5
DON’T CHANGE DESIRES, FULFILL THEM
A senior group of clergy, interested in modern persuasion techniques, once visited our advertising agency. One clergyman asked, “How do you change what people want?” I thought for a minute and replied, “We don’t try to change what people want. It is too difficult and too expensive. Rather than changing what people want, we use what people want to sell products.”
I knew I had not put that well when the clergyman looked at me and said, “Son, you are on a long and slippery slope.”
Years later I came across a quote that said what I was trying to say much more clearly. The quote comes from Dale Carnegie:1
“The only way on earth to influence people is to talk about what they want, and show them how to get it.”
Dale Carnegie intuitively understood How to Win Friends and Influence People. But science has only recently figured out how and why it works that way.
We naturally think persuasion means changing what people want. But the lizard isn’t interested in changing what it wants. Successful persuasion doesn’t try. Successful persuasion shows the lizard a more promising way to get what it already wants.
The lizard inside pursues what it desires. Persuasion encourages a particular pathway to that desire.
We work to associate the fulfillment of a desire, a reward, with the pathway or action we suggest. The reward must be something the target already wants. So we examine how the desires of the people we wish to persuade overlap with the possible outcomes of the action we suggest.
In choosing a car, males look for more excitement and females, especially moms, look for more safety. As a result, males are a little less interested in purchasing a Volvo than females. The way to sell more Volvos to males is not to change what males want. It is not to convince males that they want safety instead of excitement. The way to sell more Volvos to males is to show them that driving a Volvo is exciting. For males, Volvo can be a different and better pathway to excitement because it is the one fun-to-drive car that their spouse will be happy with. The way to sell more Volvos to males is to talk about what males want and to show them they can get it by buying a Volvo.
Adolescents want independence, freedom from adult restraint. Staying in school is the opposite. No wonder adolescents want to drop out of school. The way to keep adolescents in school is not to change what adolescents want. The way to keep adolescents in school is to show them a better pathway to what they want. That better pathway is graduation, the easiest way to get the independence and freedom they seek. Anything short of graduation is likely to keep them under the thumb of adults for a long time.
Speaking of adolescents, we had a couple of adolescent boys in a large bedroom heated by electric baseboard heat and cooled by a window air conditioner. The electric meter spun a lot faster than we liked because we had trouble getting the boys to live with a little lower temperature in the winter and a little higher temperature in the summer. We talked to them about the environmental effects of energy and the cost of energy, but our attempt to change their desires seemed to go in one ear and out the other.
We decided instead to show them how to get something they wanted by doing what we wanted. The bill from the electric company gave us both kilowatt-hours used per month and the cost of a kilowatt-hour. I found I could easily estimate what our electric bill would be if our usage was the same as the previous year’s. We told the boys that they could have the money we saved by reducing our electricity use. Because they never had much of an allowance, this was a big deal. They could get what they wanted, money, by doing what we wanted, reducing electricity use. Rather than changing their desire to blast the heat in the winter and the cool air in the summer, we showed them how to fulfill their desire for money by reducing electricity consumption. It radically changed their behavior. From then on, the room was chilly in the winter and warm in the summer and the boys were thrilled.
Dr. Dena Gromet is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). She studies how the features of a situation and the decision-makers’ values affect their choices. Gromet and her colleagues recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that illustrated the importance of fulfilling desires, not trying to change desires.2
In Gromet’s study, consumers were offered a choice between more expensive, more efficient compact florescent light bulbs (CFL) and less expensive, less efficient conventional light bulbs. Conservatives and liberals were equally likely to choose the more expensive, more efficient CFLs when the CFLs’ packaging had no environmental message.
The addition of a label saying “Protect the environment” made conservatives less likely to choose the same CFLs. The “Protect the environment” label had no effect on the choices of liberals.
The results puzzled the pundits. How could the addition of an environmental message make the CFLs less attractive to conservatives? How could the addition of an environmental message make the CFLs no more attractive to liberals?
Though puzzling, these results fit what N.H. Andersen found out about how people make judgments. Norman H. Andersen was a social psychologist and Distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He spent his time studying how people combine information to form positive or negative judgments. He is given credit for developing Information Integration Theory. Professor Andersen found that when people combine information to form a judgment, they don’t add, they average.
Efficiency seems a good reward for all consumers; say an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10. So all consumers are equally likely to choose CFLs when efficiency is the only reward offered.
Protecting the environment, however, is not a believable reward for conservatives, say a 2 on a scale from 1 to 10. People don’t add. They average. The average of 8 and 2 is 5. When the environmental message was added, conservatives should be less likely to choose CFLs and they were. The combined message is less appealing than the efficiency message alone. I suspect that when the environment was given as an additional reason to purchase CFLs, consumers who normally put little faith in an environmental reward also put less faith in the efficiency reward.
Protecting the environment is a believable reward for liberals; say an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10. But people don’t add. They average. The average of 8 and 8 is 8. Liberals should be no more likely to choose CFLs when the environmental message was added. That’s exactly what happened.
Everybody is motivated by a promise of efficiency. Some people believe and are motivated by a promise of saving the environment. We could attempt to change what conservatives want, hoping to make them choose CFLs to save the environment. But it’s probably a waste of time. If we want everyone to use CFLs, efficiency is the way to go.
“The only way on earth to influence people is to talk about what they want, and show them how to get it.”
The Gromet, et al. experiment makes a critical point about the importance of fulfilling desires rather than changing desires. That experiment suggests that talking about what people don’t want makes whatever you say about what they do want less persuasive.
Whether talking to a friend, a committee, a parent association, or a segment of society, talk about what they want, only about what they want, and show them how to get it.
If you are trying to persuade two targets that have different desires, try to talk to them separately. If you must talk to both groups at once, forget what is most motivating to each individual group and go with the one reward that is most motivating to the total. Trying to talk about two different rewards in the same message will inevitably make you less persuasive.
Someone promoting recycling might be tempted to offer two rewards. If liberals want to save the environment and conservatives want to lower the cost of government, why not offer both rewards and appeal to everyone? Offering both rewards may seem reasonable, but it’s a mistake. Adding a second reward will not make your message more motivating. It will make your message less motivating. People don’t add; they average. The average of your most powerful reward and any other reward is less than your most powerful reward alone. With recycling, as with CFLs, efficiency will probably be more motivating to the total than saving the environment.
We know we have to talk about something people already want, but people want a lot of things. How do we choose a specific reward out of everything people want?
Think Big
The most common mistake made in choosing which reward to offer is thinking too small. We naturally look for some reward directly following from the act we recommend—a 10-cent savings, more nutrition, a more comfortable bed. But there’s no need to limit ourselves in that way. We should think big. We should ask what the lizard wants out of life that might conceivably be related to the act we suggest.
With apologies to Daniel Burnham, a 19th-century architect, for borrowing his idea: Promise no little rewards. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.
What do people want out of life that the action you suggest might bring about? Do you want to save 10 cents or be seen as a smarter person? Do you want to get the superior nutrition of a bag of apples over a bag of chips or do you want healthy kids? Do you want cleaner floors or the admiration of friends?
Some desires are common to the human condition. Promise something that most people want. Rewards that are universally desired are more powerful. If a reward appeals to only a narrow segment of the population, it is often a weaker reward even for that narrow segment.
Older people often find modern cell phone technology confusing. In order to appeal to that older segment, you could promise a reward of simplicity and ease of use. But even in selling cell phones to older people, you would probably be better off promising older people that your simple and easy-to-use cell phone gives them that ability to reach out and influence the world that everyone wants from a cell phone. That sense of control is the reward they want. The fact that your particular model of phone is simple and easy to use is why they have a better chance of getting that sense of control from your phone. Simple and easy to use should not be the reward, but should be what people in advertising call a “support point.” A support point is something that makes your reward believable. A support point is why your pathway to that fundamental desire is the way to go.
Choose as the reward for doing what you would like something that just about everybody wants. Who doesn’t want to be a hero to their kids? Who doesn’t want to be appealing to the opposite sex? Who doesn’t want to be seen by others as sophisticated, as smart, as healthy, as a good parent? These desires apply to large portions of society, and the opportunity to fulfill these desires is broadly motivating.
Strong motives tend to be universal. Don’t be distracted by trivial differences across different groups in your target. The rewards desired by different groups are not identical, but the similarities in motivation across groups are greater than the differences.
As we said, marketers are fond of segmentation studies. Segmentation studies divide the population into subgroups that each has a slightly different set of desires motivating their brand choice. Unfortunately, segmentation studies magnify minor differences in desire and mask major commonalities of desire. As a result, marketers are often left studying the trees and missing the forest.
We can look in a variety of places to be reminded of what most people want.
Universal Desires
Abraham Maslow is one of the giants of early psychology. He spent his career at Brooklyn College and then at Brandeis University researching and thinking about mental health and human potential. Back in 1943, Maslow drew upon the psychological tradition of the founders of the field and laid out a classification of human needs that is still in use today.3
Maslow said that the first level of need is physiological—water, food, sleep, warmth, exercise, and so on. Once these physiological needs are gratified to some degree, another level of needs arises: safety needs. Safety needs include peace, a smoothly running society, and economic security. Once safety needs are gratified, love and belongingness needs arise. These include friends, a sweetheart, children, and acceptance in a group. Once love and belongingness needs are gratified, esteem needs arise. Esteem needs include recognition, prestige, and status. When all these other needs are gratified, self-actualization needs arise. Self-actualization entails the desire for challenge, for learning, for creativity, and for innovation.
Maslow himself didn’t diagram his classification of human needs, but almost everyone else diagrams Maslow’s classification as a pyramid.
Another approach to identifying what most people want is to look across all human societies and see what desires seem to be universal. Donald E. Brown, an anthropologist, asks in his book, Human Universals, “What do all people, all societies, all cultures, and all languages have in common?”4 Brown identifies behaviors that are universal. By examining universal behaviors, we can infer universal desires. Brown’s list of human universals is long and includes, for example, the following:
• Efforts to increase the attractiveness of selves and possessions through decoration.
• Attempts to predict the future.
• Attempts to plan for the future.
• Urge to reciprocate.
• Feelings of empathy.
• Feelings of envy.
• Attempts to communicate more than mere words can communicate.
• Attempts to misinform.
• Efforts to interpret external behavior to grasp internal intention.
From that very incomplete list of universal behaviors, we may infer the following, very incomplete list of universal desires:
• To be seen as superior to others.
• To be seen as attractive and as having attractive possessions.
• To anticipate the future.
• To prepare for the future.
• To repay.
• To feel what others feel.
• To possess what others possess.
• To say more than words alone can convey.
• To occasionally mislead others.
• To understand why someone does what they do.
Examining Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Brown’s list of human universals are two useful ways to stimulate our thinking as we look for a powerful reward to offer in persuasion.
Whether the target is few or many, the principle is the same. Think of two circles. One circle represents the desires of the people you are trying to persuade. It contains an almost unlimited number of desires: health, wealth, happy children, feeling sexy, refreshment, popularity, and on and on. A second circle represents all the positive outcomes that might possibly result from taking the action you suggest. Again, this circle contains an almost unlimited number of possible outcomes—feeling like a good parent, better chance at success, cleaner environment, and so on. Then look at the overlap of desires and outcomes; that is, examine the desires that are also possible outcomes of the action you suggest. The reward you should associate with the action lies within that overlap.
The Venn diagram of target desires and action outcomes describes a conceptual, not a mathematical, approach to deciding which reward to offer.
Show people that your recommended option is the best path to what they already desire.
If you want to persuade your teenage son to stay in school, the reward you offer should be both an outcome of staying in school and something he desires. One of his desires may be to spend more time playing video games, but that desire is not in the overlap of target desires and action outcomes. More time to play video games is not an outcome of staying in school. If he stays in school, he can attend the prom. Although that may be an outcome of staying in school, it may not be something your son wants. On the other hand, freedom from adult restraint is both an outcome of staying in school (because staying in school makes it possible to get a good job and get out from under the thumb of parents) and is something your son desires. Freedom from adult restraint is in the intersection of action outcome and target desire. To persuade your teenage son to stay in school, you can talk about what your son wants (freedom from adult restraint) and show him how to get it (staying in school).
Imagine your neighbor has gotten a new dog because he is concerned about crime. Unfortunately, the new dog barks continuously all night. Your neighbor seems unconcerned with the barking because he is a deep sleeper or because he sleeps on the other side of the house. For you, it’s a different story. The dog seems to be barking right outside your bedroom window. Let’s say your neighbor is not empathetic and doesn’t care that his dog is making it hard for you to sleep. You want your neighbor to control his dog’s barking. What reward might you associate with that behavior? Look for a reward that is in the intersection of what your neighbor wants and the outcomes of reining in his dog’s barking. You might mention how much safer your neighbor would feel if the dog only barked when someone was close to the house, implying that the dog’s continuous barking is a lot like the boy who cried wolf. Continuous barking doesn’t really increase your neighbor’s safety. Increased safety is both something the neighbor wants and an outcome of teaching the dog to bark only when someone is close to the house. You can talk about something your neighbor wants and show him how to get it by doing something you would like him to do.
Intel Inside
Intel illustrates the search for a reward that lies in the overlap of desire and outcome. Intel is a worldwide company that makes computing chips and computing software that can be found in digital products—computers, smartphones, smart TVs, and so on. For many digital products, Intel essentially provides the engine. Intel’s target is people who intend to buy digital products. Their goal is to have buyers prefer a digital product with “Intel Inside.”
We began by identifying “Digital Dreamers” in several countries around the world with a study that interviewed about 600 people in each county. Digital Dreamers is the label we gave to the roughly 30 percent of the population of each country that intend to buy about three quarters of all digital products. For example, in China, 30 percent of the population intends to purchase three or more digital products accounting for 75 percent of all intended purchases. In the UK, 28 percent of the population intends to purchase four or more digital products accounting for 69 percent of all intended purchases.
We then looked at the desires that seemed to explain why some people become Digital Dreamers.
Some rewards had already been suggested for Intel, such as “human connection” and “peace of mind.” But Digital Dreamers feel no more need for human connection and no more need for peace of mind than others in their country. A need for connection or for peace of mind likely did not lead them to become Digital Dreamers.
However, Digital Dreamers do differ from others in consistent ways. Across countries, Digital Dreamers are more likely than others to like the “feeling of speed” and to like sports cars. They are less content than others to stay in the same town for the rest of their lives. They are more optimistic. And they are more likely than others to want to feel like a leader. These differences between Digital Dreamers and others hold among men as well as among women, among younger as well as older consumers, among people who have a managerial or executive job as well as people who don’t. Digital Dreamers want something different out of life and that something isn’t explained by their gender, age, or job.
We summarized this by saying that people who intend to buy more digital products seek a feeling of exhilaration in their life. Intel, as the engine in digital products, can promise a sense of “exhilaration.” That’s how a Digital Dreamer feels when using, for example, a hot, new smart phone. If Intel can associate a feeling of exhilaration with the Intel brand, Intel can create demand for products bearing its logo.
The feeling of exhilaration lies in the overlap of the desires of the target and the possible outcomes of purchasing a product with Intel Inside.
If you are selling an electronic device, promise how it will feel to use that device rather than the superior ability to perform some task.
Spend some time thinking about all the desirable outcomes that can occur when someone takes your recommended option. The number of possible rewards will surprise you. Coming up with a set of rewards that might follow from someone acting as you’d like is an exercise in broad thinking and creativity. It sometimes helps to use a grid to stimulate thinking about the rewards that might result from taking your suggested action. A training manual used in our agency contained a grid like the one that follows. It is just one potential device to stimulate thinking and certainly doesn’t result in an exhaustive list of possible rewards. The grid asks you to think about functional, sensory, emotional, and expressive rewards that occur when people are about to take the recommended action, while people are taking the recommended action, or after people take the recommended action.
Table 4.1
Imagine that on behalf of the National Dairy Board we want to encourage people to consume more cheese. Let’s say the action we suggest is adding cheese to a dish during meal preparation. What are the positive rewards that might result from this act? Here are some outcomes that might match what people desire.
In persuasion, we build the “availability” of both the action we encourage and the reward we promise and we enhance the “association” between them. We want both the action and the reward to spring to mind quickly and we want them to be so closely linked that one cannot think of the action without also thinking of the reward. The reward is what people desire. The action is a pathway to that desire. Associating the action with the right reward motivates choice.
The beer wars drove a search for rewards that motivate choice.
When engaged in the beer wars, we looked at physical rewards like real beer taste, quenching thirst, smoothness, and many others. We also looked at emotional or image rewards like feeling or being seen as rugged, intelligent, tough, a leader, and on and on.
When we examined what actually motivated brand choice, we found that all beer drinkers were looking for a brand that fulfilled the same basic set of desires. This is typical. Most users of a category of products are motivated by a similar set of desires. That’s why they are category users. Though the desires they seek to fulfill are the same, people chose different brands because they disagree which brands are best able to fulfill those desires.
We found the rewards that motivated young men’s beer brand choice were quite similar to the rewards that motivated older men’s beer brand choice. Both groups were seeking to fulfill the same basic set of desires.
Similarities in motivation across groups are greater than differences.
Physical rewards of beer brand choice, like taste and refreshment, naturally follow from consumption. Emotional or social rewards of beer brand choice, like feeling or being seen as rugged, fun, or sophisticated, are based on perceptions of the people who drink those brands. By choosing a particular brand, you become one of those people.
We found that social perceptions of a brand and its users could predict brand choice twice as accurately as perceptions of the physical qualities of a brand of beer. We concluded that emotional and social rewards are much more motivating of brand choice than physical rewards. Focusing exclusively on physical rewards of beer drinking would have been thinking small and would have ignored the more important basis of brand choice.
Unless the target is physically deprived—hungry, thirsty, sleepy, and so on—emotional rewards are often more motivating than physical rewards.
Although both younger men and older men found emotional, social rewards more motivating than physical rewards, the difference was even greater for younger men. We found this same pattern when examining other categories such as cell phones, auto repair, computers, and phone service providers.
A couple of more factors should be considered when choosing which reward to associate with an action out of all the rewards that could be associated:
1. How soon would the reward occur?
2. How sure can we be of the reward?
The lizard seeks immediate and certain rewards.
Immediate
If offered a choice between $100 and $110, everyone chooses $110. When time is included, things change. If offered a choice between $100 now and $110 in a month, many people would choose the $100 now. Economists refer to the power of the immediate over the delayed as “present-biased preference.”5 When choosing, people weigh immediate outcomes more heavily than distant outcomes, a lot more heavily.6
Delay diminishes any reward. Promise something people can have now or can feel now.
If trying to talk someone into using CFLs (compact florescent light bulbs) instead of incandescent light bulbs, don’t bother talking about annual savings. Explain that CFLs can start saving the user three quarters of the cost of the electricity immediately. So if an incandescent bulb cost 40 cents to run for a day, an equivalent CFL would cost only about 10 cents a day to run.
Unfortunately, actions that are better for us often have delayed benefits, but immediate costs. Choosing an apple over a piece of chocolate cake, saving today for retirement, stopping smoking to lessen the risk of cancer all have delayed benefits, but immediate costs.
Certain
Which would you choose?
Option 1: a sure $30
or
Option 2: an 80-percent chance of $45 and
a 20-percent chance of nothing
Almost four out of five people choose the sure $30.7 However, the rules of rationality and math say everyone should choose Option 2 because the “expected value” of Option 2 is $36. The “expected value” of Option 2 is the average result of Option 2 if you repeated it 1,000 times.8
A certain reward is far more motivating than an uncertain reward even if the uncertain reward has a very high probability.9
The motivating power of a certain reward relative to a highly likely but uncertain reward is far greater than probability says it should be. Certainty has greater psychological value than mathematical value.
Immediacy and certainty are no doubt related in people’s minds. Even if we are told that the delayed reward is just as certain as the immediate reward, I suspect people don’t completely believe it. $100 today seems certain. $110 in a week is not just delayed, there’s a possibility that something will intervene and the $110 won’t happen.
Smoking and cancer illustrate simultaneous delay and uncertainty. Whereas the nicotine hit is both immediate and certain, avoiding cancer is both delayed and uncertain.
Just as actions that are good for us tend to have delayed benefits and immediate costs, they also tend to have uncertain benefits and certain costs. Actions that are enticing but bad for us typically have the opposite. No wonder it is so hard to choose the “good for us” path.
The Ad Council in 2009 created a series of ads designed to get us to save money by changing our behavior in specific ways. The Ad Council wanted us to (1) make coffee at home instead of buying expensive coffee shop coffee, (2) brown bag it to work rather than buying our lunch, (3) cook dinner for ourselves rather than ordering take-out food, and (4) drink tap water rather than buying bottled water. The reward offered in each case was far in the future. The reward offered was the amount of money you would save during one year or even 10 years. The ads were doomed because the lizard doesn’t want to wait a year or 10 years for a reward. If the lizard is going to initiate some action now, it wants to be assured of a reward now.
The lizard, our automatic, nonconscious mental system, has a strong preference for immediate and certain rewards. Fortunately, it is often possible to translate delayed and uncertain rewards into immediate and certain rewards by focusing on feelings. We’ll talk about how this happens in Chapter 7.
Unique or Motivating: an Easy Choice
Marketers often waste a lot of time looking for a reward that no one else is promising. This isn’t necessary.
The reward we promise for taking the action we recommend doesn’t have to be unique.
To be successful, we just need to associate that reward more closely with the recommended action than with any alternative action.
Miller High Life vs. Budweiser
Associational battles for desirable rewards are common in marketing. Miller High Life began the marvelous “Miller Time” campaign in the 1970s. Each commercial showed rugged men getting off of work and heading for the bar. The commercials sang, “When it’s time to relax, one beer stands clear, Miller beer.” Miller High Life happened to be one of the few beers in a clear bottle. The “Miller Time” phrase is still understood today. The action recommended was asking for a Miller High Life. The reward was feeling the manly satisfaction of a job well done. It didn’t matter if you had a white-collar job, or if you had just finished mowing the lawn, or hadn’t really done anything lately. Surely you did something worthwhile in the past and could feel the satisfaction of a job well done. The campaign gave the brand a growth spurt for years.
Budweiser felt threatened. But rather than attempt to build an association between Budweiser and a different reward, Budweiser decided to build an even stronger association with the same reward. Budweiser decided to take the Miller High Life reward and claim it for its own. Budweiser responded with a salute to the workingman, “For all you do, this Bud’s for you.” Heavy spending behind consistent, highly visible, well executed commercials succeeded in building even stronger association between Budweiser and the manly satisfaction of a job well done. Miller High Life abandoned the “Miller Time” campaign and fell into decline.10
Energizer vs. Duracell
The household battery category has for many years been a contest between Duracell and Energizer. Early on, Duracell seized “long lasting” as their reward and hammered this association home. We won the assignment to do advertising for Energizer and immediately set out to find some other reward we could associate with Energizer. Because Duracell had built such a close association between the Duracell brand and the reward of long lasting, we felt we needed to look elsewhere.
We spent a long time looking. One promising idea was sound quality—with Energizer your music will sound better. That idea was compelling. People would buy Energizer rather than Duracell if Energizer made their music sound better. Unfortunately, we couldn’t say it because it wasn’t true. No matter how hard we tried, we could not relate power source to sound quality.
Finally, we gave up looking for an alternative. Long lasting is the one thing that is the basis of battery choice.
We could say that current Energizer batteries last a lot longer than earlier versions of Energizer batteries. Of course, Duracell could say the same: that current Duracell batteries last a lot longer than earlier versions of Duracell batteries. But neither Energizer nor Duracell could say they last longer than the other brand. On long lasting, the two brands were equal.
Though Energizer was equal to Duracell on long lasting in reality, Duracell was associated in consumer minds with long lasting and we, Energizer, were not. Duracell batteries were selling better than Energizer batteries.
We had no alternative but to tackle Duracell head-on and try to build an even stronger association with long lasting. We came up with the irrepressible Energizer Bunny and even made the first Energizer Bunny ad, but we lost the account anyway. For us, the Energizer Bunny was one idea among many for building the association between Energizer and long lasting. We didn’t see the potential power of the Bunny.
During the meeting with the Energizer marketing director, we showed our ideas for enhancing the association of Energizer with long lasting. Most of the ideas did not involve the Bunny. The marketing director asked if we had any more ideas for how to use the Bunny. We did not. We knew we were in trouble. He had obviously seen something from another agency that he liked.
That other agency, TBWA, saw more clearly the magic in the Energizer Bunny. They suggested making the Energizer Bunny the centerpiece of every ad. They created pretend ads for other products that the Energizer Bunny, beating his drum and clashing his cymbal, would interrupt and march through because the Energizer Bunny just keeps going and going. TBWA transformed the Energizer Bunny into a universal symbol for never tiring and successfully associated Energizer batteries with long lasting.
Regardless of the ups and downs in the agency business, sometimes the search for a different reward is a waste of time. Occasionally, only one reward matters.
The reward we promise doesn’t have to have been never promised before, or not promised by alternative actions. We just need to associate that reward more closely with our recommended action than it is associated with any alternative action. If the reward we associate with the action we recommend is both motivating and unique, that’s great. But if we have to choose, we are much better off with a motivating reward than a unique reward. Remember: Many unique rewards are not promised by others because they are not motivating.
Persuasion is about fulfilling desires, not changing desires. To be successful in persuasion, we have to talk about what the target wants. When we stop trying to change what people want and instead try to show people how to get what they want, our message becomes dramatically different. Our persuasive attempts become less strident, preachy, and moralistic, and more focused on the desires of the target. Only then will the target listen.