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MARKETING, A STORY OF DECEPTION

Not only do consumers object to interruption, but they hate being played.

In the early decades of advertising, word of mouth traveled slowly, allowing snake oil salesmen to make false claims with impunity… until, that is, customers sickened by their cures horsewhipped them out of town.

As the telegraph and then the telephone ricocheted reputations around the country, fake goods gave way to more trustworthy products, and false claims segued into the conventional braggings and promisings that still fill contemporary ads. Today’s elixirs promise whiter teeth, thinner waistlines, and fewer wrinkles, with “laboratory studies” to back them up. In short, marketing became more honest, but not so honest that today’s consumers believe whatever they’re told.

In a world of immediate, global information flow, exaggerated, underperforming claims backfire. Consumers compare marketing promises with their real-world experience, and when the two don’t line up, they mock the brands that played them with scathing product reviews, public tweets, and Facebook posts. Through decades of false promises, marketers have trained consumers to distrust advertising.

Don’t take our word for it. Since the 1960s, comScore/ARSgroup has gauged the efficacy of advertising by measuring its impact on “share of choice.”¹ Today its research finds that advertising overall is rapidly losing effect, and when aimed at millennials, it’s virtually useless.

THE TWO TYPES OF MARKETING DECEPTION

Historically, marketers have driven sales through two types of pretense, one rational and the other emotional. This chapter looks at each approach, why it worked in the past, and why it fails today.

1. Rational Communication

Classical marketing theory asserts this premise: Human beings are rational decision makers who, when faced with an important choice, gather relevant facts, weigh alternatives, then choose the best option. Therefore, to persuade consumers, present your claims in a factual, logical, scientific manner.

That’s the theory. In reality, what advertising passes off as logic is in fact rhetoric. Rhetoric imitates science by presenting evidence and drawing a conclusion, but the difference is that science weighs all evidence, both for and against a theorem; rhetoric slants its argument by laying out only the evidence that supports its claim, while ignoring or refuting every point that contradicts it. In other words, science seeks the truth; rhetoric seeks the win. Marketing, in essence, is a public forum for rhetorical debate, a platform to persuade the consumer that one product’s features outperform another’s.

Ivory’s classic ad executes this method to perfection. Procter & Gamble (P&G) offered a laundry soap bar that would float instead of sinking in the tub. Marketers explained the advantage in their ad: It saved time and frustration for people who otherwise would have to search around the bottom of a murky tub when they dropped a competitor’s bar. Other soaps may have cleaned better (that is, after all, the purpose of soap) but Ivory, of course, never mentioned that.

Do you remember where you learned to use rhetorical persuasion? How to argue using inductive and deductive logic? Writing junior high school essays. Do you remember your seventh-grade syllogism lesson?

“All kings are tall.

He is a king.

Therefore, he is tall.”

In the Ivory case:

“The best soap floats.

Our soap floats.

Therefore, our soap is best.”

For example: Business-to-business marketers often print up a checklist of product features so the client can compare what’s on offer against the competition. With never-failing regularity, the marketer’s product scores tops on every feature on the list, whereas the competitor’s product leaves blanks. Amazing.

As the savvy prospective buyer scans the chart, he knows two things: (1) The company self-selected only those categories in which its brand scores best. (2) Categories in which the product scored worse than the competition were left off the list.

Now more than ever, marketing via rhetorical argument provokes skepticism in the mind of the customer and a negative attitude toward your product or service.

This isn’t to say that people distrust all facts, just facts used to persuade a sale. And that distrust directly affects what they are prepared to pay for what’s being sold.

Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight,² demonstrated this skepticism in an experiment with would-be stereo buyers. Ariely compared how two groups of audiophiles responded to a music system. Members of one group read what they thought was an overview by the manufacturer, and the second group read the exact same material, but believed it was by Consumer Reports. He writes:

All of the participants took half an hour to listen to a composition by J. S. Bach and evaluate the stereo system. How powerful was the bass? How clear was the treble? Were the controls easy to use? Were there any sound distortions? And finally, how much would they pay for the system?

As it turned out, the participants liked the stereo much more if they were told that the information they read came from the unbiased Consumer Reports. They also said they would pay, on average, about $407 for the system, far more than the $282 offered by those who read the manufacturer’s brochure. Mistrust of marketing rhetoric runs so deep that it colors our perception of products—even in the face of firsthand experience.³

If the inductive logic of rhetoric delivers suboptimized marketing results, why do businesses still gravitate toward it?

First, education. We were taught to start an essay with an opening thesis: “I’m going to prove this.” Then, point by point, we’d prove it. Finally, we’d write a conclusion: “I have proved this.” Today we use that same format at work. A PowerPoint presentation is just a junior high school essay with special effects.

Second, the prestige of science. Business leaders strive for scientific planning and choice making, for predictability and precision. All to the good. But in truth, business is not science. Despite access to massive sets of data, marketing decisions will always call for as much instinct as strategy. The fundamental problems never change: how to capture attention, hold it, and reward it; in short, how to turn people on, not off.

2. Emotional Communication

At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him.

—Bill Bernbach

Post–World War II America exploded with optimism. Product debuts spiked, TV viewership skyrocketed, and the television ad fast became the most powerful way to influence consumers. But as more and more commercials jammed the airwaves, claims and counterclaims blurred consumer judgment. Which toothpaste actually brightened teeth best?

The Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency thrived because Bill Bernbach and his partners pioneered a new connection with consumers. DDB steered clients away from rhetorical praise for their product’s features. Instead they set the obvious ethical questions aside and aimed powerful emotional appeals directly at the consumer’s subconscious desires and needs.

According to one biography, Bernbach spoke to clients “. . . not of advertising, but the art of persuasion. To persuade the consumer, the creators of ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts—their ‘obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.’”⁴

The first step to mastering emotional manipulation is to realize that there are only two primary emotions, pleasure and pain.⁵ Each, however, comes in many varieties: deeply felt positives such as happiness, peace, love, joy, as well as the sensory delights of beauty and comfort, versus profound negatives of grief, anxiety, dread, fear, loneliness, along with physical miseries that range from toothaches to migraines. In chapter 6, we’ll look at how storified marketing moves a consumer’s deep emotions, but for the balance of this chapter, let’s focus on the surface of physical feelings.

At the sensory level, something either feels good or hurts. An appetizer may delight your taste buds or repulse them. But if experience is only sensory, why do we feel more pleasure when we look at an authentic work of art than a copy?⁶ If the sensory perception were the same, why does the thrill we feel standing before van Gogh’s The Starry Night run far deeper than the glum scrutiny of a forgery?

As Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and behavioral science at Yale, explains in his book How Pleasure Works, “What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment (or suffering) we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.”⁷ Bloom claims that we are essentialists. Our response is conditioned by our beliefs of what things really are, what their essential nature is.⁸

In 2008, researchers at Caltech studied the link between the price of wine and how much people enjoyed it. Volunteers in the study were offered wines priced at $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. First they compared the $35 bottle with the $45, then the $10 bottle with the $90 bottle. Participants reported in both cases that the more expensive wines tasted better than the cheaper ones. What’s more, the pleasure GAP they reported was greater when they compared the $10 and $90 bottles.

In actuality, the $10 and $90 bottles contained the exact same wine.

Previous researchers had discovered the relationship between high price and the perception of high quality and wrote it off as snobbery. But the Caltech study used an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) device to observe the volunteers’ brain activity. The imaging revealed that when the participants drank what they believed to be a more expensive wine, the region of the brain linked to pleasure lit up.⁹ It wasn’t snobbery. They actually enjoyed greater pleasure from the wines they believed were more expensive.

The same applies to physical pain. At Harvard University, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner administered electric shocks to study participants. The study paired forty-eight subjects with a partner in a separate room who had the option to either play an audible tone for them or administer an electric shock.

Gray and Wegner separated the participants into two groups. In the first, participants were told that their partner had chosen to shock them, and moments later they got a jolt. In the second, the participants were told that their partner had chosen to play a tone sound, but then, as if by accident, they, too, received an electric shock. The same voltage was used in both groups.

The finding: Participants who believed they were shocked intentionally felt the shocks more painfully, and the pain lingered throughout the study. Those who believed that the shocks were unintentional experienced less pain and a quicker recovery.¹⁰

For both pleasure and pain, the meaning of the perception, not the sensory experience alone, determines how much pleasure or pain people experience. Because pleasure and pain are great motivators, creating these experiences within an ad promised to be marketing’s most powerful tool.

Unfortunately, however, this insight devolved into the techniques of seduction and coercion. Seduction entices someone to do something with the promise of pleasure; coercion persuades them to act with the threat of pain.

Consider the ad on the following page: As you look at it, does the taste of Bud really matter? Sex sells.

Fear also sells. Political ads coerce with fear of terrorist attacks, fear of losing your job, your health care, your income. Home security companies coerce with images of burglars jimmying your windows. Tech companies turn threats of hacks, viruses, and data theft into sales.¹¹

Emotion-targeted tactics have paid off since Bill Bernbach championed the “Mad Men” revolution. So why not stick with tradition?

Why not? Because today these ploys not only fail, they offend.¹² People with money to spend are savvy consumers of media. After exposure to tens of thousands of commercials, they can smell seduction and coercion before the logo hits the screen. That’s why nearly two-thirds of millennials use ad-blocking software to cut manipulators out of their lives.¹³

What’s left? If emotional manipulation angers people, and if rhetorical persuasion strikes them as BS, how can you connect with your customers? How can you solve your marketing crisis?

STORY

Stories are equipment for living.

—Kenneth Burke

We advocate a solution that’s tens of thousands of years old, the mode of communication that best fits the mind, that best connects one mind with another, that wraps the clarity of a rational message inside an emotional package and delivers it with sticking power: story.

A well-told story captures our attention, holds us in suspense, and pays off with a meaningful emotional experience. Emotional because we empathize with its characters; meaningful because the actions of our protagonist deliver insights into human nature.

The word itself, story, confuses many marketers. Some, for example, use the words content and story as if they were interchangeable. But as we’ll discover, that’s like conflating paint in a can with a masterpiece on a wall.

Many assume that because they’ve seen and heard a lifetime of stories, they could easily create one. But that’s like thinking you can compose music because you’ve been to concerts.

Many hear the word story and imagine a tale told to children at bedtime or yarns traded over beers at a bar. Those are indeed stories, designed simply to entertain. At the other end of the spectrum, great stories have the power to change how humanity sees reality. Storified truths have built civilizations and religions that billions follow. Novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin created political movements that led the way to war. TV series like All in the Family and Will & Grace called out bigotry and paved the way for LGBT justice. And as we’ll demonstrate in Part 3, thanks to storified marketing, innovative brands can tell stories that change how their consumers view the world, and blow past their competition when they do.

In short, story is the ultimate I.T. I in that storytelling demands information—a wide and deep knowledge of human nature and its relationship with the social and physical realms. T in that a well-told story demands skillful execution of its inner technology, its mechanisms of action/reaction, changing value charges, roles, conflicts, turning points, emotional dynamics, and much more. A craft underpins the art.

Story structure, as we’ll see in the next chapter, is intrinsic to the human mind. Why then do we need to learn its craft? Isn’t storytelling natural? By the same token, children can sketch stick figures. Isn’t drawing also natural? Yes, both are, but to achieve excellence, authors and painters move beyond instinct to experiment and master their craft anew.

After centuries of struggle, the mathematics of perspective, for example, was finally discovered by Renaissance artists seeking to perfect realism. Art schools have taught this technique ever since because if we expected young painters to discover the secrets to perspective on their own, it would take their entire careers to achieve what they can learn in a single course. Most, in fact, would never discover it.

Similarly, a form shapes story and a craft executes the telling. If you study story technique, you can learn to hook, hold, and reward your audience’s attention, as do the finest of films, plays, and novels. If you refine these skills, you can build bonds of loyalty between your brand and your clients. And finally, if you master storified marketing, as did the likes of Apple, Red Bull, Dove, and GE, your brand will, like theirs, resonate around the world.