be Relatable 

“Be Engaging” is what I’m tempted to suggest but engaging is as overused as culture, both have lost their meaning, so we’re going back to our dating example: Your first date with that alluring someone needs to transcend from mysterious to interesting to relatable rather quickly. 

When a first-time visitor hits your website, you need to be, above all, relatable to that buyer. Being evocative-only can take you from mysterious to boring, real quick. You must incite even more curiosity by building a connection.

The best websites create this immediate relatability through a sense of identity. A great example is the Lumi website, a brand that sells packaging supplies (largely) to the consumer e-commerce world. They immediately share what you can do (through them) and they also feature a logo wall above the fold of their website (not buried at the bottom) that displays a marquee of clients in the consumer world. If I were another consumer e-commerce brand driven to their website, I would be pulled in further by relating to the other brands featured on their website. I am of their kind. I relate to them. My problems are likely similar to their problems. Moreover, Lumi features an amazing array of stories highlighting what the coolest companies do with their packaging, which, as an interested buyer, intrigues me, pulls me in. 

When your customers glance at your logo wall (that spot on your website where you splay all the logos of the best brands you work with) is it more than an ego wall for your brand? Is it relatable to similar brands who want to work with you? Those brands that you show on your website also represent a persona, a type of company with unique needs. If I were the VP of a large bank and I saw that you had experience working with other large financial institutions, I would know you have some experiential knowledge about how we work, I would immediately find you relatable. 

Wildish & Co makes a bold claim on their front door, “we make brands come alive” and they immediately prove how they do this by featuring case histories. Visitors to their website are able to make a quick connection from their (brand) promise-made to (brand) promise-kept by demonstrating how they make brands come alive. 

Being relatable is creating an atmosphere where the buyer can see themselves at the center of your selling solution (not as the target of your selling solution but as the central part of the story).  

What does this have to do with Kanye merch? 

If merch is having a cultural moment and we (as an industry) are the indisputable champions at building merchandise experiences, then why such a disconnect between the highly visual impact of our medium, the voracious hunger of buyers for cool merchandise experiences, and the blandness of our brand messaging and stories? 

Marketing should be a lead-gen magnet. Your brand story should compel your audience to think differently, feel strongly, and above all, compel rather than bore. You want to ignite a strong opinion, create a visceral emotion in the mind of your first-time visitors. You shouldn’t have to hunt for prospects like a needle in a haystack, rather, you should be sifting the opportunities coming to you because you have built a visually compelling, emotionally alluring, and intimately relatable brand that drives your audience to hunger for more. 

In a recent survey, we asked participants to share what parts of their business they struggle with the most and the second most cited area was marketing, which is ironic given that we work in a marketing medium. 

I think what survey respondents were saying is that we’re familiar with marketing because we’re working around it all day long, but we’re not masters of our own marketing domain. The writer Vivian Gornick once wrote, “penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.”

It’s vital we put aside our perception that we “know” marketing just because we work in and around it all day long and rethink what has changed in our culture, in our industry, and within the walls of our own business, so that we can build alluring, attractive, interesting, and relatable brands.

*Billboard Magazine