Have I ever told you how the whole “More Cheese Less Whiskers” idea started? I used to read a lot of articles about psychology and human interaction dynamics. One of the things that I found very interesting was the reason why mice are used as test subjects in most scientific experiments.

And it’s because…

Their brains are very similar to our brains. They’re much smaller, of course, but their automatic reactions to things are very similar to ours. I was pondering about that for a bit, and I remembered how people are always afraid of trying new things, so I visualized this image of prospects as mice being afraid of you.

And then another idea struck me.

All mice come preprogrammed with two things: To get cheese and to avoid cats. They go about their whole lives just looking for cheese and being hyper-vigilant to avoid cats. Because for a mouse, cheese is a pleasure, and a cat is pain. And guess what? Humans have the exact same drives. We’re all motivated by pain and pleasure.

So I began swapping the 4 words more and more. Cheese, pleasure, pain, whiskers and it all made sense. And get this, it made sense even when I applied that to business.

  • Cheese to a restaurant owner? More people coming into the restaurant.
  • Cheese to a dentist? More patients sitting in the chair.
  • Cheese to an author? More readers.

And so on.

On the other hand, spending or taking any amount of money out of the business is whiskers to every single business owner out there. That’s when it all came full circle for me: I started looking at everything I do through the lens of “how to avoid looking like a cat.” And when you think about it…

What marketing really boils down to is the answer to one simple question: How can you get the whiskers out of your sales message and just focus on more cheese? And the more you can present your product or service as pure cheese of what it is that your prospects really want… the better off you are.

Because the truth is, we are all just mice looking for cheese while avoiding cats 😉

Want more tips on supplying people with Cheese? head on to the podcast.