Every intelligence service has had to answer the same question: why does a clerk with a steady job and a pension hand his country’s secrets to the other side? You would expect the answer to fill a library. It fits on an index card, and the card says MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego.
We call ideas like this contraband marketing. They come from trades that have nothing to do with ours, and we smuggle them across the border because they work better than the goods on sale at home. MICE is the first in the series.
The model
A case officer who wants to recruit someone does not open with a presentation on his agency’s capabilities. He works out which of four things the target wants, and offers that. The method is so simple that no marketing department has yet managed to adopt it.
Four files, four motives
Each letter has its famous cases. Here are four, with the motive stamped on the file.
Now put a buyer in the chair
A B2B purchase is a small act of defection. Somebody inside the company has to abandon the current supplier, or the current way of doing things, and argue for yours in meetings. Gartner puts the typical buying group at six to ten people. In our experience each of them answers to one of the four letters, though none of them would put it that way.
Most B2B marketing is written for one of these people. The deck is written for the champion. The website is written for the chief executive, or at least for the chief executive’s favourite adjectives. The CFO and the people who carry the risk are left to the sales team, who meet them late, after the decision has quietly been made.
Where the recruiting happens
A case officer works face to face. A supplier rarely gets the chance. In CEB’s survey of B2B buyers (CEB is now part of Gartner), buyers spent 17% of their buying time with potential suppliers, and that 17% is shared among everyone on the shortlist. The rest of the time they are reading, searching and arguing among themselves, without us.
Most of the selling happens in rooms we are never invited into. So each letter needs its own argument, short enough for someone else to carry in.
Write for all four letters
MThe buyer’s questionIs it worth the money?
Give themA number: cost saved, time saved or revenue made, and how it was worked out.
IThe buyer’s questionDoes it fit what we believe?
Give themA view of where the industry is going, and why the product belongs there.
CThe buyer’s questionWhat if it fails?
Give themProof: named references, a guarantee, a small first step that is easy to undo.
EThe buyer’s questionWill this make me look good?
Give themAn idea the champion can present as their own, in words that sound clever in a meeting.
Coercion, translated
Nobody is proposing blackmail, though some procurement processes come close. In buying, coercion is the fear of being wrong. The person who signs off a failed project carries it for years, and knows it. Doing nothing has never got anyone fired, so doing nothing wins most deals. The work is to make the new choice look like the safe one.
The officer’s rule
An officer does not lead with what he has. He finds out what the other person wants, then offers it. Most B2B marketing does the reverse. It describes the product at length, in the third person, and waits for someone to find a reason to care. MICE starts with the reason.
MICE at work: an example
Take a company we have made up for the purpose. It sells AI and analytics for the last mile of retail: the shelf, the store and the delivery van. It has about 150 people, a product that works and a few dozen customers among regional grocery and convenience chains. Now it wants the national chains, the ones with several hundred stores.
Its website says it turns data into actionable insights at the edge. That sentence has been written for no one, and no one has ever bought anything because of it.
At a national chain, four people will decide. The CFO signs. The chief operating officer has to believe in it. IT, legal and procurement can stop it. The head of store operations saw the demo, wants it, and will have to argue for it in meetings the company is never invited to. Each of them asks a different question, so each needs a different argument, carried by the same brand.
None of this needs a bigger budget. It needs the budget the company already has, aimed at four real people instead of one imaginary buyer. The brand stays one brand, with one name and one voice. The website gains four routes through it. The content calendar stops being a list of topics and becomes a list of arguments, each written for someone who can be named. The sales team stops opening with the product and starts with whichever question is in the room.
The short version
People do not change sides for a product. They change sides for money, for a belief, out of fear or out of pride, and usually for some mixture of the four. Buyers are no different. A company that knows which motive each buyer answers to can give each of them a reason, and give its champion an argument short enough to carry into the room where the decision is made.
Written by Prakash Raghupathi, founder and principal strategist at Ash & Iron.
Money
Ideology