The Anal-Retentive Achiever – Building Brands for Confident People
by Graeme Newell
Highlights:
- Order and control are two powerful emotional motivators that are particularly endearing to people who see themselves as achievers.
- Don’t forget that success means much more than career or monetary achievement. Stay-at-home moms, low-wage earners, and retirees often use different criteria to gauge life success.
- There are two primary ways to market using success – feed the need through identification, or deny the need through derision.
This is part two of a series on using the emotions of order & control in your marketing. Read part one here.
Are you an adventurer or a nester? Every personality has at least a little of both, and while most people think of themselves as adventurers, the majority craves predictability for the most part. The harsh reality is that most say they crave adventure, but spend most of their lives just wanting to make it to the end of the day and have things go as planned. This hunger for safety and structure is one of the primary emotional motivators used by some of the world’s most powerful brands.
Entire industries such as insurance, automotive, healthcare, and manufacturing are built upon this need for order. This Prudential Insurance ad runs a full-press guilt trip on dads. It works because it subtly evokes fear and taps deep social rules – a father must be vigilant to insure his family’s safety.
There are two primary emotional marketing motivators that drive our need for structure and order in our lives – fear and success. The ad above uses fear. My article last week discussed how the pros on Madison Avenue use fear to spur our thirst for order and safety. Today, I’ll be flipping this negative approach and showing how the ad industry taps our thirst for success to build this same yearning for order and structure.
What you will notice is that control freaks tend to be more than a little bit cocky. The businessman in this Discover ad wears his stressed-out life as a badge of honor. He’s proud that he has no life outside of work, and his Discover Card is his ticket to keeping all the travel details from becoming overwhelming. He wants the world to know that he gets more done than all of the other shiftless, lazy slackers out there combined.
It’s easy to get a chip on your shoulder if you watch a lot of ads that use success to feed the need for order and structure. Madison Avenue shows us a world where everyone seems to accomplish amazing things without so much as breaking a sweat. This DHL ad shows businessmen who have omnipotent control of their world, and do it all from the back nine at the golf course.
This Nextel commercial shows a fantasyland where complicated projects play out with flawless precision.
This phone ad builds a little dream world where everything runs on time.
This phone ad shows us a world where all success is easy, as long as you have the right gadgets to properly organize. These people have success, time to relax, and the suburban nirvana lifestyle. How do they do it? They prioritize. They delegate. They get organized.
Our hunger for this effortless control of our world is so powerful that we easily delude ourselves into believing the ad’s little anal-retentive fantasies. Take a look at this AT&T ad. Now, when was the last time you had a business meeting on your cell phone at the beach? And I’m sure your client won’t mind if your precocious, golden-haired daughter interrupts that meeting, and you take a break to wander off on a rapturous stroll by the ocean with your idyllic family. This little stage drama has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with how businessmen want to feel about themselves – successful, doting parents, and effortlessly organized.
What happens to people who aren’t organized? Well, the marketing world holds them up as incompetent bumblers fully deserving the failure that inevitably comes their way. This Quickbooks ad warns what could happen if you let the chaos of running a business distract you from orderly accounting. The non-planners are shown as bumbling idiots who are so dumb they can barely tie their own shoes.
This TrueCredit ad shows a colossal loser who did not heed the warning to “always know where you stand.”
There is an expectation of sacrifice in all of this emotional marketing. Eastern wisdom tells us live in the moment, but lovers of order and structure find it just as nurturing to sacrifice today for a better future. An indulgence now feels good, but delaying that indulgence reinforces their feeling of future safety and success. This pension ad painfully demonstrates the agony people will endure if they give into immediate temptation and fail to plan. The hero is shown as a hapless victim of chaos in a constant battle with complacency.
This Prudential ad takes the opposite approach and shows how good life will be if the customer sacrifices now and plans for the future. The message is clear: winners sacrifice and plan, losers live life for today.
You will notice that most of these ads are about careful planning that protects the biggest things in life: career, family, property, money, or health. Lack of planning in any of these areas could be catastrophic, but this same pride at planning and order also shows up in the emotional marketing of more casual products.
There is a whole cult of perfection dedicated just to the home. This is a world of domestic splendor, where stains and dirt do not exist. This Clorox ad turns bathroom scum into pure angelic transcendence.
This cat litter ad builds a world where cat boxes are a treasure to behold and even more wonderful to smell.
This Jif commercial shows the perfect mom stopping by with snacks as her children play quietly and politely in their room. Just as in the business ads, this emotional marketing has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with a fantasy of how parents wish it could be.
These ads don’t just sell family love and tasty peanut butter. The tone, pacing, and imagery of the ads are meticulously chosen to give harried mothers the feeling of control, a distinct contradiction to the chaotic reality of life with their kids. It is the same thing with this Rice Krispies ad. Sure, the primary motivators are motherhood and cherub-like cuteness, but Kelloggs picked this particular scene because it understands that mothers are comforted by scenes of family order and serenity.
Emotional Motivators Based on Order and Control are Not Very Sexy, so They are Often Overlooked.
This emotional marketing motivator is one of the most powerful consumer behavior drivers, but is often overlooked because it’s just not as intriguing and sexy as the other more daring consumer emotional connections. If you dig deeply into the psyche of your customers, you may find this emotional marketing approach could circumvent the more common approaches taken by competitors.
Is Your Customer a Half-Empty or Half-Full Glass Person?
Half-empty glass people respond to a fear and worry approach; one where their safety or happiness are in danger of interruption. Because they are more confident and less fearful, Half-full glass people respond more to emotional marketing motivators that showcase success and scenes of perfection. They are proud of their organizational skills and wear them on their chest like a badge of honor.
Market to the Swagger in Your Customer’s Heart
Most everyone in the world feels they are smarter, more energetic, and more capable than they actually are. Don’t just market the functional components of your product. Instead, start with the ego of your customers, then show how your product will help make their dreams come true. Your job is to make your product brand match how your customers feel about themselves.
