[This article published by The Globe and Mail on March 20, 2010]
Lucky No. 7: Understand emotional triggers like lust and mystique, and you can wield them to advantage with great conviction
BY VICTOR BARAC
What pulls your trigger? Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers To Persuasion and Captivation, knows. You are putty in the hands of someone who employs lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice and trust to bewitch you.
Or, conversely, you can redeploy those triggers back at them. A marketing version of a light-sabre battle.
"The marketing mistress of captivation"
In Fascinate, Ms. Hogshead, a U.S. advertising executive turned brand-innovation consultant, maintains that the ability to fascinate is more imperative than ever In a world oversaturated with media messages and where internet browsing has shortened attention spans. Competition for that fleeting attention has driven advertisers into a frenzy globally.
In her opinion, fascination significantly elevates one’s credibility and brings others around to caring about and spreading your message.
“Every day, intentionally or not, you’re using fascination triggers to persuade people at work and elsewhere,” Ms. Hogshead says. “This is true even in your personal life: whether pitching a new client, or inviting a friend to lunch, or lulling a cranky toddler to sleep, you’re using triggers to elicit a certain response.”
Apparently we all actively seek to be fascinating these days. Just look at shopping. Drawing on research from the Kelton Research Fascination Study, commissioned for the book, Ms. Hogshead shows that across the demographic and socioeconomic spectrum people pay big bucks to be fascinated, but will pay even more to become the most fascinating person in the room. The national survey of more than 1,000 Americans over the age of 18 indicates that people spend 15 per cent of their income on becoming more fascinating.
The author enumerates examples of the triggers in action: The TV show Gossip Girl, incorporated the initial negative press it received – “A Parent’s Worst Nightmare” – into a branding campaign that generated audience fascination by exploiting the vice trigger.
Federal Express, she says, thrives on triggering alarm. “When the threat of negative consequences runs high, we’re willing to pay extra for overnight service in order to trust that it will arrive.”
In another study, children in focus groups unanimously said that McDonald’s branded chicken was tastier than the identical chicken unbranded.
The McDonald’s brand employs the trust trigger with legendary success.
“We don’t necessarily think of Coke, Olive Garden and Rachael Ray as similar brands,” she says. However, they all rely on the same two triggers as many mainstream food-oriented brands: lust and trust.
Triggers are a deeply rooted means of arousing intense interest, Ms. Hogshead says. “For example, a delicious slice of chocolate cake might arouse lust. An unsolved puzzle activates mystique. A tight deadline arouses alarm.” Those who fail to fascinate will be pushed aside or, worse, forgotten.
Ms. Hogshead defines fascination as the ability to induce a “spellbinding focus … when you become lost in a moment, losing track of time and the world around, completely focused on a person or message.”
Fascinate is part of a trend in marketing books that purport to uncover the hidden forces that shape human behaviour. Paco Underhill’s bestselling Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping cleared the ground with detailed observations derived from his training as an anthropologist.
More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Dan Ariely cleverly applies the methods of behavioural economics to similar ends in his talked-about Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
Ms. Hogshead is not a scholar. She comes from advertising and honed her skills in the corporate world. But she provides a cogent argument on fascination as a driving force in human affairs and has done her homework, referencing a range of contemporary studies in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology and other behavioural sciences.
“I spent three years researching across a wide spectrum of disciplines … to offer a fresh perspective on why, and how, we become captivated,” she says. “Turns out all our behaviours can be traced to the same factors seen in ancient Rome, Salem witch trials, and during economic bubbles.”
She makes the occasional gaffe, but Ms. Hogshead’s central argument is unassailable. The seven triggers of fascination are firmly rooted in a human evolutionary history that is social as well as biological.
It helps to explain why (perhaps unsurprisingly) more people are more fascinated with their own children than by anything else in life.
Victor Barac (www.anthropology.ca) is a cultural anthropologist in Toronto who specializes in brand strategy, corporate culture and identity.
