How many shoes do you need, how many bags and glasses? How often do you really need a new car or a drill … and does it have to be the one with 5,000 revolutions? Exactly. In advertising, it’s all about what you think you need, but don’t really need. Probably no one has ever expressed it to you so clearly. But that is the reason why selling will be so different in the future: Today we – at least in Europe – no longer need to worry about our basic needs anymore.
And that brings us back to our story. Who wins on „Superstar“? It’s not the one who sings the best, but the one whose „story“ is the most exciting. It’s the one whose story is the most unbelievable, but who tell it in the most credible way. It is the one that causes an impetus. It is the one that challenge our imagination and want to make us want to purchase it – at any cost.
They are the ones that reach us- in places we didn’t even know we had. Not with quiet reason nor with plausible explanations because these rational motives are only used to explain afterwards to ourselves and to our fellow men, why we absolutely had to have what we had just bought, why it had to be so expensive, while comparable things were cheaper – and why it had to be done right now (knowing full well that it will be on sale soon) …
There is, of course, a little history to this. The main task of the district manager of a vacuum cleaner company was to recruit and train salesmen. To familiarize a new employee with the machine, he recommended that he demonstrate it to his wife. The next day, the salesman reported, „I did as you said. When I finished, I asked my wife, ‚Would you buy it?‘ She said, ‚Yes.‘ I asked, ‚Why? She replied, ‚Because I love you!‘ “
Anything beyond our basic needs requires provocation and appeal to our ego. It is that advertising man who knows how to be bold and unconventional who activate the images in our heads. It is the one who know how to direct our needs to what we are not and most of us desire to be: Individualists, role models, trend ambassadors.
As I stated above, no one in this world buys a Rolex just to see what time it is. And no one buys a Porsche just to get from A to B or an iPhone just to make a phone call.
Look forward to our next story in our blog “Think before doing”