Where do you use marketing in your relationships?  And when you market to your family and friends – an idea or an activity – do you use the most effective marketing available?

I mean, do you present the idea or activity in a way that the listener will be enticed to participate?
 

Think about marketing picking up your shoes from the middle of the floor to a 53 year old man.  How do I market this to him?  By saying, “Were you brought up in a barn?  Pick up your damn shoes from the middle of the floor!”

That’s not very good marketing.
 

Frank Kern suggests using stories to market.  Stories are the woof and warp of our cultural heritage.  We think in stories.  They touch all of us. 
 

Even by asking Paul if he was brought up in a barn, a story is invoked.  You can just see Paul sleeping in the hay next to a cow – or better yet, the pigs!  It’s definitely a negative story and it makes him BSW (bad, stupid and wrong).
 

But if I’d like Paul to cooperate with moving his shoes, I might tell him a supportive story.
 

My demeanor would have to be that of a happy mother telling her 5 year old a story.  The demeanor of a professor giving a lecture just doesn’t work on this stuff.
 

I could tell Paul the story of trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and tripping over his shoes.  I could make it quite funny, because I’m sure if anybody’d been watching me that night – stumbling around naked in the dark and falling left and right — it would have been quite amusing. 
 

Then I could give him the offer:  just kick your shoes to the wall so they’re not in the traffic area.
 

How would that work for marketing?  Would it work better than the barn story?