6: Relevance: Why are We Making this Effort?
The goal of relevance is to encourage behavior. We cannot persuade another person to do something that is in our interest unless we can convince them it is also in their interest, and the first step in doing so is getting them to recognize that the suggestion we are making is relevant to them. The rest of the argument doesn't get heard unless the mark recognizes its relation to himself.
Going back to advertising bombardment: we no longer have the luxury of a captive audience who will listen to whatever we have to say, patiently waiting to see if it is relevant. We must make this point right away to get them to listen at all rather than dismiss us as one of thousands of irrelevant messages they receive every day.
Maintaining Behavior
Attracting new customers by changing their habits tends to steal the spotlight from a more significant function or persuasion - to convince people not to change existing habits that are in our favor. In effect, to persuade them to keep doing what they are presently doing rather than making a different choice the next time.
Coville mentions the age-old wisdom that it's much cheaper to keep a customer than to get a replacement, so if the results of your efforts are break-even and you gain and lose the exact same number, chances are your net profit is still worse because of the difference in costs to provide service. With that in mind, a company that is merely keeping the customers it has is likely outperforming one that is growing at a slow rate but is constantly churning its clientele.
She mentions the BMW automotive brand, that is changing its ways to maintain customers for a longer period of time. Their clientele is aging, so the product must accommodate. The "ultimate driving machine" is not compromising handling and performance for a smoother and more comfortable tide - paying close attention to things like the comfort of the driver's seat, to address the aches and pains of an aging customer base.
When Change is Unwanted
While "change" is the watchword of the day, it only makes sense if your customers' tastes or lifestyles are changing in ways that are relevant to your product. In some instances change is counterproductive.
Chiefly, there are the things that your customers value about you - the qualities that are central to your brand are the reasons for which people buy your brand. Change them, and your brand will lose relevance rather than gain it.
There are also instances in which customers feel attracted to the tradition of a brand. Particularly for food products, customers like the way they taste - so change the recipe, and customers will no longer like the taste. Consider what happened to Coca-Cola in the 1980s.
(EN: MY sense is the author took a weird turn here - "change" is about changing the behavior of customers, not about changing the company. So the notes after the first one are a bit oblique.)
The Cost of Change
(EN: Here, the author asks "How much should you spend?" and offers the weak answer of "The answer is strictly up to you" along with some rambling about deciding how much to spend. In reality, it depends on how your organization controls and allocates funding. In general, there are two methods. The first is to do a cost-benefit analysis that justifies the expense by projecting revenue increase or cost decrease. The second is to treat it as a skunk-works, setting aside an amount of funds to fund experimentation as an exploratory exercise that doesn't promise a specific benefit.)
The Ethics of Persuasion
(EN: Coville attempts to address the accusation that marketers and companies attempt to "manipulate" people, but her exploration uses some fairly sloppy logic. Manipulation is an attempt to deceive a person into doing something that is in your own interest and is harmful to them. Some marketers are manipulative, intentionally using deceptive messages to trick people into purchasing products that deliver no value, or leveraging psychological tendencies that cause a person to purchase to relieve their anxiety at being confronted rather than to gain the benefit of ownership. When the appeal is honest and benefit is rendered to the buyer, accusations of manipulation are unjustified. So it's something to assess on a case-by-case basis as to whether a tactic or a message is persuasive or manipulative - the only general advice is to be honest to the best of your knowledge and be careful about the mechanisms by which persuasion is effected )