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What Is 'Demonstration'?

• Demonstration is one of the oldest and most effective marketing techniques.
• Demonstration gives your prospects a "reason to believe" your marketing and sales claims are true.

Josh Kaufman Explains 'Demonstration'

Marketers often try to explain the benefits of their offers, but it’s more effective to show the Product in action. Demonstration increases a prospect’s belief in the benefits of your offer by showing them how well it works.

Demonstration is one of the oldest and most effective marketing techniques; it’s been used to change public opinion for centuries. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, but pedestrians didn’t trust the structure—it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, and the first bridge that crossed the East River. Early users were nervous.

Six days after the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, a woman slipped on the stairs that led up to the bridge. The commotion caused a mass panic: the pedestrian equivalent of theatergoers rushing to the exits to escape a fire. Twelve people died, seven sustained life-threatening injuries, and twenty-eight were wounded in the stampede.

Following this public-relations crisis, the city allowed P. T. Barnum, the famed circus showman, to parade twenty-one elephants and seventeen camels across the bridge. The bridge didn’t waver, and public confidence was restored: if the Brooklyn Bridge could accommodate a score of five-ton elephants, it could handle pedestrian traffic.

Many of the most profitable businesses of the twentieth century were built using Demonstration as the primary marketing strategy. Consider the golden age of infomercials: Billy Mays sold more than $1 billion dollars of home products like OxiClean, Mighty Putty, Orange Glo, and Kaboom via direct-response television advertisements. Billy’s over-the-top enthusiasm was effective in overcoming the viewer’s Preoccupation and natural impulse to change the channel, but watching Billy restore a grimy floor or a stained shirt to its original glory made the cash registers ring. Viewers didn’t have to take Billy’s word for how well the Product performed: they could see the results for themselves.

Demonstration can go a long way in establishing belief in your offer’s ability to help the prospect. Whenever possible, don’t tell your prospects what you can do to help: show them.

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"The truth is generally seen, seldom heard."

Baltasar Gracián, seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher

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https://personalmba.com/demonstration/

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