Sometime early in our marriage, my wife and I used to joke about “tomorrow-today”…
I don’t even remember where the joke started, or the context.
But it was all about the fascination of having things from the future, right now.
Then, tomorrow-today became a yesterday joke, and we mostly forgot about it.
Until randomly, it came up from somewhere else. Maybe it was a news article. Maybe it was in the context of copywriting or marketing.
But this phrase we’d come up with independently — to the best of my recollection, not saying we’d invented it, we’d just stumbled upon it ourselves — was suddenly being used by others.
So I started paying attention again.
Now, I don’t know what you know about how our attention works, but when you are looking for something, you’ll usually find it.
It’s why when you just bought a new Honda Odyssey minivan, you’ll see them all over town — in the same color.
It’s why when you’ve just had a song stuck in your head, you’ll notice it playing in public shortly thereafter (when you wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise).
And it’s why, for example, the findings of all kinds of scientific research is skewed toward the researcher’s own biases.
Back to tomorrow-today.
I noticed one place in particular where “tomorrow-today” showed up frequently — and could be extremely profitable…
If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that most of my client work since late 2010 has been with financial publishers, who sell investment advice.
Now, there are all kinds of different ways that you can approach selling investment services, but one of the most tried-and-true is the “single stock” promo.
That is, you write a promotion that tells the story of a single investment, making the case for it, and offering it (usually inside a bonus report) with a new subscription to an investment research service.
And among single-stock stories, there’s one that consistently shines…
Tomorrow-today.
That is, there’s a company that is the only company out there in the market that is able to tap into the full potential of tomorrow’s technology right now.
Whether we’re talking microchips, energy, cars, computers, whatever…
If it’s a technology of tomorrow and the company has it today, that’s a fascinating story.
The use of tomorrow-today in persuasion goes back ages…
Thomas Edison was highly-skilled in the use of tomorrow-today stories in his persuasion.
After all, you don’t think he built his brand as “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by being a great inventor, do you? Tesla was a better inventor. But Edison knew how to tell a story.
I once heard that Edison was working on getting funding for some random research into electricity. But rather than talking about sending power through wires, or whatever it was he was hoping to do, he talked about robots — automatons.
Just imagine what you could do by harnessing the power of electricity. Why, perhaps you could have an electricity-powered automaton that could clean your floors for you. Or deliver a note down the street. Or…
Mine is a lame attempt at channeling the fervor with which he would’ve painted these pictures of a future world full of machines that do your work for you.
That’s tomorrow’s technology. But to make it happen — for the investors to be a part of that grand vision for the future — Edison would need an investment in a much more mundane piece of research today.
We humans have an endless fascination with the future…
Today’s life is known. Tomorrow is a great mystery. And tomorrow reaps all the fruits of the seeds of imagination we plant today.
And so we imagine anything to be possible in the not-too-distant future.
Because human beings are miraculous creators, after all.
But there’s something else. Another element. A hint of competition.
We don’t want to be left behind. We don’t want to be the last to arrive at the party. We don’t want to be the ones who are out of the loop.
We’d much rather be the ones who know about something new before all our friends than after.
And so we’re hungry not just for the distant future, but for the future that’s arriving over the horizon in this moment.
We want the new. The novel. The exciting.
Our brains light up with a rush of neurochemicals when we get a big does of novelty. And to believe it’s something that’s available or happening right now makes it all the more satisfying.
Can you capture this spirit in your marketing?
You don’t have to sell investment advice to think in terms of tomorrow-today.
In every market there are trends that you can stay abreast of, for the benefit of your prospects, customers, and clients.
The diet industry is rife with one fad diet after another (all equally hogwash) being sold on the basis of it being the newest thing.
It’s why the mobile phone industry has a nonstop parade of new model launches, with new features we never knew we needed.
I have a friend in the fish market that has written customer newsletters about the newest trends in cuisine.
All you have to do is keep an eye on where things are going, not just where they are. And then share what you find with your people.
Oh yeah, and make it even more powerful by wrapping it up in solid story selling principles, and you’ll be unstoppable.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
