Rational Thought in Marketing and Influence?
Okay, now that you’ve had a glimpse of how captivation can begin, let’s move on to…. rational thought. A few weeks ago in Coffee, you learned an important sequence of generalizations:
- Benefits appeal to Drives
- Features appeal to Rational Thought
- Rational Thought justifies Human Drives
- Human Drives… drive Sales
This time write them down.
STUDY THOSE FOUR BULLETS.
Your competitor will and he’ll use those four bullets for all kinds of different end results. On Paper, in a Journal with Ink. Because…
Now it’s time to understand what kind of “rational thought” works best with consumers.
The answer is simple: honesty.
Don’t assume honesty always reduces resistance.
It is not that simple. But, if you desire to be congruent, to get real life results, to be as useful to as many people as possible… be honest.
The expert’s resistance in particular, is reduced with direct, straight forward, flat out, integrity. (Remember, integrity doesn’t hurt with everyone else, either, though every now and then it will surprise you!)
In order to influence your customers, you need to present true, credible facts about your product or service.
These facts will serve as the “rational justification” for the drive-driven purchase.
The New Car
The rational thought-drive driven connection, and the importance of credible facts can best be demonstrated with an example using cars.
The reasons consumers verbalize for their car purchase may be rational in nature. “It’s safer, you’re higher on the road, you can see better,” — but the REAL reason people buy their cars is often quite different.
The majority of people who buy sports cars like Ferrari and Porsche seldom have the opportunity to utilize their car in high-performance mode. (They don’t get to drive fast like they think they will when they buy the car!) And many of the wave of SUV buyers, like me, will never take their vehicle off-road.
So why are these vehicles in such demand?
It’s because they’re perceived as high-end luxury items, the envy of others, and Madison Avenue says owning one of these cars will immediately give you an “in” to all the same places that the ‘beautiful people’ go.
But all these reasons seem shallow…self-serving…self-indulgent… So consumers create a rationalized reason for satisfying an internal drive. The funny thing is that the same rational thinking can justify many, many desire driven purchases.
For example:
Some people want to feel safe, so they want a car that’s reliable. They justify their need for safety with the rationale that a reliable car is a good investment because it will last a long time.
These buyers can be “sold” with government and insurance company auto statistics. They are almost dying to buy from you if you just give them a good enough “reason” they can use to tell the family…
Some drivers are thrill-seekers who want to feel like the NASCAR drivers they identify with.
They self-explain their need for speed with the rationale that a high performance car is a good investment because it will have a high resale value.
Top models know that fashion and cars are often their biggest markets. And top performance vehicles in Europe are rarely separated from top models.
The model’s job is generally not to tell the story (captivate) but to draw attention to the story and trigger the future owner’s drives, not all of which are sex by the way. The sex drive motivates most people but blends with 2 or 3 of the other 15 in a way that it provides the spark for other drives like nesting, eating, physical activity, and independence. The model (the girl not the car) is a tiny piece of the beginning of the story and the automobile drivers LIFESTYLE narrative.
Human Desires WILL be expressed, experienced and met. The sleek lines and curves of automobiles blend seamlessly with lines and curves of the finest of human figures.
Those two things typically appeal to the successful, the driven by desire humans and those high performers tend to be some of the finest minds in the world.
Thus, statistics from luxury car magazines are important facts to these buyers.
But here’s what is more important. The girl in the picture by the sports car serves multiple purposes in marketing.
She can’t sell the car but without what she represents in the mind of the buyer it is very difficult to sell that car.
Here’s how you will brilliantly market and sell with hypnotic captivation. You don’t need a beautiful girl to accomplish this (though never let anyone kid you, she can really help the process). Here’s what you will do, with or without a purple top.
Turn the page…
