The field of marketing uses the study of behavioral science to make sense of how the brain processes information so that businesses can implant their message into a prospects head.
One of the principal scientists in the field of marketing psychology is Dr. Jeffrey Lant who developed a theory that he calls the rule of seven.
The rule of seven states; that to penetrate the buyer’s conscious mind, and therefore make any significant penetration in a given market, a prospect needs to see a message a minimum of seven times within an 18-month period.
While the exact number of impressions a prospect needs to be exposed to may change slightly from one study to another, the key takeaway is that when it comes to marketing you can’t expect to deliver a message once and expect the prospect to pick up the phone and make an appointment. It takes repetition to allow the message to transcend from the unconscious to the conscious mind.
What makes this matter worse is that your marketing message will most often not even be visible to the prospect. For example, if you ran a print ad in a local newspaper. There are likely days that the prospect you are targeting may not read something on the page where your ad resides so they would never see it. Or perhaps your marketing message is posted on a twitter feed that by the time the prospect checks Twitter your message is so far down the feed that it is never read.
As an Invisible Fencing dealer back in the 1980’s I recall our franchise marketing department telling me that I would have to run nine print ads just to get one customer exposure. Coupled with the rule of seven that would mean that you would have to run an ad 64 (9X7) times to reach the minimum number of exposures.
So, the message is clear that when it comes to an advertisement at lease you will have to be in it for the long haul.
Unfortunately, many folks new to business ownership fail to truly understand that it takes a long time to create brand awareness. They make a few feeble attempts to deliver their message and when it does not produce the results they expected they give up before the message has had sufficient time to reach the conscious mind of the prospect.
Moreover, when it comes to reaching out to new prospects perhaps using email marketing they simply try to contact a customer a couple of times per year hoping to land that contract, but the rule of seven implies that at this periodicity of contact, their efforts are just part of the background noise.
Do you follow the rule of seven with your potential customers?
This artice was originaly published on Nov 10th 2014 and updated on March 30, 2018
