A story about a little boy and his pet penguin never mentions a product, let alone features and benefits, and increases sales 11% for UK retailer John Lewis. The sales manager for a marquis technology company vehemently asserts that it can’t be and I’ve made the whole thing up.
But Nike sells shoes “that make the man,” DeBeers sells diamonds that it promises will turn frogs into princes, and a Porsche dealership offers sports cars that will enhance virility for the insecure.
It doesn’t seem reasonable, but the most renowned companies in the world are betting lots of advertising dollars that this approach works better than any other, precisely because it isn’t reasonable. Despite Hamlet’s assertion “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason,” there is nothing reasonable about how we make our decisions.
Ironically, it’s reason, in its most objective form as science, that proves it. Using an fMRI to watch the brain at work, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated three decades ago that our decisions, even about finances, are made emotionally. Our reason is no more than an after-the-fact justification for a decision already made.
There’s more at stake here than just sales professionals making their quota. Damasio’s work calls into question our long held beliefs about what it means to be human and since the Age of Enlightenment, how best to live in this world. For those of us technically trained, our very identity is at risk.
When it comes to selling technology, we just pile on specs on speeds and feeds, believing it will make the case for any reasonable person. But even our technically-oriented customers aren’t swayed. Tversky and Kahneman showed that trained statisticians ignored the laws of probability when making a decision about probability. Instead, they opted for a story.
“What we think is reason,” Tversky wrote, “is just a story we spin.” Another neuroscientist, Michael Gazzanica, found that when our story doesn’t match physical reality, we change the reality, not the story. The story is primary because that’s the way we make sense of the world (and have for the last 70,000 years, long before reason and logic were invented.)
Reasonable or not, I’d like to believe Nike shoes will make me a man and DeBeers diamonds a prince. That aspiration, I found when I sold shoes as a teenager, trumps minor details like fit and quality.
For those predisposed to reason, the challenge is to use our reason (in the form of neuroscience) to get beyond reason and to realize the product per se is less important than what possession of the product will do for us. With the right story, the technology will go beyond meeting my business needs to enabling me to realize my personal aspiration.
Why buy technology when I can buy my dream?