Hope may be one of the most powerful yet least-utilized marketing drivers in the world today. Make no mistake, hope drives marketing and revenue performance already. It’s spring training time in baseball, for example, and every team has a chance. Sure, some are more likely to be competitive than others. But every year dark horses emerge. Annual cellar-dwellers get on a hot streak.
I’m a life-long Cubs fan. They haven’t won the World Series in more than one hundred years, and haven’t even been to the World Series since World War II. But this time of year, even with a “rebuilding” roster, there’s still hope.
At this time last year, the St. Louis Cardinals lost one of their top pitchers for the year to injury. Experts immediately started to write them off. They enter spring training this year as defending World Champions.
Hope tugs at our most primal emotions, instincts, needs, fears and desires. It’s draw is incredibly strong, and drives the kind of irrational thinking that leads to emotional decisions, many of which we don’t even regret afterward.
We want to hope, we want to believe. These are difficult concepts to make concrete, to translate into something material. But what’s far more reachable for most marketers is to translate the idea of hope into selling the future. What happens tomorrow, six months from now, or next season is unwritten. Paint a picture of what that future might look like for your customer or prospect, and they can’t tell you you’re wrong. They can tell you you’re crazy, but if your story of the future aligns with something they hold great hope for, they’re far more likely to listen.
The marketing of hope is really the marketing of a future you, or your customers, desperately want. And that future can be packaged, written about and presented in a way that makes that hopeful future feel well within grasp. You’re not going to get many prospects to buy the present. What your prospects want, and will open their checkbooks for, is the hope of a better future.
