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It’s festival season, summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), and holiday season. Your wallet and your cards know it all too well.
So riddle me this: after going to a festival or coming back from a vacation where you splurged, are you more or less likely to check your bank statement?
If you answered “less”, I get you — no one likes bad news, right?
On the other hand, if you get a notification that says “You just got a payment”, you’re going to open that right away, right?
Humans are like this — we love instant gratification and hate bad news. We’ll eat the chocolate and leave the broccoli. Delay getting bad news and rushing to the good news.
Why? Psychology has a few explanations.
The Ostrich Effect: if I don’t know it, it can’t hurt me
The Ostrich Effect is a cognitive bias that refers to the (false) legend that ostriches bury their head in the sand when faced with danger. Similarly, humans “bury their heads” in the sand to avoid bad news, like financial information, negative feedback, or anything that might cause them psychological discomfort. [​source​]
The Ostrich Effect is not limited to financial information. ​A 2014 study​ revealed that, when a co-worker was diagnosed with breast cancer, her colleagues were 8% less likely to take a mammogram.
Consciously or not, we believe that if we ignore it long enough, it will go away, which can have devastating effects on our health, relationships, and finances.
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Your buyers are the same: they know they have a problem but they will delay finding or applying a solution if they consider it uncomfortable.
This is why, even though your product responds to a real need, you have trouble selling it. Yes, they know they need it. No, they won’t buy NOW, because it’s hard to apply.
To add insult to injury,
We’re also wired for instant gratification (GIMME NOW!)
We know chasing instant gratification is bad for us, but we can’t help it. We can, however, make light of it with memes:
You might be familiar with this situation:
Now that we’ve had our fun and our instant gratification, let’s look at the psychology behind it. (The chocolate is above, now comes the broccoli.)
The desire for instant gratification is a primal human urge, so there’s no fighting it. You can try educating your potential clients on the need for long-term investments (in finances, health, marketing) but this will only work if you catch them in an ultra-rational state (which is very rare).
Otherwise, they’ll skip straight to the guru offer that promises them results overnight.
The human brain (your client’s brain too!) is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain — it’s an evolutionary trait, something that ensures the survival of the species, so it’s hard to fight against it.
The reward system is fueled by dopamine, which is released when we anticipate or receive pleasure — this is the limbic system, the first one to develop in humans.
The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is the last to develop. This is the part of your brain that is responsible for rational thought, self-control, and long-term planning.
This is why you might have used the phrase “making a mature decision”. The older we are, the more developed our prefrontal cortex and the better we are at making rational decisions that benefit us in the long run.
This is also why we are “wilder” in our youth. We seek pleasure, long-term costs be damned!
If you want to dig deeper into this, ​Jonathan Haidt’s elephant vs rider metaphor is excellent​.
How do you apply this in your marketing?
Humans are mostly irrational and the best marketers know that. Some of them choose to go the snake oil seller way and use fake FOMO, empty promises ($10k in 10 days by working 10 mins a day), or promise chocolate when what they serve is bitter broccoli.
Side note: ​clickbait still works​ for the same reason — dopamine release thanks to instant gratification.
Can your marketing be effective without over-stimulating the dopamine centers of your clients?
Yes! The first thing you need to understand is that, when faced with a decision, the human brain has a battle to settle. The battle between the emotional brain that craves dopamine (give me that chocolate NOW!) and the logical brain that pushes for delayed gratification and long-term benefits (try some broccoli, will ya?).
Your job, as a marketer, is to find the sweet spot between the two. You need to find the balance that rewards both centers in our brain, the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex.
Easier said than done, especially if you’re selling products that take some time to work and don’t offer much pleasure. Let’s look at a few techniques to do just that.
Agitate the pain (within reason)
PAS (Problem – Agitation – Solution) is the classic copywriting formula for a reason: it works!
Quick example: let’s say you’re selling mattresses and need to write a sales page for them. The PAS formula applied to mattresses looks like this:
- Problem: you have back pain and can’t sleep well.
- Agitation: if you can’t sleep well, you can’t function well during the day. You will underperform at work, be irritable, and constantly exhausted. Also, you’ll be in constant pain and the pain will only get worse with time.
- Solution: buy our doctor-approved mattresses, designed for people with back pain. Experience a pain-free life, restful sleep, and full-throttle productivity throughout the day.
You agitate the pain precisely because people tend to procrastinate buying a new, better mattress. If the pain is not crippling (yet!), they prefer not to spend a large sum on a good mattress. Plus, there’s the whole hassle of changing your mattress — not fun.
Your buyers bury their heads in the sand, hoping that, if they ignore the problem long enough, it will go away on its own. Worse yet, there’s no instant gratification — it takes time for the new mattress to be delivered and for the pain to subside.
It’s your job to remind them that:
- The pain does not subside on its own
- The longer they wait, the worse it will be
- The longer they wait, the more they will have to pay to fix their back
- They lose money and jeopardize their health and their relationships if they wait
A bit of nuance here: the agitation section of PAS can be exploited very easily. Following up on the example above, you could tell people that they stand to lose their job (because they can’t perform well enough), their relationship (their partner will dump them because they’re always grumpy), and they might even be immobile if they don’t tend to their back issues sooner rather than later.
Please don’t do that! Extreme pain agitation reeks of desperation and of bad product that needs sleazy marketing to sell.
You might get a few clients this way but you won’t get loyal clients. They will act on emotion (limbic system) but their rational systems (prefrontal cortex) will kick in soon enough.
This is especially important if you’re in B2B, where buying decisions are slightly more rational than those in B2C.
Use gamification — deliver instant gratification AND the long-term gains your clients need
This is chocolate-covered broccoli at its finest and no one does it better than Duoling, the language learning app. They know that learning a new language is hard and that people are short on time.
They remind you it doesn’t take that long and they also try to re-activate your prefrontal cortex in a single notification:
They also turn it into a game: you have a progress bar, experience points, an overarching goal, you can play with friends and family, and more. ​You can read the full study here​.
Duolingo uses more psychological levers than any other product I know of, including ​psychological ownership​.
These levers do two very important things:
- Make it easy to take action NOW, instead of burying your head in the sand — mitigate The Ostrich Effect
- Make it painful NOT to take action now — you get instant gratification if you take action OR lose your daily streak if you don’t.
Reflect on this: how can you make it easier or more fun for your clients to take action right now? Full gamification may be untenable for some products (especially in B2B), but you can borrow some tactics from it. For instance, you can offer loyalty discounts to your clients to improve retention.
Tell them how you make it easier to apply the solution
If it’s hard they won’t do it. If it’s hard AND it takes a long time to work, they’re even less likely to do it.
I knew all this when I launched ​the Audience Accelerator course​. People don’t want to learn for the sake of learning, they want the outcome. So I made it easier:
- I told them exactly how long the course takes (12 lessons in 7 modules, 80+ minutes)
- Told them they could go at their own pace (very few people want to shed 80 minutes in a single sitting)
- I added “action items” after each lesson, small actions they can take very quickly to get almost instant results — instant gratification AND long-term gains in a single swoop.
- I offered them two options to work directly with me — it’s easier when you have someone in your corner.
Again, this is chocolate-covered broccoli in a nutshell. I don’t promise them hacks (100% chocolate) because I know they don’t work. I’m open about it being a long-term solution to a common problem (small audience, small sales) but I also make it as easy as possible for my clients to take action.
Paint the AFTER picture
Remember those before-after picture fitness coaches use to show the progress of their clients? They work because they activate the pleasure/reward centers in our brains — I want to be ripped too! At the same time, they (most of them) are honest and tell readers that the transformation in the picture took 6+ months or so.
Essentially, these pictures get you to act on emotion BUT it’s an action that the rational part of your brain can also accept — in the short and long run.
Reflect on this: what is the equivalent of before-after pictures in your industry? The best way to find it is client feedback. Look for it in ​testimonials, reviews, surveys, case studies​. The ​social proof​ you gather (you do, right?) will tell you exactly what transformations your clients go through.
Use them (ideally, in the same language your clients used) to attract new people to your offers.
You can’t fight against human nature
If you’ve ever been on a diet or tried to force yourself to do a sport you didn’t like, you know what I’m talking about. It’s very, very hard to get used to eating broccoli when all you crave is chocolate.
You can educate your clients on the benefits of “broccoli” but don’t expect them to buy it just because you told them it’s better for their health. We are prisoners to our human nature and it’s next to impossible to fight against primal instinct.
It’s not your job to save the world and convince people to make better decisions. Your job is to sell your products WITHOUT over-emphasizing instant gratification or amplifying FOMO.
You know, finding that elusive balance and not turning into a bro marketer who claims that your life will be ruined if you don’t buy their crap.
Think you can do that?
That’s it from me today!
See you next week in your inbox.
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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