by Brian Clark (http://www.copyblogger.com/author/Brian)

If you’re in busi­ness, someone’s got to buy some­thing for you to make money.

At least last time I checked.

(Twit­ter, call me).

For the rest of you, this arti­cle should help you get more peo­ple to buy something.

Sick of Hear­ing that Peo­ple Buy Because of Emotion?

Well then… that would be a strong emo­tional response to a log­i­cal asser­tion, no?

But I hear you. Over and over you’re told that peo­ple buy accord­ing to emo­tion, and it seems not to make sense when it comes down to sell­ing your stuff.

Maybe that’s because you’re think­ing about emo­tion in the con­text of feel­ings rather than motivation.

And that would def­i­nitely be con­fus­ing, because it’s not feel­ings you’re after. In fact, pro­vok­ing feel­ings can kill the sale instead of prompt­ing it.
Noth­ing More Than Feel­ings… (Fail)

Feel­ings are mag­ni­fied, messy, and often mis­un­der­stood forms of emo­tion, and that makes play­ing with them poten­tially dan­ger­ous. What we’re try­ing to do is moti­vate peo­ple to do some­thing very spe­cific (buy)… not get them to weep, fly into a rage, or jump for joy.

This may be why so many peo­ple doubt that we make pur­chase deci­sions via emo­tion. We don’t always detect a strong feel­ing when we reach for our wal­lets, so we must be act­ing from a purely log­i­cal stand­point, right?

Not likely. You sim­ply jus­tify your exist­ing desire to pur­chase with logic. You’ve already decided you want it. It’s still pos­si­ble to talk your­self out of it, but the moti­va­tion to buy was put in place while your log­i­cal brain was mak­ing other plans.

In fact, any time we are moti­vated to do any­thing, emo­tion is pulling the strings. It’s just usu­ally an emo­tional response lower than what we think of as a feel­ing, so we expe­ri­ence our moti­va­tions as mostly rational.

But it’s emo­tion that moves us to act. In fact, the Latin root for the word emo­tion mean “to move,” because emo­tions moti­vate what we do. Psy­chol­o­gists will tell you that moti­va­tions are fairly sim­ple and straight­for­ward, while feel­ings can be quite com­pli­cated (we even lie to our­selves about them).

So, when it comes to get­ting some­one to buy, you’re def­i­nitely invok­ing emo­tion. But by under­stand­ing emo­tional response in terms of moti­va­tion rather than feel­ings, you’ll have a bet­ter idea on how to craft your copy.

More Than a Feel­ing: Motivation

So, again… the goal is not to get some­one to nec­es­sar­ily feel. Your goal is to get some­one to want, and to act on that want. If that seems like a sub­tle dif­fer­ence (since desire can often be a very tan­gi­ble emo­tion), well at least now you accept that emo­tion is dri­ving the train.

In terms of moti­va­tion, psy­chol­o­gists know that emo­tions result in one of three basic cat­e­gories of respon­sive motivation:

Approach

When approach moti­va­tion kicks in, you want to expe­ri­ence or dis­cover more of some­thing. Approach moti­va­tion involves pos­i­tive desire, and the per­ceived value of what you move toward always increases.

Approach moti­va­tion makes sell­ing high qual­ity desir­able prod­ucts easy, whether it be an iPhone or black gran­ite kitchen coun­ter­tops. But it can also be used to sell desir­able out­comes, rang­ing from the Obama cam­paign for empow­ered change, to get rich quick and get skinny now prod­ucts of dubi­ous effectiveness.

Avoid

You want to play upon avoid moti­va­tion when your prospect wants to get away from some­thing of low value. Avoid moti­va­tion deems some­thing unwor­thy of atten­tion, and an incon­ve­nience or annoy­ance that should be ignored or eliminated.

Peo­ple want to avoid pay­ing too much on their elec­tric bill more than any desire for fea­tures of the juice com­ing through the wires, unless you’re using alter­na­tive energy sources, in which case many will do busi­ness with you to avoid adverse envi­ron­men­tal impact. Most char­i­ties play on avoid­ance emo­tions to lessen the impact of poverty, dis­ease, and nat­ural dis­as­ters. Rather than tak­ing a beauty approach, Clear­asil plays on moti­va­tions to avoid the stigma of acne.

Attack

With attack moti­va­tion, peo­ple want to devalue, insult, crit­i­cize, or destroy some­thing. When some­one is emo­tion­ally moti­vated to elim­i­nate some­thing (rather than sim­ply avoid it), attack moti­va­tion is the way to go.

Think about ad cam­paigns for weed killer and bug spray (Raid kills bugs dead!). Like­wise, we’ve seen more than our share of large-scale cam­paigns designed to erad­i­cate var­i­ous com­pli­cated prob­lems by wag­ing war against them – the war on crime, drugs, ter­ror, etc.

What’s My Motivation?

Using the three basic cat­e­gories of emo­tional moti­va­tion, you should be able to craft the right kind of story to get peo­ple to take action. The prob­lem comes when you’re not clear which moti­va­tions you’re actu­ally play­ing to.

For exam­ple, it’s rare that an attack against your com­peti­tor will work on the basis of attack moti­va­tion, but com­par­a­tive adver­tis­ing (Pepsi chal­lenge, Mac Guy and PC guy) can work if you invoke enough approach moti­va­tion due to the expressed ben­e­fits and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. On the other hand, neg­a­tive polit­i­cal ads work on inde­pen­dents not by trig­ger­ing attack moti­va­tion, but instead by prompt­ing avoid­ance… the unde­cided voter doesn’t want to make the wrong choice.

Think­ing in terms of moti­va­tion makes sell­ing with emo­tion a lit­tle less mys­te­ri­ous. And spend­ing the time to truly know who your prospects are makes moti­va­tion crys­tal clear.

Copy­blog­ger was founded in Jan­u­ary of 2006 by Brian Clark. Brian is a new media writer/producer, entre­pre­neur, and recov­er­ing attorney.

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