How to speak to your clients’ future self.
If your cause is a long haul rather than a quick fix, this post offers some important considerations.
Longer term initiatives can be tricky, even in our personal lives. Take my house. There’s no end to projects large and small for the 90-year-old cottage. And I’m not averse to home improvement in theory. Six months from now when I want to sit by a fire, I’ll view the day-and-a-half it would take to retile my hearth as a wise investment. It’s something I’ve known for years I should do. But this weekend, amidst another heat wave, the payoff is barely visible. So checking it off the list before January is, at best, a 50/50 proposition.
Thankfully, when my nose does finally reach the domestic grindstone, I usually have plenty of podcasts to keep me entertained. Most recently, that rotation included the TED Radio Hour which featured Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing, behavioral decision making and psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
Hershfield’s talk reminded me that there’s always something to discover in the business of behavioral change. That there are new insights about why we make the decisions we do. And that these insights impact how we persuade people to be safer, smarter or better off.
A series of experiments by Hershfield first proved our brains are more engaged when we think about ourselves than when we think about others. No surprise there. What’s fascinating is that later tests showed our brains perceive our future-self the same way they perceive someone else. Specifically, participants were asked simple questions about:
Themselves
Matt Damon or Natalie Portman
Themselves five years from now
The questions about Matt and Natalie activated the same brain regions as those about the future self. That means that I know as much about myself five years from now as I do about two Oscar winning actors that I have never met. Future me is essentially a stranger.
This explains why changing our behavior for longer-term payoffs can be so difficult. As counterintuitive as it sounds, when it comes to the changes that have cumulative long-term impacts, we simply don’t envision ourselves as the end beneficiary of the change we are being asked to make today.
Hindsight Hinders Foresight
We are highly aware of how we have changed over the years. The greater the degree of change over the past five years, the more we are unable to envision the next five years. Understanding the past teaches us that the future is illusive. The dynamic is even more pronounced among youth. This is because the changes between ages 15 and 20 are more profound than those between say, ages 45 and 50.
Our lack of empathy and identification with our future selves explains impulsive, or System 1, decision making. So, the prediabetic picks up the soda with high fructose corn syrup, the teenager has unprotected sex and so on. Right now wins against down the road every time.
So, here are three things to remember as you plan your next consumer education campaign.
Never make the situation an emergency.
Many of us are working on problems that are indeed urgent. The timing of an intervention in substance abuse disorder, for example, can literally be life or death. This can tempt you to communicate the direness of your cause. Avoiding this tactic is key. Emergencies are rocket fuel for instinctive System 1 decision making. This is hardwired. A sense of peril necessitates instant reaction without logical processing. We don’t debate between fight or flight, we just react. Keeping your message calm and measured allows the recipient the mental space to envision a different future.
Don’t show the cost.
Use storytelling that allows your audience to envision a desirable future state. For-profit online colleges are particularly good at this. They usually don’t show students attending class. Time in the classroom is a cost, just like tuition. Instead, the universities often show a future more desirable than a classroom. Their ads show someone working in their field of study. Better still, some show families having fun. Leisure time is the benefit of a better job which requires the expense of an education. A benefit-driven message makes it a little easier for your audience to imagine an alternative behavior.
Move beyond “awareness.”
My colleagues and I have worked with hundreds of nonprofit clients over the years. I’ve served on the boards of five, worked with others on strategic plans and advised too many to count about consumer education campaigns. It feels like 90 percent of executive directors say they “just need to raise awareness.” While there’s nothing wrong with awareness, you need to see it not as an end, but as a first step. If you can answer yes to the question: “Is this news?” awareness is a valid goal. For example, the new age for colon cancer screening is 45, not 50. Screenings have been recommended for those over 50-years old since the mid-1990s. The US Preventive Services Taskforce made this change in 2021. This is news, so we need to raise awareness. But issues the majority of us are working to change are not news.
Not News:
- Drinking & driving is dangerous.
- We need to wear more sunscreen.
- Eating more vegetables is heart healthy.
Organizations that continue to raise awareness about well-known issues often come across as lecturing or judgmental. And in our world, judgmental is a synonym for ineffective. Instead of awareness, think about creating conversation. Consider the power of communications your consumers would want to share. (Here’s a classic example that’ll make you laugh.)
As for me, I’m off to Ace Hardware for a few tubes of high-heat caulk. Yesterday a coworker showed me pictures of her newly refinished deck, and I haven’t been able to forget the satisfaction on her face. She didn’t intend it, but the exchange turned out to be a potent motivator. More than, say, telling me it gets cold in the winter. 😉
Take care,
Kevin
