What a Stop Smoking Book is Teaching Me About People

As you learn the art of mar­ket­ing and sales, you’ll soon start notic­ing things about peo­ple as well. Learn­ing how peo­ple feel and think is very ben­e­fi­cial to becom­ing bet­ter at marketing.

At it’s heart, mar­ket­ing is a peo­ple busi­ness. If you learn their fears and wor­ries and you have a way to solve that, it makes a world of dif­fer­ence in your success.

With that said, I’m always keep­ing and eye out for insights into human behav­ior. As some of you may know I quit smok­ing a few months ago thanks to the help of a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smok­ing by Allen Carr. It worked won­ders in help­ing me get past that. I feel so much bet­ter for it now.

I wanted to pass that on to oth­ers where I work. So I bought another copy specif­i­cally to pass around at the fac­tory I work in. Prob­a­bly over half of the peo­ple there are smok­ers. A few have quit over the years but there are still quite that smoke. And there are quite a few of those that would like to quit as well.

My plan was to bring in the book and just leave it out on the table with a lit­tle note say­ing to bor­row it then bring it back when they were done. I was curi­ous as to who would use it, who would take the ini­tia­tive and grab the book first.

A few peo­ple have already bor­rowed it already and a cou­ple have asked for a copy of their own. But what stuck out to me was some things these early adopters had in common.

- They were quick to jump in and either buy or bor­row the book with­out sec­ond thoughts of what other peo­ple would think. Mind you, they all “enjoy” their smok­ing but they are also ready to quit.

- None of these peo­ple were the type that con­stantly whined about how crappy their life was and never did any­thing about it. They took the ini­tia­tive to change them­selves instead of wait­ing for some­one else.

- They were all pretty open minded, friendly peo­ple. The kind of peo­ple I love chum up to myself.

So what does this say? Take what you want from it. It’s just inter­est­ing they all had sim­i­lar qual­i­ties and were the first to jump on board. Kind of gives you and idea of what to look for when you com­ing up with your ideal cus­tomer or lead.

While there isn’t that much data I just thought it was inter­est­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ties between them. What should be more inter­est­ing is to see who fol­lows. Will the naysay­ers and non believ­ers end up read­ing the book? How about the peo­ple wait­ing for some­one to come clean their life up for them? Will they take the initiative?

Every per­son is just a lit­tle dif­fer­ent and as mar­keters it’s a great help to learn how to fig­ure out peo­ple so that we can solve prob­lems and cre­ate solutions.

What does a stop smok­ing book have to do with mar­ket­ing? Not much, at least not directly. But you would be amazed how much you learn from other peo­ple can have a direct impact on your mar­ket­ing skills.

~Chris

Do you think some­thing like this would help you in your mar­ket­ing ven­tures? What other unex­pected sources have you learned some­thing from?

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Raise Your Con­fi­dence With One Sim­ple Action
• What Does Com­pos­ing Music Have to Do With Marketing?
• 8 Rea­sons You Should Be Read­ing Books Too

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