To woo, you gotta probe, listen, not go yakety-yak

The other day, someone let me read a mail she received from a wannabe Romeo. Apart from the mail being a mile long, the miffed wannabe (at being ignored by the girl) had, using bad prose at its finest, tried to win the girl's attention by going on a historical account of what he was and how he was going to be, in the future. The nitwit was so absorbed in himself that he failed to recognise the simple fact that girl wasn't interested in him, and so wasn't about to be 'wooed'.

The long winding bag of bad prose reminds me of times when marketers embark on similar such endeavours. I am talking about marketers using media interfaces that allow for two way communiques and yet can't stop the one way flow of talk, all from their mouths. For instance, telemarketers trying to pitch their wares are so absorbed in what they wanna sell, they fail to realise what the buyer really wants. They can't get the fact that its never about what they wanna sell, that its always about what consumers wanna buy. To pitch a product or a service successfully, the marketer must understand how that product or service can turn into a solution or a benefit for the consumer. And for that, the 'pitcher' must disconnect from himself and his products, and instead understand and connect to needs of consumers.

The key to doing this successfully is in 'probing' and 'listening' to 'consumer talk'. That is, LISTEN to a talking consumer. Again, that requires the marketer to shut up and just do a bit of probing.

Its same with wooing too. Wooing's about probing and listening. Its surely ain't yakety-yaking about oneself. It would bide well both for the wooer and marketer to listen, than to talk. Of course, for the wooer, that would mean no lousy prose too!