Kelford Labs Daily: “Here is the right method”

“No one can profitably change habits in paid print. The advertiser comes in when those habits are changed [and] says: ‘Here is the right method.’”

— Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising

“How do I get people to change their habits?”

That’s often the unspoken—or, sometimes, spoken—question when people ask about marketing.

They want to know how they can get people to understand that they have a superior solution, a better alternative to what’s already on the market.

And the answer is, you can’t.

As Bob Moesta once put it, “We don’t create demand, we uncover it.”

Our job as entrepreneurs and as marketers isn’t to change people’s minds, it’s to find the people who already want what we have.

Now, they may not want our specific solution—they don’t know about it yet!

But their values overlap with ours, and they’re on the lookout for something that better aligns with their preferences.

That’s the job of marketing—to demonstrate our value at a distance to the people who are looking for it.

We show them that we have the right method for them.

Which means we don’t have to convince, persuade, or annoy. We can educate, demonstrate, and encourage.

So how do you get people to change their habits?

You find the ones who already want to.