This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You donât have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.
Related Quotes
Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, itâs difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but itâs easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.
If weâre trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that weâre fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships. It would seem that thereâs nothing much we can do to affect what people believe. But if weâre skeptical about our ability to affect belief, we merely have to look at naturally sticky ideas, because some of them persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.
The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, weâve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, weâve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.
Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. âThe most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the worldâs best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the worldâs best lawn!).â An old advertising maxim says youâve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people donât buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their childrenâs pictures.
People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because itâs more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person theyâre evaluatingâand the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time youâre selling yourself, donât fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.