Scared? Look for the exigence.

Hard times and arguments have everything to do with the price of eggs.

You may have to be over 60 to remember the old idiom, “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” It meant, Stop spouting irrelevant facts and theories.

Want to bet that expression finds new life? The egg memes sure have.

The expense of eggs is an urgency. Never mind what caused it—avian flu, production costs, increased demand, industrial farming, the Woke Mind Virus—the urgency makes people much more susceptible to persuasion. Donald Trump said he would lower prices on “day one,” and it arguably helped him win the election.

In any disagreement, success can lie in your ability to tap into the urgency. A teenager’s parents refuse to give the kid a car. Her spoiled car-owning friends already give her rides, don’t they? Then the evening news has a story about a horrible accident with a car full of teenagers. The sense of urgency drives a parent-financed car.

Urgency puts people into a highly persuadable state. In rhetoric, it fuels the exigence.

According to Lloyd Bitzer, the rhetorician who came up with the term exigence a few decades ago, the kairos of the moment dictates the response. Academics have busily debated this concept ever since. Bitzer argued that a speaker’s actions have to fit the “constraints” of the occasion, by which he meant the people, events, setting, and other factors. You either fit the occasion or you don’t. (See my post on decorum.) The speaker’s job, Bitzer said, is to spot the exigence that determines the kairos, and then make sense of it all.

Here’s a real-life example of successful exigence exploitation. Tamika Scriven, a 32-year-old who worked at a software company, enjoyed the unusual hobby of making her own wigs. When Covid forced workers to meet over Zoom from their homes, millions of Americans suddenly saw an unflattering version of themselves onscreen. Cosmetic surgery boomed. Scriven saw the urgent need for wigs. Early in the lockdown, she founded her own company, Allure Wigs, making custom headpieces out of human hair imported from China. Within half a year, she was making eight to ten wigs a month for up to $5,000 apiece. Video meetings had created an exigence that opened an opportunity. Tamika Scriven filled that gap.

History contains numerous stories of exigence-sensitive opportunists. One of my favorites involved a 15-year old boy named Chester Greenwood. While ice skating on the town pond in Farmington, Maine, in 1873, his ears got bitterly cold. He went home, bent some wire into loops, and asked his grandmother to sew pieces of fur onto them. He later won a patent for his invention, the world’s first earmuffs, and died a millionaire sixty-four years later. The exigence wasn’t Greenwood’s frozen ears but the nation’s growing love of outdoor sports. Leisure time was increasing and doctors were no longer telling patients that cold air was bad for them. More Americans were playing outside. This winter recreation trend fostered an urgent need for warm ears.

I’m also fond of the true tale of Frederic Tudor, the Ice King of Boston. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, he unlocked exigence upon exigence, creating a shipping business that enabled the felicitous invention of the mint julep and the mojito. At the time, ships laden with cargo from the West Indies to New England were returning empty for lack of saleable goods. Tudor saw the opportunity to hire the ships cheaply. That was exigence number one. Exigence number two: the rapidly expanding lumber industry was struggling to get rid of its chief waste product, sawdust. Tudor borrowed money to build an icehouse in Havana, Cuba, then paid workers to cut ice from ponds in midwinter New England. He packed the ice in sawdust and created a new industry, one that he expanded as far as Calcutta.

But nobody beats eighteenth-century entrepreneur Timothy Dexter, a Yankee who literally sold coal to Newcastle. The English coal region had been suffering a miner’s strike, and residents were freezing. After supplying energy to that traditional center of energy, Dexter went on to sell bed-warming pans to the West Indies—as molasses ladles. An oversupply of the pans had made them so cheap that manufacturers were threatened with bankruptcy. Dexter even made a profit exporting wool mittens to the Caribbean. Asian merchants in the West Indies were desperate for goods to ship to Siberia. As if that weren’t enough profit, Dexter added stray kittens to the Caribbean-bound ships. The islands were suffering from a rat infestation.

So what’s all that got to do with the price of eggs? I mean, how do you relieve the exigence of the challenges various people face? This gets us to the heart of rhetoric and the soul of marketing (assuming that marketing has a soul).

Let’s suppose you just invented a brilliant new self-cleaning litter box for cats. Like any would-be marketer, you find your market through a Venn diagram, that set of overlapping circles that depict an audience’s needs or characteristics. The portion in the middle is the “white space” or opportunity. You draw one circle for cat owners and another for Roomba owners, early adopter sorts who sleep dreaming of electric cats. The space in the overlap is your market.

A common marketing mistake is to stop with the diagram. You found the market, good for you. But what’s its exigence? What drives a cat-owning Roomba lover’s urgent need? This isn’t about the cat’s exigence. Its own urgent needs are perfectly satisfied with the old-school litter box. (Cats are not early adopters.) What would make the owner want to hit the Buy Now button? That’s the exigence.

Advertisers often try to create an artificial urgency through time-limited offers and other such tricks; but the best kind of exigence is one associated with the market’s own need. Demand for toilet paper was higher during the Covid pandemic than during a current sale on the stuff.

So your amazing cat-friendly invention does not automatically create a kairotic moment. While the self-cleaning litter box does solve a problem—litter boxes are disgusting, and the need to clean them can ruin marriages—a true opportunity arises from a kairotic moment, and a moment is kairotic when some urgency juices it. What’s the urgent need? What would make buyers feel desperate?

Maybe your Venn diagram needs another circle: owners of cats and Roombas who have recently downsized. A litter box that’s been transported from a house to a tiny apartment seems to expand in size and practically spray litter. Or maybe you find young tech-loving cat owners with high disposable incomes who have just had their first child. Nothing creates cascading urgencies like giving birth.

Your audience’s exigence always outweighs your own. Yes, you have an urgent need to sell Autokitty litter boxes before your funding dries up. But the opportunity lies in those young couples tripping over Roomba-riding cats during three a.m. baby feedings.

Each of the examples I’ve given surmounted a counterintuitive, even paradoxical occasion by spotting the exigence of a particular time and place. If you’re in search of an opportunity—a new product or service, or a way to make the world a little better—be like the Ice King. Look for the exigence.

In a time like this you’ll find exigence aplenty.

(Got an interesting response? Don’t limit it to me. Be all social and leave a comment.)