In an evaluation of customer behavior named “Tightwads and Spendthrifts,” Rick, Cryder, and Loewenstein identify that the level to which folks will spend is determined by the psychological “pain” that the spending causes. Persons will invest, they argue, until it hurts.

In particular, they identify 3 forms of persons:

The “unconflicted,” or the biggest group, spend an average level of dollars just before pain ensues. For these men and women, marketing should sway them to improve their discomfort threshold.
The “spendthrifts’ devote readily and conveniently. Typical marketing approaches is usually employed to attract this type of customer.

The hardest folks to reach will be the “tightwads” who take a great deal of persuading to portion with their money since they hit the discomfort threshold sooner. Minimizing the acquiring discomfort for this group is definitely the secret to achievement.

The book you will be reading bases all of its marketing methods on this premise laid out by Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein. Promoting a solution to a person requires the marketer, I contend, to discover ways to move the meter of one’s discomfort threshold by signifies of some sort of reframing. And what could be additional potent inside the task of reframing pain than by tying our spending habits to our pretty identity? The athlete who runs until she or he can hardly walk views the lactic acid accumulating in their legs not as pain but as an investment in future glory around the field. The law student who pulls an all-nighter studying for an exam will not be experiencing the low of discomfort, but is as an alternative preparing for the higher of achievement within the classroom.

So when the marketer frames the solution in such a way that spending is tied to a larger truth in regards to the identity in the customer, then there ceases to become a discomfort threshold because there ceases to be any pain at all. Buying a item just isn't noticed by the consumer with regards to just how much it drains from one’s bank account, you see, but is instead observed in terms of how much it adds to one’s identity.

The rest with the book lays out for the reader 4 on the most potent facets of our identities as they relate to our consumerist tendencies: people today nowadays are specifically inattentive, trendy, needy, and tribal.