OUR MSC COLLEAGUES JON AND RAY HAVE A BIG DEADLINE COMING UP. THEY ARE BOTH APPLYING FOR RESEARCH GRANTS FROM THE National Science Foundation. The paperwork is so arduous, it makes filing one’s income taxes seem like a stroll on the beach. Tackling such a complex, unpleasant job requires lots of motivation. This is not a case where a particular kind of motivation is a better match for the task (as we discussed in chapter 8). Either a promotion or a prevention focus will do. What does matter is that the motivation be strong. So what should we say to Jon and Ray to strengthen their motivation and get the job done? As you’ll see in examples throughout the remaining chapters of this book, you can motivate someone—to perform better, to want a particular product, or to embrace an idea or belief—much more effectively if you tailor your message to fit his or her motivational focus. We already know that the encouragement that “fits” for Ray will not “fit” for Jon. But how do you create fit, exactly?
The sense of “fit” that we are probably all most familiar with is a match between what someone wants or needs and what the person believes an idea, action, or product provides. (For Jon and Ray, applying for an NSF grant “fits” with their very real and pressing need for research funds.) Marketers, of course, tell stories in order to shape or influence those beliefs, to guide us toward their particular products. So yuppie liberals will want to drive a Prius because its story says “I’m smart and eco-conscious,” and that’s essentially what yuppie liberals want to be. Anxious parents will make their daughter’s first car a Volvo because its story says “I put safety first when it comes to my child,” which is precisely what they are looking to do.
But our research suggests that motivational fit is a subtler concept than just “give them what they want” or “match your product to their need.” Put simply, motivational fit happens when you create a match not only between what people want and what they get, but also between what they want and how they go about getting it—the way they reach their goals.1
For example, you can lose weight by eating less or by exercising more. You can realize your retirement dreams by embracing risk or avoiding it like the plague. You can make a good impression by saying more or saying less. People definitely have preferences about the way they do things—about the process, not just the outcome—and those preferences are determined by their promotion or prevention motivation. We experience motivational fit when our current motivational focus is sustained or supported by the means we use—the manner of our decision making, the kind of information we consider, or the particular strategy we adopt to pursue a goal. So Jon needs to tackle his grant application in a way that sustains his prevention-focused motivation—maintaining or increasing his natural vigilance. Ray, on the other hand, needs an approach that will work with his promotion-focused motivation to enhance his natural eagerness.
Influencers are used to thinking a lot about what people want, but tend to overlook the fact that people also have preferences about the way they get it—and these preferences can be just as strong motivationally as their desire to fulfill the goals themselves. When they experience motivational fit, people tell us that they feel right, and they become more strongly engaged in what they are doing. Feeling right and having stronger engagement, in turn, lead to increases in perceived value.2 If Jon and Ray experience fit, they will be more motivated to complete their applications on time—and because they’ll be more engaged in the process, they’ll value the grant-writing activity more and turn in superior work.
When people consider your product or idea and experience motivational fit, they feel more attracted to it, have more confidence in their feelings, and will pay more or do more for it.3 They will trust your laundry detergent (or political candidate or sales campaign) to live up to its promise, compared to its competitors. When they experience fit when listening to how you describe a task, or when receiving your feedback, they will perceive it as more fair, they’ll be more engaged, and they’ll work more effectively.
As you’ll see, the tailoring we are arguing for can be incredibly subtle. For instance, if you wanted to sell cars to Ray and Jon, you should talk to promotion-focused Ray about “better mileage” but describe it as “lower fuel costs” to prevention-focused Jon. You should draw Ray’s attention to the “bonus” features he will get if he buys the Limited Edition (after all, he wants whatever is the latest and the best), but emphasize to Jon what a “mistake” he would be making if he didn’t buy it (since he doesn’t want the mistake of buying an inferior product). If you think these differences wouldn’t matter much . . . after all, it’s just a difference in choice of words . . . you would be wrong.
What the customer ends up getting may be the same—Ray and Jon may in fact drive away in identical cars. But how they come to buy those cars—through the promotion-focused strategy of seizing opportunities to get something good (e.g., better mileage or bonus features) or the prevention-focused strategy of avoiding something bad (e.g., high fuel costs or an inferior product)—is motivational night and day. Knowing which version will be effective for your employee, child, student, or customer, for your particular message or product, is the key to creating fit.
In this chapter we’ll describe the basics of creating motivational fit and show you how to predict when and why it will occur. Let’s begin with one of our favorite examples of the power of fit—the marketing of the Riedel wineglass.
In his influential bestseller All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin describes how the success of Riedel is in the genius of its story, and how that story changes the experience of the consumer. In the end, it’s a story about the vital importance of means.
The motivation behind drinking good wine is promotion-focused—it’s about pleasure, sophistication, and status. No one ever shelled out a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine so that they would be safer when they drank it, or because it’s a good value for the money. There is also some fairly compelling evidence showing that most people can’t actually tell the difference in a blind taste test between inexpensive and expensive wines. But that doesn’t stop (promotion-focused) people from wanting expensive wines, because deep down they still believe that good wine should and will cost more—that’s what makes it a luxury—and thus they want to drink a more expensive wine. So pricing your wine at one hundred dollars a bottle instead of ten dollars is an example of taking into account people’s beliefs, and matching a product to what people want.
The glass you drink that wine out of, on the other hand, is not as much about what you want, as it is about how you consume it. Drinking expensive wine out of a twenty-dollar Riedel glass feels right, because it seems like the right way to get a pricey, high-status wine from the bottle to your lips. Drinking from the best glass sustains the goal of tasting the best wine, which creates fit—fit that translates into making the whole tasting experience more worthwhile.
Indeed, wine connoisseurs swear that wine actually tastes better in a Riedel glass, despite the fact that scientifically conducted tests show no difference between a Riedel glass and its one-dollar equivalent. But as Godin points out, even if the difference between the glasses isn’t real, the difference in reported value to the customer is real. What he and the people at Riedel may not realize, however, is that this is not just “cheap talk”—the actual experienced value of the wine is enhanced because of motivational fit.
As we mentioned earlier, the essence of experiencing fit is being able to pursue one’s goal in a way that sustains (rather than disrupts) promotion or prevention motivation. In other words, it’s doing things the way you want to do them, given how you are motivated. Eager means (e.g., being bold and optimistic, being fast, taking chances) fit with promotion motivation. When you do things in a bold way, you are more likely to gain, and you don’t close off opportunities to advance. Vigilant means (e.g., being careful, being accurate, avoiding mistakes) are a good fit with prevention motivation. When you do things in a careful way, you are better at avoiding losses and are less likely to make mistakes.
When we ask people how fit feels—what kind of an experience it is—they reliably tell us that it just feels right to them. Feeling “right,” incidentally, is not the same thing as having a “pleasant” feeling. Thinking everything is going to be sunshine and roses might feel pleasant, but to someone who is prevention-focused, thinking this way will also feel wrong, because it’s dangerously naïve. On the other hand, methodically preparing for worst-case scenarios will feel right, despite the fact that thinking that way doesn’t feel pleasant at all.
(One of the most irritating things that the prevention-focused have to put up with is being told that they must get pleasure from being the worrywart and sweating the details, since that’s what they always do. To be clear—it does not give them pleasure, but it does feel like the right thing to do. And feeling right about it does matter, because by knowing that they have their bases covered, they can experience the satisfaction of being effective.)
When people feel “right,” they are more persuaded by your message—whether you are asking them to buy your toothpaste, do their homework, or accept the fact that their job description needs to change. But how exactly does “feeling right” translate into more effective persuasion? It turns out that motivational fit influences your attitude toward an idea or product through two different mechanisms, depending on the importance of the idea or product to you.
When the message concerns something that is important—something that is highly relevant to you personally—feeling right from fit affects persuasion by increasing your confidence in your own judgment. In so doing, it intensifies your reaction (either more positive or more negative) to what you are seeing and hearing. So your initial feeling or opinion becomes even stronger. Feeling wrong from nonfit, on the other hand, weakens your reaction (either less positive or less negative).
So if you are a real automobile aficionado—someone truly passionate about cars—and you are thumbing through your monthly issue of Motor Trend magazine, you will probably pay particular attention to the car advertisements, forming opinions on each new model. If you also experience fit from the advertisement (say, because it is gain-framed and you are promotion-focused when it comes to cars), then you will feel right, and feel more confident in your judgments. If you like a particular new model, you will like it even more because of fit. If another one is a total turnoff—let’s say you think it’s too boxy and boring—it will be an even bigger turnoff because of your higher confidence from fit.
When the message concerns something that is not important or personally relevant to you, however, you don’t even bother weighing the pros and cons to make a judgment. You don’t care enough to engage in critical evaluation. You just use the “feeling of rightness” itself as a guide—if I feel right (from fit), then it must be a good thing. If I feel wrong (from nonfit), it must be bad.
So imagine you are not an automobile aficionado—you can’t tell a Porsche from a Pontiac—and you are thumbing through your Sunday newspaper. You probably won’t pay particular attention to the car advertisements, though you may give them a cursory read. If you also experience fit from the advertisement (this time, say, because it is loss-framed and you are prevention-focused in general), then you will feel right—and that feeling of rightness will form the basis of your opinion about the car. If you feel right when looking at a picture of a Honda Accord, then you will feel favorable toward Accords. (If the advertisement creates nonfit, however, you’ll feel wrong and be less favorable to Accords.)
Let’s illustrate these two paths to persuasion again, this time with a research example. Participants were asked to look at a print ad that described the negative effects of drinking coffee on health. It included statements like “Coffee blocks the absorption of vitamin C,” and “Love your body instead of your coffee. Reduce your caffeine intake.” In one version of the experiment, they were also told that the ad was scheduled to appear in a national campaign the following month, and that the ad agency that created it would take their reaction to the ad very seriously.
Because their opinion was so important, it made the message personally relevant. As a result, all the readers paid close attention to the arguments in the ad. Since the message arguments advocated against coffee, this made their attitude toward coffee more negative. Those who experienced motivational fit while reading the message were significantly more negative about coffee than those who experienced nonfit. In other words, fit intensified their (negative) reaction to the subject of the (negative) ad. The (largely unconscious) thought process looks something like this:
Reader Who Experiences Fit: After paying close attention to the arguments, I’ve formed an opinion about coffee—it’s bad. I feel right about my opinion. Coffee must be really bad.
Reader Who Experiences Nonfit: After paying close attention to the arguments, I’ve formed an opinion about coffee—it’s bad. But I don’t really feel right about my opinion. Coffee must not be so bad.
In another version of the experiment, people were given the same ad, but told that it was a draft of an ad that may or may not appear in European newspapers, possibly the following year. For this group, the ad wasn’t particularly important or personally relevant, so there was no real need to pay close attention to the ad’s arguments. Instead, the participants could just use their feelings of rightness (or wrongness) as their guide to their attitude about coffee. In this low-importance case, motivational fit resulted in more positive attitudes toward coffee, while nonfit produced more negative attitudes.4 In this case, the thought process (also largely unconscious) looks something like this:
Reader Who Experiences Fit: I don’t really care much about all this information so I’m not going to pay much attention to it. But right now I’m feeling right about coffee. Coffee must be pretty good.
Reader Who Experiences Nonfit: I don’t really care much about all this information so I’m not going to pay much attention to it. But right now I’m not feeling right about coffee. Coffee must not be so good.
So what does this all mean for you, the persuader or motivator? How can you use this knowledge to be more effective with your audience—whether “your audience” is your employees, your students, supermarket shoppers, or your child? Well, in a nutshell, it means that delivering your message with motivational fit, all by itself, will make whatever you are advocating more appealing when the issue is not very important to your audience—when it’s about something relatively trivial (e.g., which soda brand they buy), something they don’t know much about (e.g., how Super PACs work), or something that affects only other people (e.g., foreign aid).
If, on the other hand, the issue is important to your audience, you will need to make sure your message not only fits your audience but also contains strong arguments; the strong arguments will persuade your audience to accept the message’s conclusion, and then feeling right from motivational fit will make them more confident that they’ve drawn the correct conclusion. If instead you use poor, unconvincing arguments on an important issue for an audience in motivational fit, then your audience will feel right (i.e., confident) about rejecting your conclusion, and you will be worse off than before. So when the issue is not important you can take advantage of motivational fit even when your arguments are weak. But when the issue is important, you need to have solid, convincing arguments to take advantage of motivational fit.
Most English-speaking people in America have no problem understanding the queen of England, Anthony Hopkins, or former American Idol host Simon Cowell. Despite their British accents, we have little difficulty grasping what they are saying. The same cannot be said for Ozzy Osbourne, the cast of the film Trainspotting, and half the character actors on Masterpiece. Their accents are just different enough from ours to make understanding their speech a challenge. Even though they are using the same language, the experience of the American listener is less fluent. In other words, it’s more difficult to process.
The ads we use to sell products, and the feedback we use to motivate our employees, students, or children, can also differ in its fluency, or ease of processing. Research on fluency suggests that, in general, people like things more when they are easy to grasp quickly, and dislike them more when they are complex or somewhat contradictory. Perhaps this is why Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish masterpiece The Seventh Seal, in which a medieval knight challenges Death to a game of chess, has fewer fans than Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo.
As it happens, one way to enhance your message’s fluency, and therefore its persuasiveness and likability, is to make sure it creates motivational fit. When ads for Welch’s grape juice described the famous beverage as energy-enhancing, making it a promotion-focused product, buyers found the ad easier to process and rated the brand more positively when the ad message itself was also gain-framed,
Get energized!
rather than loss-framed,
Don’t miss out on getting energized!
When Welch’s grape juice was instead described as a source of antioxidants that prevent cancer and heart disease, making it a prevention-focused product, the ad message that was loss-framed,
Don’t miss out on preventing clogged arteries!
was more fluent and more effective than the one that was gain-framed,
Prevent clogged arteries!5
So if you want to make sure your message is getting through—that it is easy to follow and fully understand—it pays to deliver it with motivational fit. People will “get” what you are saying and respond to it more strongly.
When academics submit a paper to a journal for review, they get a response (many months later) that follows the same general format. The journal editor begins by highlighting the paper’s strongest qualities—what you did right. This is followed by a list of the paper’s shortcomings—what you did wrong, or failed to do at all. Finally, there is a verdict—fix what’s wrong and I’ll publish it, or go back to the drawing board.
When you receive a response from an editor, the very first thing you do, no matter who you are, is skip to the end. The final verdict, after all, is what matters most. But which part would you read next—the praise or the criticism? If you are like Ray, you’ll probably go back to the beginning to see what you did right and what the editor found promising—but if you are more like Jon, you’ll dive right into the criticism and try to figure out where and how you could have gone wrong—to fix what you can and learn what to avoid next time.
In a way, people create their own motivational fit on a regular basis by paying particular attention to the aspects of feedback (or persuasive appeals, or products) that sustain their motivation.6 In other words, you form your opinions, make choices, and take action based on the attributes that fit your focus, and you brush off or disregard the ones that don’t.
For instance, promotion-focused shoppers are more likely to attend to descriptions of toothpaste that focus on what can be gained: teeth whitening, breath freshening, and enamel strengthening. The prevention-focused, on the other hand, are more sensitive to descriptions of how a toothpaste might help them prevent cavity, plaque, and gingivitis.
So if your message contains information that is about both gains and losses, pros and cons, or what went right and what went wrong—you can count on some selective tuning on the part of your audience. They are going to pay special attention to what fits and are more likely to disregard what doesn’t.
Their greater engagement and attention will translate into better memory for that information, too.7 If you want people to remember what you tell them, or to remember your product when choosing from a sea of alternatives, deliver your message with fit.
Incidentally, one way to remove the attention bias for information that fits is to convince your audience that the message is very important to them; people are more likely to pay attention to, and critically evaluate, all information when something really matters. (But then make sure you have strong arguments.)
One of the toughest things we ever have to do is tell people what they don’t want to hear.
No, you won’t be getting a promotion at this time.
We aren’t going to go on vacation this year.
You can’t take my car on a road trip with your friends.
I know you already feel overworked, but here are three new projects you’ll need to complete this quarter.
It’s not you, it’s me.
There’s no way to disguise the fact that bad news is bad news, so you can never hope to entirely remove its sting. But you can learn to deliver bad news in a way that softens the blow, by increasing the chances that it will be perceived as fair.
The key to making bad news seem fair is to match your delivery to the motivational style of the listener. For instance, imagine you are an executive who has to inform your employees about an upcoming companywide “reorganization”—news that is generally met with groans and dismay. You could choose to justify the reorganization using gain framing (e.g., the reorganization will “make the company more profitable”), which highlights the potential gains (sometimes called the “vision” speech). Or you could instead use loss framing (e.g., the reorganization will “prevent further financial losses”), which emphasizes the dangers avoided (sometimes called the “burning platform” speech).8
As you might expect, promotion- and prevention-minded employees judge bad news to be significantly more fair when its framing matches their focus. Public perceptions of a company’s actions are also affected by fit: promotion-minded readers rated (real) layoffs at DaimlerChrysler as significantly more fair and reasonable when they were described as an opportunity to “promote market share,” while prevention-minded readers took a more favorable view when the layoffs were justified as “preventing loss of market share.”9 (If their grant applications were—Heaven forbid—rejected, Ray would prefer to hear that the reviewers “did their best to accept just the very best proposals,” while Jon would find it more fair if the reviewers “were careful to screen out all but the very best proposals.” Neither, for the record, would be happy about it—but they’d be less likely to cry foul.)
How exactly does motivational fit increase fairness? Essentially it’s because it decreases “could have” and “should have” thinking in the wake of bad news. When people experience unfavorable events, they engage in what psychologists call counterfactual thinking, or “what if” questioning, to decide if they were treated fairly.
“Could have” counterfactuals address questions like: Could things have turned out differently if the decision makers had taken another course of action? In other words, was it inevitable? Did my company have another option besides “reorganizing”? Could the reviewer have funded my research proposal?
“Should have” counterfactuals address questions like: Should the decision makers have taken the other course? In other words, did they knowingly do the wrong thing? Was it unethical? Are the top executives sacrificing lower-level jobs just to line their own pockets? Was my proposal rejected because the reviewer doesn’t like me personally?
When “could have” and “should have” counterfactuals lead to “yes” answers, people are more likely to perceive their circumstances as unfair. But this is less likely to happen when people “feel right” about the message as a result of motivational fit; when there is fit, people feel less need to ask (and answer) these questions.
So the next time you find yourself having to take a project out of the hands of one team member who’s clearly floundering and transfer it to another, you’ll know whether to describe it as an “opportunity to devote your energy to other assignments” (for your promotion colleague) or as a way to “avoid being dangerously overloaded with work” (for your prevention colleague). And when giving the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, you’ll know whether to talk about “freeing you to find happiness elsewhere” (for your promotion ex-partner) or “not wasting any more of your time” (for your prevention ex-partner).
In this chapter, you’ve learned that when you experience fit, you feel right, you become more strongly engaged, and information is easier to process and remember. Feedback feels fair, and performance is enhanced. And this is only the beginning. Now that you understand how it works, you are ready to see what it can do for you.
In chapters 10–12, we’ll take a closer look at how motivational fit shapes consumer preferences (and the price they’re willing to pay) for everything from sunscreen to coffee mugs to health insurance. You’ll see how it affects performance on basketball courts, in office cubicles, and in math classes, and how it helps people to manage their illness, work out regularly at the gym, pay their taxes, and fight teen smoking. And all of this can be accomplished simply by saying things just a little bit differently to different people.