It’s the last week of my marketing class. Yikes! I need to finish my homework, so I’m going to take a bye on writing a new article this week and instead refer you to a really interesting thread I ran across a few days ago.
The posts I link to below cite research which finds that the reward centers of your brain seem to be stimulated by anticipating a benefit in a way that’s very similar to actually receiving it. The implication for marketing is that you can create a very rewarding experience for your consumer – you – by helping yourself to vividly imagine how good the outcomes of a behavior are going to be.
- Why Brains Crave Beneficial Copy – post on copyblogger.com
- Why Good Ad Copy Works – post on neurosciencemarketing.com
- Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions – the book both posts refer to
It seems that when you position a product (or in our case a behavior) you want to emphasize experiencing the benefits. Focus less on what it is you are persuading yourself to do than on how good it will be for you to do it. I don’t mean good for you in a you-should-eat-your-peas kind of way, but in a this-is-going-to-feel-AMAZING way!
The idea is that by stimulating the reward center in your brain, you will create positive associations about the target behavior. By advertising the benefits to yourself it may be possible to begin collecting positive, rewarding experiences from a behavior before you even begin to do it!
