How Do You Feel About That?

Mindshare Is Meaningless

You’ve heard of mindshare, the portion of customers’ minds that a vendor’s brand occupies. Mindshare is meaningless; building it is a waste of shareholder capital.

NEWSFLASH: People don’t make cerebral decisions — ESPECIALLY PURCHASE DECISIONS — even in the industrial, technology, military, and commercial sectors.

So, why are you targeting the head, the intellect? Bad move. Target the gut.

Where to Build a New Tesla Gigafactory? (2020)

Unlike the way Jeff Bezos conducted a public bakeoff of cities eager for Amazon’s HQ2, Musk decided to make the decision as he often did, from the gut, trusting his intuition and those of his executives. (They chose Austin, Texas).

Elon Musk by Walter Issacson

Using GutShare™ (not features) to Sell Cars

Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone, told Morley Safer of 60 Minutes: “The consumer is king. The consumer ought to make the decisions … certainly not the engineer. Engineers tend to get enchanted by the technology itself.”

Indeed! I call this obsession technologica erotica — a term I coined in 1989.

Focusing exclusively on logic, technology, and product features — common in the high-tech arena — will result in two undesirable outcomes:

  1. Failure to tap customers’ real buying motivations
  2. Artificially high cost/length of sales.

Fusion Point of Thinking & Feeling

Because mindshare is meaningless, I coined GutShare™ — that portion of customers’ guts that a vendor’s brand occupies — based on these truths:

  • Every corporate decision embodies at least one of three primal emotions, a factor many tech execs mistakenly dismiss
  • A brand (whether consumer, industrial, commercial, or military) that doesn’t incorporate customer emotion will fail to garner GutShare™ — and fail, period.
  • The goal is to GutCast™ your brand, with pinpoint accuracy, into your customer’s guts. Are you doing that, or aiming futilely at their heads?

More About GutShare™

Examples of GutShare

[On the FOMO causing ridiculous billion-dollar startup valuations]: “This is the most crowded party that’s ever been thrown.”

Bill Gurley
Managing Partner of Benchmark Capital Partners
Wall Street Journal: 02.20.15

 

[On why he was reluctant to split News Corp from 21st Century Fox]: “I guess it was emotional.”

Rupert Murdoch
CEO of 21st Century Fox
Fortune: 04.28.14

“Late night is not what it used to be during the days of Johnny Carson and even the early days of David Letterman. It was much more of a profit center. The last few years it’s been more about bragging rights.”

Les Moonves
Former CEO of CBS

“When they’re [venture capitalists] feeling good, they invest more.”

Mark V. Cannice, PhD
Department Chair
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
University of San Francisco School of Management

“Nothing in life is done with one side of the brain. Everything has an emotional content and a pragmatic aspect.”

David Kelley
Founder of IDEO
Fortune: 04.29.13

Emotional Creatures

Getting the picture?

The gut is where decisions happen. Alas, too often, people ignore their guts by overthinking, regretting it afterwards. The gut always has the right answer.

Be Unique or Be Ignored™

 

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