Factual or Emotive?
Which of these two marketing appeals for blood donation worked best?
The enterprising Agitator subscriber has learned that this is a trick question as all our marketing works differently for different people – whether we know it or not.
This experiment was no different. The researchers found that people with a high sense of social power preferred the factual messaging, those with lower social power had no preference.
Why is this and how can we apply it?
Those who consider themselves higher in social power have a need for justification mindset, a proof it to me attitude. Ironically, these same people as ‘senders’ of communication don’t feel the need to justify their thinking.
How do we apply this? Here are a few proxies for finding high social power people and adding a factoid to the message as a test.
- Higher wealth/income. This is correlated with higher social status (e.g., boss vs. staff), desire for even greater agency and perhaps a factoid as post rationalization on a decision to support.
- Those high in Conscientiousness, Openness or Extraversion as all three are associated with higher likelihood of having leadership positions and therefore, higher power status mindset. You can buy these Personality Tags for your file for a mere $.15/record).
Kevin
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