What can you say to a kidnapper so that he lets you go?
This question is the only reason I’m good at marketing
When I was 9 years old, news stories of kidnappings in Delhi were common.
There were reports of men who roamed around in a van with tinted windows with the objective of kidnapping children. Maybe they weren’t as common as my 9-year-old brain had made them out to be.
But I was scared.
It became my biggest fear.
What made it worse was that I felt ashamed to share it with anyone. I didn’t want to be vulnerable in front of anyone and expose my biggest fear.
And if there’s one thing we 90s kids had a lot, it was time. We didn’t have so many screens to distract us from boredom. So, I lay in boredom almost every day worrying about being kidnapped.
That’s when this question popped into my head.
𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙄 𝙨𝙖𝙮 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙠𝙞𝙙𝙣𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙨 𝙢𝙚 𝙜𝙤?
Now, it wasn’t a fear that I had no control over. Now, it was a problem that I could solve.
I obsessed over this question. I started with myself as the focus of my study.
What can ‘I’ say… No solution appeared to work.
Then, suddenly it clicked. ‘I’ am not the focus. ‘He’ is.
I don’t matter in this situation. He is the only one that matters. I have to think about what’s going on in his head.
What motivates him? Is it fear? Is it greed? Is it desperation?
Obviously, I wasn’t this clear in my thinking at that age but I distinctly remember trying to think from his POV.
I unintentionally developed EMPATHY.
It’s funny to think that I cultivated empathy by putting myself in a kidnapper’s shoes.
I never found the perfect answer because there isn’t one.
The answer would be contingent on the kidnapper.
・Can he be scared?
・Is he doing this as a last resort?
・Is he purely evil?
But I found something much more valuable — a new way of thinking. And I got hooked on it.
It became my favourite hobby to try to figure people out.
・What does this person want?
・Why is she with him?
・Why doesn’t my history teacher ever smile?
Putting myself in other people’s shoes became an obsession.
And that is a superpower that has served me very well both in my personal and professional life.
Can you get to the bottom of a person? Not what they’re projecting to the world, but what they actually want and need. Sometimes they don’t even know what they want.
Once you have that, you just work backwards to give them what they want. That’s marketing. Nothing else.
As a marketing consultant, the most common question I get is — How do I increase my followers?
Their end goal is never to increase followers but to sell something. Somehow, they’ve convinced themselves that more followers equals more sales.
Even if we assume that’s true, they don’t stop to ask themselves, why should anyone follow me?
If you can answer that question and make content keeping just that question in mind, you’ll get followers. All the other hacks are just that — hacks. Nothing more.
Just repeating this exercise over and over in your brain will make you a better marketer than most.
Start with the other person and work your way backwards. I know it sounds simple and isn’t some fancy ‘blah-blah effect’ with ‘blah-blah curve’.
But the most important things in life are usually simple.
Sometimes all of marketing can be boiled down to just one question — What can you say to a kidnapper so that he lets you go?
Fruit
