What a Feeling — Death and His Marketing Friends
Effective marketing is just terror management.
My late mother was a wise woman. That comes from being the oldest of five kids and having four kids of her own, I guess. She was raised Catholic and was firm in her beliefs (although she left the Catholic church as an adult). She also knew her own mind and was not afraid to speak it.
A couple of years after I got married, I bought a new car. Exciting times for me. The first time I took my mom for a ride she said to me, “You seem like you really like this car.”
“Mom,” I said, “I love this car.”
She gave me hard stare that I could feel even as I looked ahead through the windshield.
“Love your wife, like your car.” She had spoken.
For many years her words stuck with me, through divorce, re-marriage, children, new cars, motorcycles, bikes, and other expensive toys. Someone would ask me if I liked my (insert item here). My answer was always the same.
“I like it a lot.” What I never said was, “I love it.”
After many years of following my mom’s direction, I have finally learned that maybe she wasn’t quite right.
Humans are emotional creatures. Marketers know this and use that information to their advantage. I can say that because I am a marketer. People tell themselves they are logical beings who make decisions based on logic and cold analysis. In truth we make decisions — especially big, expensive decisions — emotionally, and then we do our best to support that decision with a logical rationale.
Marketing — good marketing — is storytelling. It paints a picture of an imperfect world, demonstrates how the product being marketed fills the gap from imperfection to perfection, then helps you to see yourself in that new and improved world. You fill in the details, but the bottom line is that you now need this item to be happy.
Once that emotional pull is working at you, the search for rationale begins. That means looking at reviews, finding the specs, building a case for purchase. You tell yourself this case is to justify the purchase to your significant other. It’s really to help you connect the two sides of your brain and feel good about the purchase that you’ve already decided to make.
Back to my mom. When she told me to love my wife, not my car, she had it partly right. She didn’t want me to actually love the hunk of metal, rubber, and leather sitting in the driveway — and I didn’t really. What I did love — what everyone loves when they love an inanimate object — is how that hunk of metal made me feel.
It’s the rush I would get looking at the car in the driveway each morning. It’s the way it made me feel getting in and starting it. It’s the backwards glance I would give it after I parked and locked it.
Because emotion. Life is an unknown quantity for most of us. Humans alone are burdened with the knowledge of our eventual demise, our memento mori. We spend out days trying to avoid that knowledge, trying to not think about dying and the particulars of our own death.
This avoidance gets tougher as we age and the grains of sand drop from top to bottom. But the knowledge is with us from our early years, coming into focus as we get older.
So we look for ways to feel better. “You only live once,” we tell ourselves. And marketers are only happy to oblige us in that endeavor.
“Buy this,” they say, “and forget about your certain doom.”
All purchases are based on an emotional platform. Features and benefits are just there so we can tell ourselves the story that we are rational, logical creatures unswayed by the certainty of our outcome.
Love your car, your boat, your motorcycle, your fishing rod, your Xbox. Love it because it makes you feel better, and you love feeling better, even if it’s only for a while. Until you wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat.
Then it will be time to find that next love. Maybe this one will have twin turbochargers. The marketers will be ready with a story.
