Marketing — A Human Psychology Primer
In an analysis of consumer behavior called “Tightwads and Spendthrifts,” Rick, Cryder, and Loewenstein identify that the level to which people will spend is determined by the psychological “pain” that the spending causes. People will spend, they argue, until it hurts.
In particular, they identify three types of people:
- The “unconflicted,” or the largest group, spend an average amount of money before pain ensues. For these people, marketing must sway them to increase their pain threshold.
- The “spendthrifts’ spend readily and easily. Standard marketing techniques can be employed to attract this type of consumer.
- The hardest people to reach are the “tightwads” who take a lot of persuading to part with their cash because they hit the pain threshold sooner. Minimizing the buying pain for this group is the secret to success.
The book you are reading bases all of its marketing strategies on this premise laid out by Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein. Selling a product to an individual requires the marketer, I contend, to find ways to move the meter of one’s pain threshold by means of some sort of reframing. And what could be more potent in the task of reframing pain than by tying our spending habits to our very identity? The athlete who runs until he or she can hardly walk views the lactic acid accumulating in his or her legs not as pain but as an investment in future glory on the field. The law student who pulls an all-nighter studying for an exam is not experiencing the low of pain, but is instead preparing for the high of success in the classroom.
So when the marketer frames the product in such a way that spending is tied to a larger truth about the identity of the consumer, then there ceases to be a pain threshold because there ceases to be any pain at all. Purchasing a product is not seen by the consumer in terms of how much it drains from one’s bank account, you see, but is instead seen in terms of how much it adds to one’s identity.
The rest of the book lays out for the reader four of the most potent facets of our identities as they relate to our consumerist tendencies: people today are especially inattentive, trendy, needy, and tribal.
