Practical Help to Grow Your Business  

MYTHS AND OTHER FOLKLORE

Urban legends are not hard to create.  Repetition builds believability and the internet helps enormously.  Then the tale is reinforced by being published in Wikipedia or some other reference source, which seems to automatically attach trustability to every entry, even though they are created by folk like you and me.

Several surround global warming and 'green' activities.

1. Mobile phone chargers

For example, some say that the power wasted by chargers is a big issue for mobile phone users.  In truth, if you upgraded your handset in the past two years - and you almost certainly did - then the energy used in its manufacture probably far outweighs the energy used in the charger, even if that is of an old design.  And if you upgraded your charger at the same time, modern chargers have a much lower standby consumption than those of only three years ago.

Other stories concern equipment that actually does have a relatively high standby consumption, even though the user may believe otherwise.

2. Standby power consumption

It sounds bizarre but sometimes the only difference between a set-top-box in operating mode and in standby mode is that no picture is being sent to the display.  Many of the other sub-systems can be happily chugging away, with standby consumption as high as 80% of full operating consumption!  Satellite receivers can be particularly power hungry.

Sometimes, of course, these stories start life in textbooks and again, the action of being printed lends unquestionable believability.  The whole of academic publishing hinges on being able to quote the sources of your material, and this unfailingly happens.  Non-academic non-fiction can be just as guilty.  However, there sometimes seem to have been few checks on the veracity of the information at its original source.

3. Meet needs or wants?

Many books on Sales and Marketing - and indeed many training courses too - will tell the reader or trainee that they must meet the needs of their customer.  "It doesn't matter what they want, you must sell them what they need," says the blurb.

I could say what utter rubbish.  It doesn't matter whether someone needs something, they're not going to buy it until they want it.  I could pretend that I smoke 60 cigarettes a day, have a full fried breakfast every morning, drink 12 pints of beer every night and consider brushing my teeth my daily work-out.  From this you could conclude that I need to alter my lifestyle, but until I want to, I'll do little about it!

So maybe it's semantics.  Maybe, like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, we use words to mean what we want them to mean.  Ultimately, if the prospective customer does not yet want what you can provide, but you can see that they need it, you have a choice - to educate them to move that need to a want before they will ever buy from you, or to walk away and find someone in whom the want already exists.

And wouldn't life be nice if it was like that.  People who want what you are selling actually ask to buy it from you.  You don't have to sell it to them.  Is it hard to sell beer in a pub, or newspapers in a newsagents?  Of course not!

Then thirdly there are the ideas which were actually true at the time they were published, but the world has moved on.  Unfortunately, because the information is 'out there', it is hard to contradict in the light of later evidence or merely changing tastes.

4. Dumping electronic stuff

Many people think that if their company doesn't keep to the e-waste regulations - the WEEE Directive - on the disposal of electronic hardware, they will be breaking UK law.  In fact the UK and other EU countries have still to 'transpose' the WEEE Directive into their national laws.  This fact was reported by a House of Lords committee enquiry in 2008.

5. Military analogies in sales

How many of you have won an order in the last month?  And how many have joined forces with an alliance partner in order to do so?  How many of you have launched a Marketing campaign this year?

Selling is about both parties getting the most out of the deal and the relationship, for as long as possible.  On the other hand, war is about winners and losers, with the aim being to end the lives of the losers as rapidly as possible!  So why do we persist with military analogies?

If you would like to submit a "burst balloon" for consideration in a future edition of this bulletin, please e-mail it to me david@davidwinch.co.uk

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