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Dedicated to Discovering How People Make Choices
In this excerpt from a session of the University of Florida and MECLABS Institute graduate certificate program, we look at three good headlines that PR Newswire crafted with the help of MECLABS Institute's Value Proposition-certified research experts.
Each headline is the result of a carefully chosen set of observations (as opposed to random facts) designed to foster a conclusion in the reader's mind.
But only one of these headlines will be used, because a great value proposition may still be the wrong value proposition for your business if you haven't carefully considered the final goal — to acquire the highest conversion rate.
This is not a random set of facts, this is a carefully chosen set of observations designed to produce a conclusion.
– Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute
This excerpt is from Session 7, Reconciling our Customer Knowledge Gap, from MMC5259: Customer Relationship and Effective Lead Management course, part of our graduate certificate program offered through UF. The full session aims to introduce students to the unique and unprecedented nature of the web and how it can be used as a living laboratory to study the cognitive decision process of our customers and predict their future behavior.
TRANSCRIPT
Flint McGlaughlin: So we gathered 25 leaders. These were the most experienced leaders in the business. These were leaders going all the way up to the CEO, the C-suite. And we worked them through an understanding of the value proposition framework, which, as you probably know, we teach in another course.
And in doing so, the workshop and the interviews and the interactions helped us organize what we know or the set of facts, pseudofacts, that we think we know and put them in a place we could prepare to learn what we don't know yet. All of that being done, we arrived at possible answers to the original question.
So if you look at the headline on this version, you'll notice it's Treatment 1. "For almost 60 years ..." What are we emphasizing here? And by the way, what conclusion do we want them to draw from the words "60 years"? You should be able to sense the answer to that.Then it has "PR Newswire has been an authoritative source ..." and it goes on. You'll notice, read everything there — 1954, inventing the industry, etc., etc. And as you will do, you should realize that this is not a random set of facts. This is a carefully chosen set of observations designed to produce a conclusion in your mind. That's number one.
Ask yourself how you think that will work, or how effective it could be compared to what I have for number two. "Over 200,000 media outlets and hundreds of thousands of journalists ..." Something else is happening here. The statements of fact in Treatment 1 are true. The statements of fact in Treatment 2 are true. But both are designed to produce a different conclusion, and this is the power of the Trust Trial. The right conclusion will drive a decision — that comes with expectations, that is correlated against an experience — and this new experience becomes the new observations. And as I mentioned earlier, if this Trust Trial is successful in multiple cycles, you are building brand. But let's keep going.
Treatment 3. "Every year, tens of thousands of organizations of all sizes, all over the world ..." You can see where this is going. Look at the bullet points at the bottom.
So now you have three observation sets, and I'm going to ask you a profoundly important question. Which of these three will produce the highest conversion rate? — which is really the highest yes rate, which is really the right decision, which is really the right conclusion.
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