Seed your clients for better marketing.
Could a law firm bring in its target clients and ask them for marketing advice? Here’s an introduction to how it just might work:
Rather than simply offer free samples, previews, test-drives etc to opinion leaders, the idea of seeding trials is to create goodwill, loyalty and advocacy among the opinion-leading 10% of your target market by putting the product or service in their hands and giving them a say in how it is marketed. By involving opinion leaders in this way, by effectively inviting them to become part of your marketing department, you create a powerful sense of ownership among the clients, customers or consumers that count.
The reason this works is called The Hawthorne Effect. Here’s a fascinating example from the article:
Back in the 1930s, a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School were commissioned to run some employee research for the telecom giant Western Electric (now Lucent Technologies). Conducted as the company’s production plant in Hawthorne, near Chicago, the research program involved inviting small groups of employees to trial various new working conditions before rolling them out to the general workforce. To the researchers’ amazement, whatever was trialed the participants seemed to like, to such an extent that their productivity increased! For example, when researchers invited participants to trial working in brighter lighting conditions, productivity increased. But then when they trialed dimmer lighting conditions, productivity also increased. In fact, productivity kept increasing in successive trials of working under progressively dimmer lights, until the lighting was no stronger than moonlight! In another trial, the research participants were invited to test working shorter hours, and sure enough their productivity increased again. Indeed, subsequent trials showed that the more breaks the research participants were given and the less time they worked, the greater their productivity. But then, when the researchers asked them to trial longer hours, productivity went up again – to an all time high.
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