Who decided breakfast is the most important meal of the day?
Have you seen scientific proof?
Don’t Google it. Take a moment and search your memory.
No one proved this claim to you… but there's a good chance you accept it as truth.
What happened is this: you heard this statement early in your life… you heard it often… and from authority figures.
Maybe you never questioned it. (Most people don’t.)
I was shocked when my youngest son brought this chart home from school…
… because this is not education. It’s indoctrination.
And — cue exaggerated rage — who are these people to tell my son which meal is most important????
(As you might have guessed, the chart came from the vendor that sells meals to our school district. Trying to grab a bigger share of the 8am market.)
I’m sure most parents didn’t think twice about it. Why should they? It lines up nicely with what they learned in school.
There’s a useful persuasion principle at work here:
Someone is indoctrinating your children… and your prospects. It might as well be YOU.
To some degree, the success of your business depends on the success of your indoctrination efforts. You must either:
- successfully indoctrinate your should-be buyers — to define how they think about or make decisions in your area of expertise, or…
- align your message with the indoctrination that’s already in place.
If your marketing or sales pitch has to convince someone that breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day, you’re in trouble.
It’s worth spending time to find out what your ideal clients already believe (and why), and what they NEED to believe in order to make your product or service the obvious choice.
Time to do your research!
Here’s what I want you to do:
1. Always Be Indoctrinating. Otherwise, you could lose ground to the other voices trying to compete with you.
2. Build yourself up as an authority. That puts oomph into your statements, neutralizes some degree of skepticism/criticism and helps your message “stick.”
Don’t just BE an authority. Be KNOWN as one.
3. If necessary, re-position your product/service/self so it’s in a category all by itself.
When people see something familiar, they automatically put it into a category — and that category almost certainly has someone else’s indoctrination already installed.
When you create a new category, you get to set definitions “early… often… and as the authority figure.”
Have a productive day.
Related: Sell Me Their Eyeballs