News
 Moving
Decisions Forward with Contrast
By Phil Dunn
Customers act on drama, not subtlety. We rarely buy
if a product promises to offer only marginal
improvements in our lives. That applies to virtually
everything we consume, from brochures and emails to
gum and movies. Without some compelling motivation,
we pass on reading the brochure, watching the demo
or making the purchase.
Contrast is one of the most highly effective ways to
communicate the benefits of change or action to
people. It provides the emotional impetus for buying
and, in the least, moves prospects closer to a
decision.
Try the following experiment to get a feel for the
impact of contrast on your sense of touch. Pour
three buckets of water, one hot, one room temp and
the other cold. Simultaneously put your separate
hands into each of the hot and cold buckets, and
then simultaneously dunk them into the room temp
bucket. The room temp water feels cold to the hot
water hand, and it feels hot to the cold water one.
Contrast shows you the profound impact of change
relative to other situations.
By showing customers a contrasting experience with
respect to your products or services, you gain the
same kind of emotional impact. In terms of writing,
this is often achieved with the case study or
success story. The contrast of highly undesirable
circumstances against a pie-in-the-sky solution
provides readers with a grand vision of how the
world could be better. First you elicit pain, and
then you provide the refreshing, enlightening,
ingenious solution.
The measure of success you attain when writing a
success story is directly related to how sincerely
the writing identifies with the reader. If you're
not talking about the right pain points, for
example, your credibility goes out the window. You
need to gather the contrasting emotional pay-off to
the purchase. Ideally, responses like, "it made my
life so easy," "I looked like a hero," or "we're so
relieved," help color in the descriptive spaces
between standard pay-offs like ROI and time saved.
Learn more from Phil Dunn at
http://www.qualitywriter.com/blog/index.html
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Melissa Data
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