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Audience
Cicero, the godfather of all persuasive rhetoric, once wrote: If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.

The year was 80 BCE, and this lawyer and government bureaucrat was writing about the persuasive power of empathy. A few thousand years later, modern social neuroscience would bear him out … people respond to language and arguments that start where they are intellectually and emotionally. In other words, messaging is doomed to fail from the beginning if you don’t think about whom you’re trying to reach first.

What’s more, when an organization is focused on near-term survival, and their sales, marketing, product, HR, IR and corporate development leaders haven’t explicitly agreed to their target audiences and desired impact, developing an umbrella narrative that works for the whole company is nearly impossible.

And that’s where the AIM model comes in. You can use it to create a new message from scratch. You can use it to fix a message that doesn’t seem to be resonating. And you can use it to untangle a god-awful mess like the one I was dealing with.

Just ask yourself and your team the following questions:

• Whom are we trying to reach?

• How do we prioritize competing audiences? If we have to optimize the message for one or two audiences and their sensibilities, which ones do we optimize for?

• What’s going on with this audience? What do they currently think of their own business challenges? Their technology challenges? Their personal and career challenges?

• And where does our own company, solution or cause fit in with the universe of their existing priorities? Why should they care about us, at all?

Impact
Zig Ziglar once famously said: If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.

Never a truer word was spoken about messaging and persuasive storytelling. But I discovered something in that stuffy conference room— you’ve got to do more than achieve alignment on the audiences you’re trying to reach.The next critical step is to reverse-engineer your messaging from that magic moment when your audience changes what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, and what they’re doing.

And those are the three dimensions of impact—think, feel and do. Here are just a few the questions to ask to prevent the international goat-rodeo I was going through in that stuffy Gatwick hotel 20 years ago:

• What is the audience currently thinking about their challenge, their options, our company and its solutions, and our competition?

• What do we want our audiences to think?And what evidence do we have to support our assertions?

• How is the audience currently feeling about their challenge, their ability to succeed, our company, and our competitors?

• How do we want them to feel?

• What are they currently worried about? And what should they be worried about?
  (More on this in a moment, because this is the single most frequently overlooked question—and often the most valuable one to ask!)

• What is the audience currently doing relative to this challenge? When are they choosing a competitor over us, and why? How does choosing us and our solution align with their personal passions and values?

• What do we want them to do—or to stop doing?For which audiences are we best suited for, and which ones are we convinced we can do the most good for?

• At what points in the customer (or stakeholder)journey would better messaging be most useful? Where are we experiencing the most friction with our customers? And how much of that is down to the product vs. the message?

One of the most important distinctions to call out here is the difference between what people think and how people feel. As I mentioned in my previous article, it takes a powerful combination of ethos, pathos and logos to really make a difference in people’s behavior. And when it comes to how we want to make people feel, the answer I usually get most often is, “We want them to feel comfortable with us,” or “confident in our solution,” or some other variety of “happy, good, safe.”

But people don’t always change behavior when they feel comfortable. In fact, the biggest—and most meaningful—changes happen when people feel constructively uncomfortable about the right things. I’m not talking about fear-mongering—we have way too much of that in the public domain as it is. It’s about escalating the urgency of choosing the right option at the right time. 

And that technique led to the turning point in the meeting at that Gatwick hotel …


“Whom do you all sell to? You’ve all told me privately that nobody else in the company really understands your local market. Well, now is your chance to make them understand. Whom do you sell to? And whom do you need to sell to better in order to make your numbers this year?”

I start asking more questions related to buying, selling and making money. And these concepts translate smoothly into any language. A fresh (and noticeably larger) whiteboard wheels into the room.The air conditioning kicks in. Ties loosen as finger sandwiches and beers are passed around. Profanity has been replaced with active listening. An orderly hierarchy of buying personas takes shape on the whiteboard and surrounding flip charts.

“Okay, these are the folks we need to get to, prioritized by region. Now, what perceptions about us do we most need to change with these people in your region? And what perceptions about our competitors do we most need to shift?”

More alignment emerges. Board members move closer to the front row so they can hear the translators more easily.

“Ok, now how are your customers feeling when you first approach them? In the middle of your pitches? When you’re about to close? How do we want them to feel?”

Brits and Germans are as quiet as the Italians, French and Spaniards jump in first. But soon everybody’s sharing common fears and aspirations across their customer base, and we’re coming to agreement on the right tone for us to take.

“And what’s the real marketing and sales challenge here? Is it basic awareness? Driving new leads? Driving the right kinds of leads? De-positioning competitors? Accelerating sales cycles? Where in our funnel do we need the most help?”

Within minutes, audience and impact are codified, perhaps for the first time in years. One board member takes a photo of the whiteboard with her clunky early 2000s digital camera.

Finally, we’re ready to talk about the message.


Message
Before marketers and communicators can lead and assert on message, we first have to earn the trust of our executives by asking and coming to consensus on audience and impact. But once we’ve got the audience and impact locked in, it’s our time to shine as persuaders.

When it comes to creating a persuasive storyline, there’s a pattern to how narratives are constructed—something we’ll get into in our next post. But first, it’s essential to agree to the core building blocks of any persuasive strategy—Why, What, How and What’s Next. These are the components of the M in AIM—the Message.

Perhaps the most famous articulation of the Why in any message comes courtesy of Simon Sinek from his TED talk back in 2009. And it remains true to this day. People can’t care about what you’re talking about, or how your solution works, until first you tell them why they should care. How does what you want to sell or persuade them to do relate to their own priorities? Their challenges? Their values? And at its root, their authentic identity? Why should they give you one second of their precious time? And in world in which, according to a recent New York Times article, the average person is exposed to about 5,000 ads a day, why should they pay attention to your marketing message?

Breaking through the white noise is one of the most critical functions of AIM—and so is sequencing your core messaging strategy in the right order. Here’s the framework for questions to ask yourselves, and your customers:

• ‍Why: Why should they care about this? How does this relate to their existing priorities? What’s the challenge they’re facing, and how would they frame that challenge?

• ‍What: What can they, your customer, do that they can’t do without you (or with your competitors? Don’t make this part of the message about you and your product or solution. Make this them about them and their capabilities.

• ‍How: How do you help them address their challenge and achieve their goals? Limit yourself to the details that matter most.Hook them in and give them enough evidence to convince them you really can help.

• ‍What’s next: Think of the question you wish they would come to you with. What are the strategic questions they should be asking themselves in RFPs or buying situations? And what questions do you wish they were asking competitors?

When you sequence the order right, and once you’ve documented “Why, What, How, and What’s Next”, you’ve got a blueprint for crafting most of the core messages you and your organization will need.

And that’s what we finally came to in Gatwick, in the end.


“Well, Josh, this turned out not to be the colossal waste of time I was afraid it would be! Well done.”

My jet lag prevents me from recognizing this as a compliment right away, but the clap on the shoulder and the request for my business card (reminder, this was 2001) from a relieved-looking board member tells me we’d survived the firestorm. We had a clear AIM documented in the room, and we had agreement across all 12 geographies—and more importantly, across sales, marketing and product teams.

My CMO client, now happily nursing a gin and tonic, sidles up to me. “We’ve got it. Finally. We’ve got it. The head of sales just asked me how soon we can turn all this into the new front of a sales deck. That’s a first.”

The mission statement still needs a little wordsmithing, and we’ve got some follow-up research to do on which differentiators we can substantiate now vs. which ones will appear in the product roadmap next. But we’ve finally got this company aligned around its audience, its impact, and its message.

Later at the bar, the CMO offers me a Manhattan, which would become my go-to drink in later years, as we continue our debrief. “This was a brilliant framework, by the way. That audience-impact thing? Why didn’t you just lead with it?”

Damn good question. Maybe I will next time.


AIM: GROUNDING YOUR MESSAGING IN PURPOSE
Over the years, we’ve developed variations on that initial AIM model applicable to all sorts of marketing and sales situations. Corporate branding and brand narratives. Detailed technology solutions. Industry standards and associations. Public policy debates. And more recently, virtual events and digital experience design. And throughout all the customization, the core model has held up.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of AIM is that it grounds you in purpose. It anchors everybody in a shared “why”. And from there, it provides a more strategic (and often more affordable) way to approach measuring the effectiveness of our marketing. Rather than relying on outdated vanity metrics like impressions, clicks and likes, we can actually delve deeper, thanks to marketing data analytics, into whether we’ve shifted perception, sentiment and behaviors the right way with the target audiences we care about most.

 

Of course, using AIM to find your core persuasive strategy is just the first step on the longer journey to finding your persuasive story… which is a topic we’ll cover in my next installment on persuasive storytelling and the five-chapter model.

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