The 3 Cause Marketing Lessons I Learned From Sea Monkeys

As human beings, we are inherently empathetic. Our brains are hardwired to relate to other people’s experiences. When we witness or imagine someone acting, our neurons fire the same way they would if we were undertaking the same action. That’s why your heart races when your favorite athlete soars toward the basket or why the sight of a mother struggling to save her child from floodwaters causes you pain.

When we translate this empathy into helping another person, our brains have another reaction: We’re rewarded with happy feelings, thanks to a dopamine dose to our brain’s pleasure center.

If empathy is a preexisting human condition, and if it feels good to do good, then it should easy to be a cause marketer. Apply a pink, red or purple ribbon to your campaign and watch people act.

But of course it doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the reason: Empathy is not enough. Compelling people to act on their empathetic impulses means you have to appeal to them in a certain way. Fortunately, a wealth of new research informs that effort. We understand now more than ever how people think—and that means we have a better chance of inspiring them to act.

Research suggests the following factors work best to catalyze action:

1. Appealing to emotions, not just rational argument. People take action for a cause because they feel something, not because they think something.

2. Focusing on personal connections between the cause and the audience. There's no better way to do that by telling a good story about one living being. People relate to individuals more than an undifferentiated mass of people. This is called the "singularity effect."

3. Using positive peer pressure and social proof to catalyze action. People take cues from other people when deciding what to do. When they see other people taking action, they are more likely to do something themselves.

There's a great story that the illustrates these points.

A professional researcher into the singularity effect was inspired to study it further when his daughter’s school class had an aquarium filled with sea monkeys (which are actually just brine shrimp). The researcher noted the monkeys kept dying off until there was only one sole sea monkey left. No one seemed to care until there was only one monkey left floating. The children, who’d viewed the crowded tank as an undifferentiated mass, became hugely devoted to the last sea monkey. They described its personality and cared deeply about its survival, though its brethren’s deaths had barely raised an eyebrow.

Inspired, the researcher did a follow-up study with sea creatures. When participants saw many together in a tank, they were less likely to describe them as conscious, smart or interesting. They were far more likely to bond with one creature alone—or with an odd-looking standout from the crowd. We relate to the lone sea monkey, and we relate to its story.

If you want to make people care, forge an emotional connection over one story - and get people to care together.

For more on sea monkeys and how people really think, check out the ebook I just wrote (it's free): The Brainiac’s Guide to Cause Marketing. It shows how if we get how people think, we can get them to do.