Selling with Feeling

Diego Gambetta, who looked at the Sicilian Mafia through an economist’s eyes, once compared it to an advertising department. In Sicily, the men who sell protection march through town under a saint’s banner. The saint is a protector by profession, and they are, so to speak, his sponsors down here on earth. Gambetta writes that this is no different from ordinary advertising. Cowboys greedily eat cornflakes. Soap suds pour down in a refreshing waterfall. Washing machines spin to a Strauss waltz. The calculation is the same everywhere: something of the symbol will rub off on the product.

I spent forty years standing next to washing machines. Not one of them ever spun to Strauss. But people buy them to Strauss, that’s true.

A man doesn’t buy a thing, he buys the feeling stuck to it. The whole question is where that feeling came from. Whether it grew out of the thing itself. Or whether someone brought it along and set it down beside it.

A Cactus in the Pocket

Gambetta tells of a Sicilian photographer, Natale Gaggioli. Gaggioli admitted that he always kept a thick prickly-pear pad to hand. When he photographed a Mafia victim, he would lay the pad next to the body. Without the cactus, he said, a murder didn’t look like a Mafia killing, and nobody on the mainland would buy the picture. Television, Gambetta adds, does the same thing with sound. The right music is laid under news about the Mafia, otherwise the news doesn’t ring true.

The fact was real. The dead man was real. But the feeling people paid for, the photographer carried in his pocket.

The Sunglasses That Came Home

With dark glasses it was cleverer still. Gambetta traces their journey. At first they were worn by the blind. Around 1930 they turned up in dangerous sports, in motor racing and in the mountains. In the war they became the mark of a tough man. Then Hollywood got hold of them and started putting them on hard men, so the audience would know at once who it was looking at. And only after the films did dark glasses become the obligatory uniform of real gangsters. Gambetta honestly notes that he found no evidence that gangsters wore them earlier.

The image was invented to sell the audience a feeling of toughness. Then the very models for the image bought it themselves. A feeling, once sold, can find its way back to the man it was drawn from and put him in its uniform.

Love Songs

Saviano once bought an mp3 player from a teenager for fifty euros. The player had survived in a wrecked flat where a Camorra hit squad had lived. These were the songs the gunmen listened to on the way to a job. Saviano expected rap or heavy metal. What he found was Neapolitan love songs and pop. “In America they shoot after a dose of rap; in Secondigliano they kill to love songs.”

The feeling a job is charged with doesn’t have to resemble the job. It’s chosen for whatever helps get the job done. Remember that when a bank sells you a loan against a backdrop of kittens.

Lunch for the Whole Room

Saviano recalls the restaurants he went to with his father. Camorra bosses were served there first, even if they’d come in last. And the bosses knew how to smooth over the awkwardness. Just before they left, they ordered lunch for everyone in the room. Just before they left, so as not to have to sit through the fawning thanks.

Only two people didn’t get the lunch: Professor Iannotto and his wife. The professor hadn’t greeted the mafiosi. They didn’t buy him lunch, but they sent him a bottle of limoncello as a gift, via the waiter. “Every camorrista knows you must never neglect your open enemies, because an open enemy is worth more than a secret one.”

Look at what was bought here. Not food. The room forgot the grievance about the queue and remembered the generosity. And the professor got a bottle that said: we see you. Both feelings were sold without a single word about money.

Fear with a Way Out

The oldest feeling in trade is fear. In 2015 a group of psychologists led by Melanie Tannenbaum pulled together more than a hundred studies of fear appeals. The conclusion was dull and useful. On average, a frightening message shifted what people thought about the threat, what they intended to do about it and what they actually did: give up smoking, buckle up, see a doctor. It worked best when, next to the threat, people were shown exactly what to do. And the favourite scare story, that fear always drives people away, was not borne out by the analysis.

Notice what was being measured. Not purchases of just any product, but actions recommended for the person’s own good. Whether fear will sell your lock or your insurance is a separate question, and you’ll have to test it on your own customers. And the second question is whether, behind the door you’re leading the frightened man to, there’s anything besides your till.

The Sheet Straight Off the Press

Now about the Don. Once a laundry opened across the river that perfumed its linen. Its sheets smelled of lavender, like a meadow in a picture. Two of our hotels went over to it within a month. I came to the Don with a bottle: let’s do it too, it costs next to nothing.

The Don sniffed the bottle and handed it back. “That’s something you put next to the linen,” he said. “What does clean linen itself smell of?” I didn’t know. “Nothing. And warmth.”

Instead of the bottle, he invited the head housekeepers from both hotels that had left to come to our laundry. At six in the morning, before the first run. They stood by the press, and a presser took a sheet off it and put it into their hands, still hot. No lavender, no speeches. All the Don said was: “This is what we bring you. The rest gets sprayed on top.”

One hotel came back six months later; the housekeeper talked the manager round herself. The other stayed across the river. The guests, as far as I know, liked the lavender. The Don shrugged. “They wanted a meadow. I haven’t got a meadow.”

At the time I was angry with him over the second hotel. Now I think he’d simply done the sums. The guests really did like the lavender, no argument there. The bottle cost next to nothing. But with it we’d have had to explain every year why we were better than the ones who perfumed more heavily.

The Bottom Line

If you sell honestly, let the feeling grow out of the thing itself, like the warmth of a sheet straight off the press. If you frighten, show the way out at once. And don’t grieve over a client who left for the lavender: the only way to keep him is with heavier lavender.

And when someone’s selling to you, look for the cactus. Do you like something more than it’s worth? In your head, take away the music, the saint, the cowboy, the kittens. Look at what’s left on the table. If it’s the same thing you were about to pay for, pay. If the table’s empty, you were buying a prickly-pear pad.