Be Fascinating
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Oct 06, 2009
At the AMA MRC, Sally Hogshead, author of Radical Careering, discussed her new book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, due out next February.
Sally began with a recap of the tulip craze. Tulips bloom in the spring for one week, yet people would trade their life savings for a bulb. Economists call this the first economic bubble. In the moment, when people get fascinated, when their perception of value has been driven up, things get out of whack. When people realized that tulip bulbs weren't worth 12 acres of land, the Dutch economy crashed.
When marketers bring fascination to their clients' products, it raises the value of those products. Take something that is not innately fascinating and find something fascinating with it.
Consumers want to buy things to make them fascinated. Most brands are purchased so that the person can feel more fascinating to others. The more fascinating, the more we can charge. Based on research that Sally did, she found that women will spend more to be fascinating than they spend on food and clothes combined: willing to spend 15% of their budget. If you make your product fascinating, you can access this market.
Most marketing messages fail badly. They are not fascinating. Here are seven triggers to persuade and captivate:
- Mystique: Intrigue with unanswered questions.
- Prestige: Social rank and respect.
- Vice: Temptation with "forbidden fruit".
- Power: The ability to command and control.
- Lust: The craving of pleasure.
- Alarm: Threat of negative consequences.
- Trust: Certainty based on experience.
When you map brands to these triggers, you find that Coke is very high on lust and trust, high on vice and alarm, lower on mystique and power. FedEx is very high for alarm and trust and is high on power and prestige. Kmart has low values for most triggers, except for trust.
Potential fascination badges:
- Purpose
- Core beliefs
- Heritage and culture
- Products
- Benefits
- Actions
And some gold hallmarks of a fascinating brand:
- Provokes strong, immediate reactions
- Creates advocates
- Becomes "cultural shorthand"
- Incite conversation
- Forces competitors to realign
- Triggers social revolutions
Keep in mind that these may not be the most liked brands. For your own brand, don't be fascinating for the sake of being fascinating. Be fascinating for the sake of communicating the ideas that resonate with your brand.