In an analysis of customer behavior known as “Tightwads and Spendthrifts,” Rick, Cryder, and Loewenstein determine that the level to which individuals will devote is determined by the psychological “pain” that the spending causes. Individuals will spend, they argue, till it hurts.

In specific, they identify 3 forms of people today:

1. The “unconflicted,” or the largest group, commit an typical quantity of income prior to pain ensues. For these people today, marketing and advertising should sway them to improve their discomfort threshold.
2. The “spendthrifts’ devote readily and conveniently. Typical marketing and advertising methods could be employed to attract this sort of customer.
3. The hardest people to reach are the “tightwads” who take a great deal of persuading to part with their money mainly because they hit the pain threshold sooner. Minimizing the shopping for discomfort for this group would be the secret to success.

The book you're reading bases all of its marketing and advertising tactics on this premise laid out by Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein. Promoting a item to an individual needs the marketer, I contend, to find techniques to move the meter of one’s discomfort threshold by implies of some kind of reframing. And what may be more potent in the activity of reframing discomfort than by tying our spending habits to our extremely identity? The athlete who runs till 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 isn't experiencing the low of pain, but is rather preparing for the high of success within the classroom.

So when the marketer frames the item in such a way that spending is tied to a larger truth in regards to the identity with the customer, then there ceases to become a discomfort threshold mainly because there ceases to become any discomfort at all. Buying a product just isn't seen by the consumer in terms of how much it drains from one’s bank account, you see, but is as an alternative observed in terms of how much it adds to one’s identity.
The rest in the book lays out for the reader four on the most potent facets of our identities as they relate to our consumerist tendencies: folks now are especially inattentive, trendy, needy, and tribal.