“You start with the pills, next thing you know you got implants with pumps. I think a hard-on should be gotten legitimately or not at all.”
That’s a bit of dialogue from 1999’s Analyze This.
Mafia boss Paul Vitti, played by Robert De Niro, is having problems. Hard-on failures are a part of it.
So he barges into the office of Dr. Ben Sobel, a New York shrink, played by Billy Crystal.
Vitti doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. All he knows is he gets choked up all the time, he cries without reason, he’s uncomfortable hanging out with the guys he’s grown up with. And then there’s the hard-on issue.
“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” Dr. Sobel asks him.
“You mean like seeing your best friend murdered?” Vitti shoots back. “Yeah, I got stress.”
Dr. Sobel shrugs his shoulders and makes his first-level diagnosis: It’s probably the stress that’s causing all of Vitti’s symptoms.
Vitti visibly brightens at this. He smiles and points his finger at Dr. Sobel.
“You… YOU… you’re very good, doc,” he says. “You’re right on the money. I can feel the juices rushing back to my manhood as we speak.”
I rewatched this movie recently. It’s not very good overall, but I watched it specifically for this scene, because it’s a great (if caricatured) illustration of the power of making a new diagnosis.
And of course this goes for marketing too:
Your prospect out there has vague or intractable problems. All he knows is he doesn’t feel right. The symptoms he can point to are not something he understands, or can fix himself.
And then you, as the marketer, kindly sit him down on your couch, and you give him a diagnosis he’s never heard before:
“You’re under stress.”
Or…
“You’re a bright-shiny-object addict.”
Or…
“You have hypothyroidism.”
Once you make your new diagnosis, your prospect sees the fog lifted from before his eyes. For that moment at least, he lights up, and he thinks his problem has been solved, or at least can be solved. He feels the juices flowing back to his manhood… or womanhood.
More importantly, in that moment, he think you, YOU, are very good. And he’s willing to follow your lead, even as you explain how your product or service naturally addresses the underlying cause of his problems.
Of course, in Analyze This, the true underlying cause of Vitti’s problems turned out to be more complex than simple stress.
The same will probably happen in your prospect’s life. But if you do an honest enough job of delivering the diagnosis for the surface-level symptoms… and if your recommendation based on that diagnosis isn’t too self-serving… then your patient, I mean prospect, will still listen to you when you offer to solve the deeper problems in his life.