CMOs: 8 sales topics that last forever

If you want to discover once and for all, what’s on people’s minds then you’ll want to read this article. Because this article will not only reveal the eight topics that are most important to people, year in and year out, but explain why they are.

What one publishing house found out

If you’ve ever read a woman’s magazine, you would notice that there are topics that appear regularly like, how to lose 10 Ibs in 10 days or how to make a house beautiful. Women never get bored of hearing about these things, irrespective of what the breaking news is that day and one publishing house understood this fact all too well.

Over 30 years ago, Reader’s Digest conducted a savvy marketing strategy. They asked their readers to chose which titles they would like to read, from a list of carefully chosen titles, every month.

From the replies a trend started to unfold; so over a 10 year period, a survey was conducted to see what topics the public most liked to read about, regardless of what was going on in the papers at the time. Here are the top three topics as revealed through Reader’s Digest’s headlines:

Health Care: Here are some header examples:

How to prevent – relieve – an aching back
Flu – how to protect yourself
How to build a better body
How to feel fit at any age

It’s clear that people were concerned about their health then and are still concerned about it now. If you sell a product that relieves an aching back, protects you from flu, builds better abs, or can make people feel fit at any age, then your product will appeal to a huge audience.

Money: Here are some headers:

How to save money buying a car
How to keep your debts under control
Six ways to avoid tax troubles
Ten ways to beat the high cost of living

In our present credit crunch climate and money woes, anyone who makes statements like these in their headlines today, is going to have a lot of interested readers on their hands.

Self-Improvement: Here are some of the headers:

How to cope with criticism
What concentration can do for you
Seven steps to greater personal freedom
How to make habits work for you

The other five topics are:

Marriage, getting ahead, the pursuit of happiness, child rearing and popularity.

What’s on people’s minds now?

The same issues.

Then as now, people want to improve themselves, save money or stay healthy. These are powerful headlines that sold millions of copies for Reader’s Digest and similar headlines have the same impact today because they touch on topics that people really care about.

So read headlines. Not the newspaper headlines that are there to shock and titillate but the many magazine headlines and trade journal headlines. Then you will really see what’s on people’s minds at any given time and can hold up your product or service as the answer to their needs, wants, hopes and desires.