How To Marry 10 000 Women

The Brand Shrink

I’ve spent quite some time now working on communications strategy for different brands. Some would call what I’ve done “planning”, “design strategy” or “brand strategy”, but really, I think of myself more like a shrink counseling a brand stretched out on the sofa, trying to figure out who they really are and what is really attractive about them. Today, we’re going to talk a little about attraction, and what we can learn from the pros about picking up women and men.

The Art of Pick Up

I used to work in television. What I did back then was to try to gaze into a crystal ball and figure out what kind of show would be the next big thing. Doing that, I learned a lot  about different disciplines, but one that stuck with me more than any other was “pick-up-theory”, that is, the theory of picking up girls (or guys for that matter if you’re so inclined). The same day that “The Game” by Neil Strauss was released in the US, it was on it’s way over to me in a package from Amazon. To me, that book was the PERFECT television show back then. For some reason, I never managed to sell anyone on the concept, but if I had, we would have aired it just as the Swedish translation hit the market, and that book just went ballistic over here.

Anyway –  I never managed to pull that project off, but the concepts I learned in the research stayed with me like glue. Perhaps not so much as a way to pick up girls (even though I managed somehow snatch this magnificent creature), but for all that it brought back to me in terms of putting me on the path of behavioral psychology.

How To Marry 10 000 Women And/Or Men.

Basically picking up girls works like this:

1. Grab attention
2. Create attraction
3. Create comfort
4. Seduce
5. Live happily ever after, but earn it every day!

Besides being a very useful model for all kinds of relationships, it’s also an extremely useful model for business, and one that many businesses don’t live by. Here is why:

The traditional marketing model taught in business schools (yeah, I went to business school too) goes like this:

1. (A)ttention
2. (I)nterest
3. (D)esire
4. (A)ction

If you compare that to my picking-up-girls-model above, you’ll notice three major differences. First, they’ve split up “Create Attraction” into two different stages. Second, they’ve entirely skipped past “Create Comfort”. Third, they don’t even have marriage and kids on the map. The AIDA model is basically a bad one-night-stand kind of deal.

Let’s work through these three problems one by one:

1. Splitting Up Interest and Desire Is a Bad Idea

In my mind, interest without desire is bad. Because if you have reached this state (according to the model something more than attention) without having created attraction, you’ll have reached something resembling “let’s just be friends”. The initial curiosity triggered in the attention stage is wasted. Interest should arise along with attraction every time. Otherwise your marketing is off, and your conversion rate will drop.

2. Skipping Past Comfort Will Get You Laid Less

Moving straight for the kill without establishing a relationship will probably result in your not getting laid at all, and if you do, buyers remorse will be much more likely to occur. You may perhaps manage to seduce somebody once, but that means seduce in the worst sense of the word, and the buyer/lover will be likely to end up feeling cheated into it.

3. More Than a One Night Stand?

If all you’re interested in is getting laid once, then fine, you might be able to pull that off. But in the marketing world, you’re really not aiming to sleep with ONE woman/man, but rather marrying several thousand. And as we all know, if you’ve delivered once on your promise, you’re likely to get return customers, and perhaps even very fruitful life-long relationships.

The Silver Bullet: EVOLVE

So back to pick up. What did I eventually learn about picking up girls? Well – I learned that there are no techniques. There is no way to succeed when just conjuring a magic outer shell while pretending to be something that you are not. There IS, however, one silver bullet that you CAN use to pick up basically any girl that you want, and it’s this one:

If you develop yourself into a congruent, honest person that has integrity, brilliance and style, and that you’d love to hang out with any day of the week, you’ll get laid as much as you can possibly want – up until a certain point: when you fall in love. Because when you fall in love, you’ll not want to sleep around any more and you’ll want more than anything to stick around with the one person that you love.

While most brands don’t end up wanting to hang out with just one customer for the rest of their lives, they should definitely heed the advice of genuinely developing themselves instead of creating thin golden shells around them. They should be honest and they should be congruent. Doing this successfully can be hugely effective for them – even more so now that they have the web strapped on as a V8 boosting these basic human drives.

Smoke Screen Graphs Will Kill You

I’ve worked as a brand strategist on many projects by now, and if there is one thing that I’ve learned it is that graphs and strategy documents kill passion. You can work out a 200-slide presentation and charge a couple of hundred thousand dollars for it, but I am highly skeptical that this will make your communication better in the end.

At Honesty, we have a method of keeping these smoke screen slides to a minimum, and instead focus on two things: simplicity and humanity. Or perhaps better put, clarity and emotion. If we can figure out very clearly what topic we want to activate and figure out what emotional triggers will make this topic fly, no diagram in the world will beat this. In fact, most diagrams will dilute this clarity when you start compromising to honor your $100 000-Powerpoint.

Simplicity is King

I love this way of working, and I’ve really never produced better work than now. Simplicity is king, emotion is it’s kingdom, and when it comes down to it, we’re only human after all.

Ps. If you’re in Stockholm in March, come see me speak on this topic at The Conference at Berns March 16.