“A summer of statistics and fun!”
Now. I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of humans would not agree that “fun” and “statistics” should be used in the same sentence. Let alone with an exclamation point at the end.
Yet, that’s exactly what the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (affectionately known as ICPSR by its devotees) did in a brochure for its summer program in advanced quantitative research methods.
That’s because ICPSR has absolute clarity about its target market. It’s not you and me (and I even taught research methods when I was prof in a mediation master’s program). ICPSR knows its target market is social science professors and advanced Ph.D. students. It’s people like my political scientist husband, who does believe that courses with titles like Logit and Probit Analysis and Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Generalized Linear Models are fun.
ICPSR, knowing its market very clearly, spoke directly to that market. And when my husband got that brochure, he sat down and read it in detail from cover to cover.
ICPSR didn’t care that you and I would toss that brochure in recycling pretty damn fast. It cared about the people it knew would read it and sign up. Just like my husband, who’s going back for his fourth or fifth gig in Ann Arbor. He’ll come home with another t-shirt that only stats geeks would get, like the one in his drawer that reads, “I’ve spent my whole life worrying about heteroscadasticity.”
That’s your goal, too, in your mediation marketing – to know your target market so clearly and so well you can create information that’s compelling enough they can’t wait to digest it.
ABA Government and Public Sector Lawyers Division Newsletter
On another note, my thanks to Katherine Mikkelson, author of Teams in Government Law Offices: How to Build a Better Team, published in the Summer 2009 issue of the above newsletter. Katherine tapped me as a resource for the article and was kind enough to quote me as well.
