Why Your Audience Isn’t a Bunch of Fish to Shoot in a Barrel

Seth Godin’s blog the other day was simply this:

“Of course it’s easy to shoot fish in a barrel. The difficult part, the part no one talks about, is getting the fish into the barrel in the first place.”

The man is a walking mic drop.

Think about that though, for reals. How you THINK about how to get fish into that barrel says a lot about your attitude and beliefs.

Some believe you have to trick the fish into jumping in.

Some want to catch them somewhere else and transport them to said barrel, whether they want to go there or not.

Some think it’s enough to have a barrel, and that the fish should simply WANT to be there.

Somewhere along the line we started to believe that it’s our job simply to manipulate, coax, and cajole people to do what WE want.

We don’t always ask what the fish want.

Oh sure, there are marketing surveys and polls, psychographics, demographics, metrics measured within an inch of their lives. But I’ve found, surprisingly, that despite all this work, when I ask someone who’s been tasked with getting fish in the barrel what is the real reason the fish would want to be there, they come up empty-handed. (Or they tell themselves a story about how cool their barrel is).

What if we lost the barrel altogether? Great messaging, to my mind, is never to get anything into a container so we can shoot it.

I’ve always thought that the idea was to get in the water, find out where they are and why, and turn the tide in the direction where they most want to go.

That’s a relationship. A live fish, not a dead one. Which one becomes the customer for life?

 

 

Watch the FB Live I did with Seth right here. ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ And if you want to learn how to speak from the stage in a way that connects with your audience, inspires and motivates them, join me at #TappedtoSpeakLIVE, Boston, April 4&5: www.tappedtospeaklive.com.

 

Top Photo by David Clode on Unsplash