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

In unique, they identify three varieties of folks:

The “unconflicted,” or the largest group, spend an average amount of money before pain ensues. For these men and women, advertising will have to sway them to enhance their pain threshold.
The “spendthrifts’ spend readily and very easily. Typical advertising and marketing strategies might be employed to attract this sort of customer.
The hardest persons to reach are the “tightwads” who take a lot of persuading to aspect with their cash due to the fact they hit the discomfort threshold sooner. Minimizing the buying discomfort for this group would be the secret to results.

The book you happen to be reading bases all of its promoting approaches on this premise laid out by Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein. Promoting a product to a person calls for the marketer, I contend, to locate methods to move the meter of one’s discomfort threshold by indicates of some kind of reframing. And what may very well be extra potent inside the activity of reframing discomfort than by tying our spending habits to our quite identity? The athlete who runs till he or she can hardly walk views the lactic acid accumulating in his or her legs not as discomfort but as an investment in future glory on the field. The law student who pulls an all-nighter studying for an exam is just not experiencing the low of pain, but is instead preparing for the high of accomplishment inside the classroom.

So when the marketer frames the solution in such a way that spending is tied to a bigger truth concerning the identity of your consumer, then there ceases to be a discomfort threshold since there ceases to become any pain at all. Buying a product will not be seen by the customer when it comes to just how much it drains from one’s bank account, you see, but is instead noticed in terms of just how much it adds to one’s identity.

The rest from the book lays out for the reader four of the most potent facets of our identities as they relate to our consumerist tendencies: persons right now are especially inattentive, trendy, needy, and tribal.