The Interest and Desire parts of AIDA model go hand-in-hand: As you’re building the audience interest, you also need to guide them to understand how what you’re offering can help them and the best way of doing this is by appealing to their personal needs and wants.
“Fundamental techniques in handling people”, part one of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” provides a great recipe for generating desire:
1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in other person an eager want.
Here in the immortal words of Dale Carnegie, is the main reason you will rarely see advertisers go into direct “comparative advertising” and tackle their competition head on.
“Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”
Carnegie goes onto quote B. F. Skinner,”… the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment. The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.”
And this is the basis of all loyalty and reward programs that have been implemented for the last 100 or so years primarily by retailers ranging from coupons to points! Simple – reward good behaviour!
Some brands don’t even realise that they inhibit their brand development by criticizing their audience behaviour without even knowing it! Can they still be incredibly successful – sure, after all the brand slogan or it’s positioning statement is not the sole success factor of a business! And I for one believe that the extremely successful Specsavers optical chain could be even more successful with a slogan that does not implicitly berate it’s target audience – “You should have gone to Specsavers”.
Being myopic and hence the ideal prospect for Specsavers, I’m ready to dispense some long-sighted brand building advice!
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