Made to Stick (24 page)

Caples helped establish mail-order advertising, the forerunner of the modern infomercial. In mail-order advertising, unlike most other forms of advertising, advertisers know
exactly
how well an ad works. Say there’s an ad for a “stock-picking guide” in a newspaper or a magazine. If you want to order the stock-picking guide, you send off a check to the address listed in the ad. But each version of an ad lists a slightly different address, so when your order shows up at a particular address the marketer knows precisely which ad generated the sale.

Contrast mail-order ads with a classic consumer product like Crest. Why does someone buy a tube of Crest? Is it because of the new TV ads? Or was it the discount price at retail? Or the fancy new package design? Or the fact that Mom always used Crest? Or that it was the only brand in stock that day? Marketers have surprisingly little ability to tell.

Because mail-order advertising is so transparent, it’s essentially a laboratory for assessing motivational appeals. What makes people care? Ask a direct-mail copywriter. And John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. He says, “First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”

Caples’s ads get self-interest into their headlines by promising huge benefits for trivial costs:

• You Can Laugh at Money Worries if You Follow This Simple Plan
  

• Give Me 5 Days and I’ll Give You a Magnetic Personality … Let Me Prove It—Free
  

• The Secret of How to Be Taller
  

• How You Can Improve Your Memory in One Evening
  

• Retire at 55
  

Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why
we
should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out
the benefit of the benefit
. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

We get uncomfortable looking at Caples’s handiwork: Many of his ads are shady. Deceptive. The manufacturers of the Magnetic Personality Kit may enjoy a conscience-free existence, but most of us aspire to a working relationship with the truth.

So what’s the nonadvertising, nonschlocky takeaway from the Caples techniques? The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who now coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY—“what’s in it for you,” pronounced
whiff-y
—should be a central aspect of every speech.

Weissman notes that some people resist spelling out the message. “But my audiences aren’t stupid,” he quotes the resisters. “They might even feel insulted if I spell it out for them!” For an audience that may be distracted, though, spelling it out has value: “Even if it takes them just a few seconds to connect the dots between the feature you describe and the implied benefit, by the time they catch up, you will have moved on to your next point, and they probably won’t have time to absorb the benefit … or the next point.”

Teachers are all too familiar with the student refrain “How are we ever going to
use
this?” In other words, what’s in it for me? If the
WIIFY was that algebra made students better at video games, would any teacher hesitate to say so? Does any teacher doubt that students would pay more attention?

If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it. Even subtle tweaks can make a difference. It’s important, Caples says, to keep the self in self-interest: “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires.’ Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.’”

Of course, there are less obnoxious, less overt ways to appeal to self-interest than those promoted by mail-order ads. To explore this, we’ll start with a rather odd study conducted in Tempe, Arizona.

In 1982, psychologists conducted a study on persuasion with a group of homeowners in Tempe, Arizona. The homeowners were visited by student volunteers who asked them to fill out surveys for a class project.

At the time, cable TV was just starting to appear—it was still unfamiliar to most people. The research study was designed to compare the success of two different approaches to educating the homeowners about the potential benefits of cable TV.

One group of homeowners was presented with some information about why cable might be worthwhile:

The second group of homeowners was asked to imagine themselves in a detailed scenario:

Some readers have said that at first they didn’t see any difference between the two appeals. The difference
is
subtle. But go back and count up the number of times the word “you” appears in each appeal.

In a sense, the study was a more elaborate version of Caples’s advice to avoid talking about abstract benefits (“People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires”) and focus on personal benefits (“You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires”). The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to
visualize
the feeling of security they would get by using Goodyear tires.

The homeowners filled out a questionnaire for the students and said goodbye. They thought they were finished with the research project, but the researchers still had another stage to complete. A month after the survey was conducted, cable TV arrived in Tempe. The local cable company approached the homeowners for subscriptions. The university researchers managed to get subscriber data from the cable company. They then analyzed which homeowners had subscribed and which hadn’t.

The homeowners who got information about cable subscribed at a rate of 20 percent, which was about the same as the rest of the neighborhood. But the homeowners who
imagined themselves
subscribing to cable subscribed at a rate of 47 percent. The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make It So?” The answer was yes.

Compared with a typical mail-order ad, the “imagine cable television” appeal is a much more subtle appeal to self-interest. Note that the benefits offered were not fantastic in a Caples-esque way. The gist was that you could avoid the hassle of leaving home (!) by ordering cable. Indeed, just hearing about the benefits, in the abstract, wasn’t enough to lure additional subscribers. It was only when people put themselves in the starring role—
I can see myself watching a good movie at home with my hubby, and I can get up and check on the kids in the next room whenever I like … and think of all that babysitting money I’d save!
—that their interest grew.

This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t 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
.

Imagine that Save the Children incorporated this idea into its pitches for sponsorship. Right now the pitch is “You can sponsor Rokia, a little girl in Mali, for $30 per month”—a pitch that is already successful. But what if the pitch was expanded? “Imagine yourself as the sponsor of Rokia, a little girl in Mali. You’ve got a picture of her on your desk at work, next to your kids’ pictures. During the past year you’ve traded letters with her three times, and you know from the letters that she loves to read and frequently gets annoyed by her little brother. She is excited that next year she’ll get to play on the soccer team.” That’s powerful. (And it’s not crass.)

Self-interest isn’t the whole story, of course—especially if we define “self-interest” narrowly, as we often do, in terms of wealth and security. If it were the whole story, no one would ever serve in the armed forces. There are things people care about that would never appear in a Caples ad.

In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill:

• Transcendence: help others realize their potential
  

• Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
  

• Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
  

• Learning: know, understand, mentally connect
  

• Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
  

• Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
  

• Security: protection, safety, stability
  

• Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort
  

You may remember this list as Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s list of needs was incredibly insightful, but he was wrong to describe it as a “hierarchy.” Maslow saw the hierarchy as a ladder—to be climbed rung by rung from the bottom up. You couldn’t fill your longing for Esteem until you satisfied your longing for Security. You couldn’t fill your Aesthetic needs until your Physical needs were taken care of. (In Maslow’s world, there were no starving artists.)

Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus—people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously. There’s no question that most starving men would rather eat than transcend, but there’s an awful lot of overlap in the middle.

When people talk about “self-interest,” they’re typically invoking the Physical, Security, and Esteem layers. Sometimes Belonging gets acknowledged if the speaker is touchy-feely. Not many marketers or managers venture far beyond these categories. Even appeals
that seem to fall under the Aesthetic category are often really Esteem-related, but in disguise (e.g., a luxury-auto ad).

There could be a very good reason that people focus on those particular categories. Maybe those are the ones that truly matter. The rest of them—Self-actualization, Transcendence, and so on—do seem a bit academic. Recent research has explored this question, helping to shed light on which of Maslow’s categories made people care.

I
magine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to the employees:

1. Think of what that $1,000 means: a down payment on a new car or that new home improvement you’ve been wanting to make.
   

2. Think of the increased security of having that $1,000 in your bank account for a rainy day.
   

3. Think of what the $1,000 means: the company recognizes how important you are to its overall performance. It doesn’t spend money for nothing.
   

When people are asked which positioning would appeal to them personally, most of them say No. 3. It’s good for the self-esteem—and, as for No. 1 and No. 2, isn’t it kind of obvious that $1,000 can be spent or saved? Most of us have no trouble at all visualizing ourselves spending $1,000. (It’s a bit less common to find people who like to visualize themselves saving.)

Here’s the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for
other people
(not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is,
we
are motivated by self-esteem, but
others
are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains
almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.

Or consider another version of the same task. Let’s say you’re trying to persuade someone to take a new job in a department that’s crucial to the company’s success. Here are three possible pitches for the new job:

Think about how much security this job provides. It’s so important that the company will always need someone in this job.

Think about the visibility provided by this job. Because the job is so important, a lot of people will be watching your performance.

Think about how rewarding it will be to work in such a central job. It offers a unique opportunity to learn how the company really works.

The chasm between ourselves and others opens again. Most people say No. 3—an appeal to Learning—would be most motivating for them. Those same people predict that others would be most motivated by No. 1 (Security) and No. 2 (Esteem).

In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement—we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people. It’s not that the “bottom floors”—or the more tangible, physical needs, to avoid the hierarchy metaphor—aren’t motivational. Of course they are. We all like to get bonuses and to have job security and to feel like we fit in. But to focus on these needs exclusively robs us of the chance to tap more profound motivations.

A great example of using these more profound motivations involves a retired member of the U.S. Army—not a battlefield commander but a guy who ran a mess hall.