“It’s the cat’s pajamas”
“It’s the what?”, I asked. “Why are the cats wearing pyjamas?”
At first I thought my friend was crazy. Then I realised that I had been living in under a rock and was the only one who didn’t know this phrase. It turns out that ‘cat’s pyjamas’ is a 1920s phrase for ‘a wonderful or remarkable person or thing’, or in Wikipedia’s more restrained language, something ‘beneficial’.
Later that week, I was reading a book on the train and it talked about a product being the cat’s pyjamas. Immediately, this phrased jumped out at me – not just because I now knew what it meant, but also because I’d heard it recently and it was familiar to me.
Permission marketing
I recently heard Seth Godin speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. (He’s an absolutely amazing public speaker… you must try and see him speak if you get a chance). He brought ‘permission marketing‘ (the opposite of ‘interruption marketing’) to the world’s attention, which is centred around obtaining customer consent to receive information from a company. I was recently reading Paul Hawken’s ‘Growing a Business‘ when I came across a chapter describing how ‘the customer must give your business permission to sell to him’. The familiarity of Seth’s phrase ‘permission marketing’ made the concept stand out for me, among the many other illuminating thoughts Hawken shares.
So what can we learn from these random stories?
Have a conversation about your product, write a story about your idea, encapsulate your point in a phrase. The next time someone hears the same words, it will stand out in their mind. Keep doing this and it won’t just seep into their consciousness like advertising does, but it will ring a bell in their head. And once it’s familiar, you’ll have the attention you seek.
Tags: marketing