Good morning from Los Angeles.

I am writing this from a table on Larchmont, which is not the Los Angeles anybody puts in a film. No downtown noise, no Hollywood performance. A few blocks of shopfronts where people actually live, small beautiful brands, modern and dreamy at the same time, the kind of design that looks effortless and clearly took somebody a year.

Yesterday was Labor Day, so the country stopped. Everyone was out. The coffee shops were full, the farmers market was busy, and because it had rained over the weekend people stayed in the city instead of driving out of it. So I sat with a coffee and did the thing there is never time for at home, which is stare at buildings.

And it occurred to me that this city has no product other than desire. Nothing here is sold on need. Not the film business, not the fitness, not the food, not the real estate, not the shop across the road with four things in the window and a queue outside it. Every one of them is selling a version of who you would be.

We file that under Californian eccentricity. It is not. It is the same trade being done everywhere else, just louder here, and with better lighting.

Because somebody sold you something before you opened this email.

The person who made your coffee sold you the idea that this one is better than the one at home. Your phone sold you five minutes you had not planned to give it. A colleague sold you a position in a thread before you had finished reading it. Your own head sold you a version of today in which you get through the list.

None of that felt like selling, which is exactly why it worked.

We have decided, collectively, that selling is a department. It is not. Selling is what happens whenever one person wants another person to want something, and that is most of what any of us do all day. The person raising a budget is selling. The person arguing for the hire is selling. The candidate is selling, the board is selling, the friend recommending a restaurant is selling for free and doing it better than most agencies.

And underneath every one of those, doing the actual work, is desire.

Not need. Desire. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is the single most expensive mistake in commercial life.

Need is what people tell you. Desire is what they do when nobody is watching.

Business plans are built on the first, and revenue comes from the second.

In 2011 two computational neuroscientists, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, published a study of what people actually want, as opposed to what they say they want. Their subject was sexual desire, which is not the point. Their method is the point.

Every previous researcher had asked people. Kinsey, the gold standard for half a century, interviewed 18,000 of them. Ogas and Gaddam did not ask anybody anything. They took roughly 400 million anonymous web searches, and about 650,000 individual search histories, and read what people typed when they believed nobody was looking.

Their premise, in one line: people lie to researchers, but nobody lies to a search box.

They also cite an experiment from 1973 in which strangers were put together in a completely dark room. Within minutes they were touching, talking and behaving in ways none of them would have in the light. Anonymity did not change who those people were. It changed what they were willing to show.

What do my customers type when they are alone, and how different is it from what they say in the meeting?

You almost certainly have both records. One is in a deck. The other is in a database nobody has opened this year.

Before your next meeting that actually matters, write one sentence, for yourself, that nobody else will see:

Not what their company wants. What they want. To look right in front of somebody. To stop being blamed for a thing that is not their fault. To get out of a decision they already regret. To be the person who found you.

Write the sentence before you walk in, and then build your first two minutes around it.

If you cannot finish the sentence, you are not ready for the meeting, and that is worth knowing at nine in the morning rather than at ten past.

Reply and tell me how it went. I will run the best ones.

You do not need new research. You need to read what you already have, in the places where nobody was performing.

Three things follow from taking desire seriously, and all three are commercial.

Stated preference and revealed preference are different datasets, and only one of them pays. When somebody says they need a faster process, they may want to stop being blamed for the slow one. Both are true. Only one is the reason they will sign. Sell to the stated need and you compete on features. Speak to the desire and you are the only supplier in the room.

Desire is far less varied than anybody expects. This is the finding from that study that surprised its own authors: about twenty interests accounted for eighty per cent of everything people searched for. Not infinite variety. A short list, repeated by nearly everyone. The commercial version is that you probably do not need a hundred segments and forty messages. You need to find the four things people actually want and say them properly for years.

Which is where storytelling comes in, and why it is not decoration. The same study found that the enormous, endlessly successful market in romantic fiction runs on a handful of plots, retold thousands of times, to readers who know exactly what is coming and buy it anyway. Nobody in that industry is embarrassed about repeating themselves. The audience is not bored. The audience came back for it.

Marketing departments are the only people bored of their own story. Your customers have heard it roughly a tenth as often as you think, and the ones who love you want to hear it again.

It is how one person makes another person feel a want they already had, and recognise it, and act on it. That is the whole job.

Six moves, in the order I would use them.

Write the desire underneath the need. Take your last proposal and add a second column. Left: what they asked for. Right: what they want to be true about themselves when it works. “Faster reporting” on the left, “stop being the person who is always late to the board” on the right. Then open the document with the right-hand column. Everyone else in that pitch is answering the left.

Use their words, not yours. In the room, repeat their phrasing back to them exactly, including the slightly awkward way they said it. On the page, lift the language straight out of search queries, reviews and tickets. Both work for the same reason. A person who hears their own sentence come back believes you were listening, because you were.

Say the fear out loud. Naming what somebody is quietly worried about is the fastest trust move available in business, because almost nobody does it. It is also unfakeable. You cannot name a fear you have not understood.

Repeat yourself for far longer than feels comfortable. Pick the four things that are actually true about you and say them for a year. Change the examples, keep the argument. You will be sick of it roughly eleven months before your market has properly heard it.

Hand people the sentence you want repeated. Nobody passes on your positioning statement. They pass on one line they can say at dinner without sounding like an advert. If you do not write that line, they will invent one, and it will be less flattering.

Make the buyer the hero, not the product. In B2B nobody is buying software. Somebody is buying the meeting in which they look like they called it correctly. Build the story so they are the one who wins, and you become the thing that helped rather than the thing that starred. This is also the only reliable way to survive being the third supplier presented that day.

For years I believed reasoning wins. Our work was built on it. The numbers, the long-term case, the argument that still held up when somebody took it apart. I thought that if the logic was sound the decision would follow it.

It is not that those arguments were wrong. They were right, and they lost anyway.

Human nature gets there first. People decide as people and then explain the decision as executives. So before any meeting that matters I now ask a different question. What makes the person across the table tick, what moves them, what is in this for them.

And when a conversation opens with the greater good of the company, that is the moment to ask it hardest.

Send me yours as well. The time the brief said one thing and the buyer wanted another. Reply to this email, tell me if you want to be anonymous, and I will run the best ones next week.

There is nothing to buy in this email. Send it to the person on your team who writes the briefs.

If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here. One email, Tuesday mornings.

Brave New Media is a boutique B2B media and marketing agency. Small team, we work globally.

We have only just started talking about ourselves in public, so it is fair if you are surprised to be getting email from a company with almost no footprint. We spent years doing the work and close to no time telling anyone about it. That was a choice, and on reflection it was the wrong one.

It is changing quickly now, and on purpose.

Glad you are here for it.

Until next Tuesday,

Anne, Founder, Brave New Media The Brave New Business Journal · Issue 19