Cortisol: When you feel threatened physically, emotionally, socially, or financially, you experience a rush of confusion, insecurity, doubt, and fear. You respond by either fighting and taking on the challenge or by flying away as fast as you can to avoid the crisis and seek a safety zone, which often is just a state of denial. This is what triggers the fight‐or‐flight mentality that drives much of what people do.
❯❯ Serotonin: This is the hormone that helps stave off depression. It makes you feel calm and upbeat and gives you the ability to face your daily challenges with hope, optimism, and confidence. Listening to music that has the right schematic patterns and tones often creates feelings of love, nostalgia, comfort, or confidence, all of which influence serotonin rushes and your mood.
When marketers trigger these rushes, knowingly or not, they create feelings that compel consumers to behavior – either toward or away from the behavior they’re seeking to trigger. The challenge you have as a marketer is to create the rushes that create excitement for your brand, the experience and products you deliver, and not the ones that send people flying to the competition. Unwittingly, many marketers do both.
❯❯ Use testimonials validating your fulfillment of claims.
❯❯ Cite industry awards from third parties showing that you meet or exceed the industry standards.
❯❯ Identify and address fears related to your category and show consumers that you understand how they feel and why. Use empathy to let them know you’re just like them, because people tend to buy from others they deem to be like themselves.
Moving from USPs to ESPs
One of the most important things marketers must do today is to move away from USPs – unique selling propositions – to ESPs – emotional selling propositions. ESPs are the messages that get through because they appeal to the emotions, such as those listed in the previous section.
A brand’s ESP is a statement about how it fulfills a given emotion associated with its category. Understanding the emotional value you provide is key to your success in all forms of marketing – direct, social, personalized, mass, and experiences and events.
For example, if you’re selling luxury apparel, what is the emotional fulfillment your customers seek by wearing something with your label or insignia and by paying much more than a functional alternative would cost? These emotions that drive the choice to buy your product at your most likely elevated price likely include
❯❯ Feelings of glamor or beauty
❯❯ Feelings of confidence and personal respect
❯❯ Feelings of superiority to others who aren’t wearing similarly unique or expensive clothing
The final emotion of superiority often stays in the unconscious as it relates to the most powerful of all related emotions: survival. When you know you have something most others don’t, and that few can afford, you feel superior whether you realize it or not. And when you feel superior, you anticipate your ability to survive over others, and you experience a form of a dopamine rush that makes you feel joy about the products or experiences that set you above others. Much of this is unconscious but very real at the same time. That feeling of superiority and associated sense of survival drives some to purchase a $60,000 Gucci crocodile handbag.
Rewards versus loss
Daniel Kahnemann, psychologist and author, has conducted a great deal of research about human psychology and how people process information and make choices. His research consistently shows that when people are faced with a choice to risk losing something in order to gain something, they most often choose to avoid the risk rather than take the chance of winning the award. In other words, he found that people will pay a high price to get a sure gain and to avoid a sure loss.
Ask yourself the following questions:
❯❯ What potential losses can consumers experience by not buying your product?
❯❯ How can your brand deliver on the promise of avoiding that loss in ways that competitors can’t?
Being able to answer these questions and deliver on them is key to differentiating your product from others emotionally, and that is the most critical differentiation of all.
Survival insticts
When viewing illusion art that shows either a woman looking in a mirror or a skull, most see the skull first. This is because the brain is wired to see threats to prevent harm before seeing the reward or joy.
Identify the fear that drives your customers and address it directly so you can put them at ease. After you diminish the fear or present a visible solution, you can then communicate better to the unconscious mind and more clearly to the conscious mind.
Here’s how common products tap people’s survival instincts:
❯❯ Insurance: Survive accidents or mishaps that could destroy critical possessions like homes and cars.
❯❯ Education: Survive the economic woes of not being able to get good jobs, live a quality life, and provide for children.
❯❯ Luxury cars: Survive the perils of not achieving a high social status, which could include exclusion from influential circles, interesting experiences, and respect in business.
Your ESP should encompass the fears and joys sought through your product category, consciously and unconsciously, and should be present in your marketing messages, content marketing, social dialogue, customer experiences, and sales propositions. Crafting your
