Seth Godin has a post this morning about what he calls the three key marketing levers: fear, hope, and love. He concludes
The easiest way to build a brand is to sell fear. The best way, though, may be to deliver on hope while aiming for love…
People don’t want fear, they want faith. They want to buy something they can place their trust in to alleviate their fears. Replacing the term “fear” with “faith” makes the three levers more parallel, stating each in terms of positive aspiration. With this edit you could summarize Seth Godin’s marketing advice as follows.
Now abide faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
I think I’ve read that somewhere before.
17 February 2008 at 21:02
While I agree with the intent of the article, I still think(unfortunately) that the fear of loss is a greater driver in consumer behaviour (and I suspect behaviour in general) than faith or hope. From my experience in sales it seems, however, that a very compelling driver to “buy” is when the focus on what is hoped for is “threatened” with a subtle fear of the loss if the “product” is not “bought”. The stronger the hope, the more effective fear is as a driver.
It seems to me that our natural human inclinations are too often less noble than we aspire too. Being “faith, hope, and love” motivated would be ideal, but I all too often find that even knowing that I should be motivated by posivites it is the negative that acutally does the trick.