A typical cola advertisement has the following words "happiness", "celebration", "refreshing", "freedom" etc embedded into it, either orally or visually or both. Just a few seconds of such an advertisement has a powerful effect on us, emotionally, physically, and psychologically. A cigarette was once marketed to women as "torches of freedom".
The core phenomenon that advertising uses to create a lasting influence on a potential consumer to buy, can be called a "valve-overlapping". And this phenomenon can be easily leveraged to gain the critical skill of influencing others in situations like #negotiations, #sales, #jobinterviews, etc
What is value-overlapping:
Words like happiness, freedom, contentment, etc do not have an objective standard meaning. Each of us has our own definition of them. Our own way of knowing if we are experiencing them. Our own tactile, emotional, and sensory criteria telling us when are experiencing them. It has been found that if an individual considers these as their values, embedding them in a message about a product or service makes it compelling for them. It influences the person hearing the message to view the message favorably because of the value-overlap.
How can this be leveraged to influence:
There are 3 steps to leveraging this:
Value mining
Value embedding
Value communicating
Value mining:
The objective of this is to mainly find out what the target of influence considers as important. This is done either directly or indirectly. Directly by asking the person simple questions like:"...what about traveling is important for you.." They might come up with an answer like "...traveling makes me feel free". Here freedom is a value to them. You can dig further by asking "...say you got to be free what does that do to you?" They will most likely come up with another value like happiness. This gives a list of values for this person. Asking the person to rank these values will give you their value hierarchy.
Values can also be mined indirectly by studying the target audience's digital footprint like their LinkedIn profile etc.
Value embedding:
Incorporate the values elicited above in a message that you intend to communicate. Pretty much like how advertisements do it. The values need to be carefully incorporated into the message so that they do not seem out of place. Techniques like storyboarding can be used to ensure the narrative flows smoothly.
Value communicating:
Use the above message in your communications with the target audience. The mode of communication depends upon the style preferred by the audience. Research says over 50% of people prefer a visual style of communication. The rest is a mix of auditory (>35%), kinesthetic (<15%). Even if there is no opportunity to use pictures painting a picture with words by using metaphors, anecdotes, etc works very well.
Let me know, by commenting, how you were able to use value-overlapping in your communications.
Good read and some additional thoughts around this to suggest
- "A Brand is a promise : What ever your customer says it is". Advertising play a significant role but it also need to live up to that promise.
- The Value is core to the channel where this Advertisement or Product Placement works, on a side note when the Korean movie - "Parasite" recently got rewarded with Oscar winning performance, some FMCG items sales spiked in other parts of the world. The channel of advertisement played a bigger role.
- Advertisement core phenomenon is focused beyond purchase or consumption but to live in an image centric world around it, with Minimalist and other concept of less is more. Priorities…