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The difference between survey buttons and the message in a promo piece must be crystal clear to those working in promotion and marketing.
The first thing to understand is that they are NOT the same thing.
The message is the communication, the thought, the significance you want to get across to an audience or public.
A button is what is used to get the public’s agreement to hear the message.
Too often promo and marketing people seem to get all tied up with the use of buttons and thus they never put any message in the promo piece. But the message is the whole reason for the promo piece in the first place!
Surveys can appear to not work very well when survey buttons and only survey buttons are used, as the result is messageless promo.
A survey is done so that you elicit response and agreement. But you get response because you’ve elicited agreement. You elicit agreement by using the right button. The button is the R-factor. It’s how you establish a reality with an audience.
To do a proper survey and to then use its results effectively requires an understanding of the purpose of surveys, and of ARC and the ARC triangle. It requires an understanding of what reality is.
One uses the ARC triangle in conducting a survey initially and, following that, one applies the ARC triangle in putting the survey results to use.
It goes like this: One communicates to an audience (via a survey) with affinity to find out what the reality of that audience is. Reality is agreement as to what is. The reason you do a survey is to find out what that audience will agree with.
One then approaches the public with that reality in a promo piece to get the public’s agreement to hear the message, the communication, in the promo. And thus one raises the public’s affinity for the item one is promoting.
That is the simplicity of it. But it will only be simple to the person who understands the ARC triangle. It is basic Scientology data we are using here. By improving
one corner of the ARC triangle, one improves the other two corners. The most important of these three related points, ARC, is communication. But without reality or some agreement, communication will not reach and affinity will be absent.
Thus, surveys are done to get agreement. Dispel the idea that surveys are done for any other purpose. They’re done to establish agreement with an audience.
In a survey, you question people to get their opinion on something — an idea, a product, an aspect of life, or any other subject. A button is the primary datum you get from this action. It is the answer given the most number of times to your survey question.
You ask ten or ten hundred people what they would most want or expect of an automobile tire and seven or seven hundred of them tell you “durability.” That’s the button. That’s the reality, the point of agreement on automobile tires among that public. So you use that button with that public and you’ve established reality; you’ve got agreement and they will then listen to what you have to say about automobile tires.
Buttons have their use but we are not so much interested in them as we are in MESSAGE. The message is the real essence of any promo piece. Buttons are just the grease to use to get your message through.
It would be a good idea for anyone with any confusion on these points to work them out in clay. One should be able to make a clear distinction between these two terms, button and message, and to view them in the correct relationship.
Once that distinction is made, it will be the end of messageless promo.
In its place we’ll have promo that uses a button to strike just the right note of agreement and establish a reality with the audience and then, without fail, communicates, really DELIVERS THE MESSAGE, to what is now a receptive audience.
That’s the secret of promo that gets response.
The first thing about it to understand is that SURVEY BUTTONS ARE NOT THE MESSAGE.