How You Can ‘Engineer’ Demand
The spark of entrepreneurial creativity can power perpetual motion that ignites new ideas and results in a constant flow of inventive new products and services. Many of these have transformed our lives and our world.
Because I started my career as an engineer, I think about innovation in terms of engineering market behavior through the spark of creativity that drives every successful public relations program.
The term “public relations” was conceived nearly a century ago (by the nephew of Sigmund Freud) as a nicer, politically correct replacement for the word “propaganda” — a very deliberate way to make people think the way you want them to think. By telling provocative stories and getting analyst and media opinion leaders on board to help tell those stories, companies can indeed engineer market thinking and market action.
The basic idea behind market engineering is that if you change the way people think, you can change the way they behave. While we creatively engineer products and services through research and development, we use public relations to creatively engineer markets to adopt those products and services. Because when you change how people behave, that's not just invention — that's real innovation.
Both kinds of engineering are purposeful, creative, multidimensional, objective-driven and idea-motivated processes that require sufficient time and adequate investments to produce worthwhile results. An equally well-executed combination of these two kinds of engineering adds up to an amazingly high probability of business success.
When we engineer markets, it's important to remember those first sparks of customer-centric creativity that inspired us to create a new product or service. This inherently outward-facing thinking sets us up to craft provocative and compelling stories that matter to the media, and resonate on an emotional level with the market. In fact, the most crucial maxim in all of marketing (or is it psychology?) is that people won't buy anything from you because you want them to — they only buy products and services in response to their emotionally compelling reasons. And yes, this outward-thinking truism even holds for business-to-business marketing. If you engineer desire in the mind and the heart of a customer, they will buy from you.
Far too many PR campaigns are dead on arrival because the messaging is inwardly focused on the product or service itself. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but when it comes to PR, it's not about you.
“It's not about you” is also a crucial piece of advice for social media. Succeeding in social media is just like succeeding in any other social situation: The person who listens to the discussion to hear what is meaningful to other people and then participates in the conversation accordingly is a person who is successful in social situations. Apply this rule to any social media platform and people will not only follow you, but you will establish the social credibility you need to begin to engineer markets through social media channels.
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Steve Schuster is CEO and founder of Rainier Communications in Westborough. He can be reached at steve@rainierco.com.
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