Under The Spell Of Fascination...
Danijela Jerkovi?
Ba.Sci., CA Certified Accountant, CIA Certified Internal Auditor | Managing Director at Danijela Jerkovic's Services
“It’s the unknown that draws people.”
~E.A. Bucchianeri
FASCINATE:
Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
Author: Sally Hogshead
Under the spell of fascination, they became hostage to his thoughts, losing the ability to think rationally or protest.
Throughout cultures, across the continents, since the birth of civilization itself, people have studied the ways in which fascination influences behavior.
The word “fascination” comes from the ancient Latin, fascinare, “to bewitch.”
All around the world, ancient cultures were fascinated with fascination. The Romans believed it was an evil curse, and for protection worshipped one of the earliest Latin divinities: Fascinus, the god of fascination.? In Mesopotamia, Persians believed fascination could cause deadly maladies. In Constantinople, citizens painted passages from the Koran upon their houses to defend their families from the spell of fascination’s evil eye. Fortunately, by 280 B.C.,?Greece’s first pastoral poet, Theocritus, seemed to have found a safeguard: an old woman’s spit. During the Renaissance, the bookshelves of Europe were filled with weighty tomes on the subject. De Fascino defined fascination as “an open covenant with Satan…witchcraft of the eyes, or words…to so compel men that they are no longer free, nor of sane understanding.” A hundred years later, Tractatus de Fascinatione warned against lounging in bed too late in the morning wearing nightcaps (yes, nightcaps), or breaking a religious fast on green peas (yes, green peas).
Greece’s first pastoral poet, Theocritus, seemed to have found a safeguard: an old woman’s spit. During the Renaissance, the bookshelves of Europe were filled with weighty tomes on the subject.
De Fascino defined fascination as “an open covenant with Satan…witchcraft of the eyes, or words…to so compel men that they are no longer free, nor of sane understanding.” A hundred years later, Tractatus de Fascinatione warned against lounging in bed too late in the morning wearing nightcaps (yes, nightcaps), or breaking a religious fast on green peas (yes, green peas).
Greece’s first pastoral poet, Theocritus, seemed to have found a safeguard: an old woman’s spit. During the Renaissance, the bookshelves of Europe were filled with weighty tomes on the subject. De Fascino defined fascination as “an open covenant with Satan…witchcraft of the eyes, or words…to so compel men that they are no longer free, nor of sane understanding.”
A hundred years later, Tractatus de Fascinatione warned against lounging in bed too late in the morning wearing nightcaps (yes, nightcaps), or breaking a religious fast on green peas (yes, green peas).
LUST creates the craving for sensory pleasure.
MYSTIQUE lures with unanswered questions.
ALARM threatens with negative consequences.
PRESTIGE earns respect through symbols of achievement.
POWER commands and controls.?
VICE tempts with “forbidden fruit,” causing us to rebel against norms.
TRUST comforts us with certainty and reliability.?
Whether you realize it or not—whether you intend to or not—you’re already using the seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result?
By mastering the triggers, your ideas become more memorable, your conversations more persuasive, and your relationships more lasting.
Across the ages, scholars have described the powers of fascination.
Century after century, they’ve told us how to recognize when someone is in a state of fascination.
Society after society, they’ve defined why fascination matters.
How can you become more fascinating??
What Is “Fascination, ” Exactly??
A competitive environment demands a more captivating message.
In a distracted and overwhelmed world, everything—including you, your communication, and your relationships—fights tooth and nail to get noticed.
When you fascinate other people, not only do they focus on you and your message but they’re also more likely to believe, care about, and retell your message.?
Companies will add more value, and compete more effectively, by activating one or more of the seven triggers. Those who don’t will be pushed aside or, worse, forgotten. Messages that fail to fascinate will become irrelevant. It’s that simple.
This might not be fair. But as Salem villager Giles Corey can attest, fascination doesn’t always play nice.?
We all have certain behaviors that don’t exactly make sense, even to ourselves. We make certain choices and take certain actions, without understanding exactly why.
Here’s why: In a state of fascination, we don’t think and act quite logically. We do things we don’t understand, we believe messages we don’t agree with, and we buy things we don’t even want. At its most extreme, fascination short-circuits the logical evaluation process.
Why did millions of people trust Hitler?
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, and deny any contradicting input, eventually people will come to believe it.
...the prestige trigger
... the mystique trigger
You don’t control fascination. Fascination controls you.?
FASCINATE:
Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
Author: Sally Hogshead
Fascinate or Fail Will You Fascinate? Or Will You Fail??
No matter how long it lasts, what behavior it motivates, or which trigger inspires it, every fascination binds with a singularly intense connection.?
Think of when you’re “in the zone.”
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes what he calls a “flow state,” and its loss of self-consciousness. “Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus.”
All fascination creates a momentary connection, but obsessions create an ongoing unhealthy connection.
The next time you find yourself intrigued by a certain person, engrossed?in a conversation, or mesmerized during an event, ask yourself: What’s happening under the surface of your decision-making to cause this heightened interest? It might be a complex intertwining of triggers. Or it might be as simple as a smile.?
If the Amazon jungle is the most competitive place on Earth, the second most competitive might be Amazon.com.
Books compete to fascinate in many of the same ways, because the more crowded an environment, the more competitive?it becomes, and the harder each individual must work. Flowers must fascinate insects, and books must fascinate readers, in order to survive.?
We’re constantly “reading” the facial cues of those around us, searching for signals: smiles, wide eyes, scowls, tears. By looking at just two eyes, a nose, and a smile, we can decipher and predict an extraordinary range of emotions, personality traits, and intentions. Faces are so key to our survival, in fact, that we’re born to be fascinated by them.?
Facial fascination is such a critical skill that our brain has a region specifically for recognizing, interpreting, and responding to human faces: the fusiform face area, or FFA.
A sense of humor, like a smile, is fascinating for evolutionary reasons. Recent studies show that women are more attracted to funny men because humor broadcasts a rich surplus of intellect and health to a potential mate.
As Phil Cowdell describes, “The traditional advertising model was built upon this principle of passively absorbing information, slowly ingraining and embedding it. The greater the number of messages, and the higher the exposure to those messages, the more valuable the brand, and the more ubiquitous.” Now a marketer’s job is more difficult because the hedge maze changes every day.?
Advertising started with the Egyptians, who used papyrus to make sales messages and posters.* In the early twentieth century, advertisers developed tools to get attention on behalf of brands. These tools, such as radio ads, billboards, and the like, were rational, grounded in repetition and awareness. They were based on how often someone heard a message, rather than on how intriguing that message was.
Interest is not enough.
In our chaotic world, our minds and our lives have become so cluttered that we rarely focus on just one thing at any given time. We’ve thrown open the doors to the short-attention-span theater, and now the show parades around us at a rate of five thousand marketing messages per day, faster than FedEx, louder than Kanye West, bigger than Disney World. Our attention spans are shrinking at a rate inverse to the growing number of distractions. A hundred years ago, our attention span averaged twenty minutes: one minute for each year of age, up until age twenty. Things were slower on the farm, with fewer distractions.
Picture attention as a currency. When we pay to see a movie or read a book, we’re paying for stimulation. Until fairly recently, this model worked just fine, because there was far more attention available than stimulation to fill that attention.
People “paid” attention. But now attention is scarce. It’s usually difficult and expensive to convince a consumer to focus on a brand message. Attention has become more important, rarer, and more valuable. To get someone’s attention, now a marketer must earn it, often with massive effort and crazy expense. Even if a brand could reach everyone, it still can’t break through most of the time. People simply shut out a message by fast-forwarding or clicking to the next one.?
Marketers have to deal with all kinds of “attention gatekeepers” designed to shut out messages: TiVo, do-not-call lists, noise-canceling headphones, and pop-up blockers. We all have to move past people’s natural resistance, because now, with modern technology, people can more easily avoid messages.
Assuming you do avoid being ignored, your next challenge is to avoid being forgotten. (If you can avoid being ignored and forgotten, you must still actually make someone act upon your message.)
The shift from the Information Age to the Fascination Age
In the last century, information was a scarce resource. Success relied upon capturing and generating information, so information was power. Wars were won with cracked codes and more sophisticated information systems. But information is no longer hard to find. Search engines changed all that. Now, data are a commodity. What’s scarce? Complete focus. Information isn’t power—the ability to fascinate is power. This trend isn’t just deflating the value of information—it’s also changing the market value of products themselves.
We once lived in a goods-based economy, then moved to a service-based economy; then came the information economy, and knowledge economy.
Fascination is the means by which companies will be able to charge a premium for products, command more influence in the marketplace, and build more loyal relationships over time.
Companies that can help consumers feel more fascinated in their own lives, or more fascinating in their relationships, not only will win the sale but will earn consumers who actively seek out those products.?
Fascinating People and Companies Win
They win bigger budgets, more time, better relationships, greater admiration, deeper trust. The ones that fail to connect and stimulate will, increasingly, lose the battle. It’s that simple. You can’t survive if you can’t persuade someone to engage with you. What behaviors are you trying to elicit??
Most of us, at some point, are trying to get others to “do” something. But we can’t get them to do much of anything until they’re focused on our message. People won’t change a preference, start a thought process, form a bond, or make a behavioral shift unless they’re provoked to change their opinions or actions.?
It’s not enough to want to fascinate. It’s not enough to brainstorm genius concepts out of the wazoo if we can’t attract interest and support for our best ideas.
But why? Why do certain ideas captivate, while others, seemingly equally deserving, never get quite enough recognition or support?
Gold Hallmarks of a Fascinating Message
Fascinating people and companies don’t just talk at us. They get under our skin and into our conversations. They challenge and move us. They’re unafraid to ask questions, and along the way, change the way we think. They earn our business, as well as our trust and our conversations. Instead of getting us to merely notice them, the fascinating ones change us in some way.
A fascinating message, like a fascinating person, steps outside the norms in one or more of the?following ways:
Fascinating people, like fascinating companies, don’t try to explain why they’re fascinating.
The Wizard of Oz said, “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” The true measure of the fascination lies not in your own communication to the world, but in how the world communicates about you.
If this sounds emotional, that’s because it is. We don’t intellectually evaluate messages—any more than we intellectually evaluate whether someone’s voice is high or low. A voice either intimidates us, or it doesn’t. A message either does or doesn’t grip our interest (and more often than not, it doesn’t).
For many brands, this is bad news. People don’t want to connect with brands. They want to connect with each other. Fascinating companies create more opportunities for people to connect with each other, through the brand.
For marketers, it’s not about marketing a message—it’s about getting the?market to create messages about you. For a website—it’s not about the number of links on your site, but about how many sites, and the quality of the sites, that link to you.?
David Meerman Scott is an online marketing and PR expert, speaker, and best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave.
If your name is John Smith or Joe Johnson, what to do? Modify it. “Don’t underestimate the importance of your name being easily found on the first page of search results. It’s essential.”
The F Score to objectively evaluate the level of fascination generated by a product, brand, or idea.?
Fascinating brands have an extraordinary ability to influence behavior, and the same is true of personalities.
A person doesn’t have to be likable to be fascinating.
A company that is respected isn’t necessarily fascinating.
Different people embody different types of fascination. That’s a good thing. There’s no one “right” way to fascinate.
Do you lead? Only if you are able to fascinate others to follow you and your vision. Because, as Peter Drucker said, “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.”
No fascination, no followers.
It’s a fact in leadership, on Twitter, and in your own life. Of course, all the fascination in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have something worthwhile to say. What you’re saying is still more important than how you’re saying it.
No matter how important your message is, it still must be heard in order to be effective.
That’s where the seven triggers come in: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust.
Each trigger is a world unto itself, each with invisible behavioral tripwires and reflexes.
Once we identify the forces behind each trigger, you’ll see why you’re convinced by some leaders (but not others), why you take some unwise risks (even though you know full well you shouldn’t), and why you buy certain brands (without actually having the foggiest idea why)
FASCINATE:
Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
Author: Sally Hogshead
The Seven Fascination Triggers
Meet Your New Arsenal: Lust, Mystique, Alarm, Prestige, Power, Vice, and Trust
Nothing is, in itself, fascinating. When something activates a trigger, we’re compelled to focus—whether we want to or not. Many fascinations revolve around things that are not in themselves “fascinating” or “unfascinating.” Context and meaning determine whether a person or product is fascinating.
We all have triggers that turn otherwise ordinary objects into fascinations. We all become captivated by certain people, ideas, and things that might be totally unfascinating to someone else.
There’s also a matter of personal preference. Different triggers possess different levels of appeal to different people. Some people respond very strongly to vice, whereas others are most fascinated by prestige.?
Meaningless things fascinate consumers all the time, if a brand can give that object meaning with a logo
When consumers buy a certain brand, they’re often not paying for the utility of the item. What they’re actually buying is the trigger. The strongest brands create triggers around things that would otherwise be?meaningless.
Triggers also bring meaning to all types of otherwise meaningless scenarios.?
Triggers apply meaning, and the more meaning, the more fascination.
The context creates triggers and presto! You’re fascinated!
A combination of triggers around them made them fascinating. Understanding how to switch on that response mechanism in others gives us the power to change people’s opinions and behavior.?
Wicked behavior shocks us, loud noises alert us, and unsolved mysteries send us on fact-finding missions for resolution. It all comes down to the same seven triggers. But how? How do these triggers cause us to fixate, sometimes irrationally so??
Once you understand how the triggers turn otherwise meaningless things into intense captivations, you’ll realize how fascination directs decision-making.?
Each trigger adds a different type of energy to your message.?
LUST
Whether we realize it or not, our own oral wetness announces our positive or negative emotional state to the world. These are just a few of the unconscious lust hints we give off every day…cues that either pull people closer to us or push them away.
What Is “Lust”?
Meet an eternally favorite deadly sin. Lust fascinates through experience: our appetites and passions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and scent. We anticipate what it might be like to fulfill this craving, and that anticipation pulls us closer.?
Overcoming desire is no easy task. Major philosophies have grappled with this topic since the sixth century. Buddhism presented the “overcoming of desire” as an ideal. In contrast, by appealing to our most undisciplined urges, the lust trigger unleashes parts of ourselves that we’ve struggled for centuries to tame. Lust tends to be particularly difficult to ignore because it doesn’t stem from wise and reasonable decision-making. As a result, this trigger is especially useful in heightening desire.?
At its heart and soul, lust stems from the biological attraction. It triggers both a physical and emotional response, one that bypasses rational scrutiny and?heads straight to desire. We might successfully resist lust, but we cannot talk ourselves out of it. It’s rarely “take it or leave it.” Willpower can change our actions, but not our fascinations. Facts create alarm, and opinions stem from power; however, lust is different. It doesn’t involve reasoning. It’s not sensible.
If your message currently relies on an otherwise rational message, lust can add new ways to increase your desirability. The need for a visceral element, such as lust, is especially critical for messages relying upon power or prestige because these triggers can sometimes feel cold or impersonal.
Additionally, trust, which often relies upon rational information and reliability, benefits from cues of attraction.
At first, many people and companies assume lust isn’t appropriate for them. Don’t write it off so quickly. In a competitive marketplace (read: almost every modern marketplace), all of us can benefit from becoming more sought-after for our ability to make others feel closer to us. Many corporations, especially traditional ones, benefit from the warmth and emotion of this trigger.
Do you want to invite people closer? Do you want them to crave your message? Do you want to add warmth to an otherwise cold package or process? Do you want to pull consumers into stores, magnetically drawn to look at and touch your product?
Lust builds the allure of this interaction.?
Lust is not about utility or function. A product does not become more lustful by adding more data to the instruction manual, or more product descriptions on the product label.?
Great design frequently uses lust, especially when that design brings a?human sensibility to an object, or makes the functionality more pleasurable.
Lust offers four pillars: Stop thinking, start feeling. Make the ordinary more emotional. Use all five senses. And tease and flirt.
Instead of selling a brand simply on rational benefits, this trigger focuses on creating an experiential attachment.?
Lust conquers the rational evaluation process, freeing us to stop thinking, and start feeling. We might not even realize it’s happening, but in relationships, the effects can be long-lasting.
Maya Angelou remarked, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The word “lust” connotes many things, but watercooler conversation is generally not among them. Yet the most essential application of this trigger might live in our everyday conversations. Trust is the trigger most associated with relationships for its authenticity, consistency, reliability. However, lust can play a role as well, infusing communication with warmth and positive chemistry.
Lust can bring approachability and friendliness to a conversation, encouraging strangers to lower their natural barriers of resistance, making them more likely to absorb our message.?
When we smile affectionately, touch someone’s sleeve during a difficult conversation, lean in to listen more closely, we’re bonding by drawing upon lust. If trust is the trigger that drives what you say and when you say it, lust is the trigger that drives how you say it. By combining both of these, a message is more likely to be heard and remembered.
Trust stabilizes long-term relationships, and lust encourages people to return repeatedly.?
Long-term relationships require that those involved keep coming back. In order to trigger lust over the long term, continually pique new types of appetites.
Lust is a promise of pleasure. It is not, necessarily, the fulfillment of that pleasure. This trigger often hints and tantalizes and even promises, without follow-through. At its best, lust makes others want more (and more and more), even if those wants are never fulfilled.?
Yes, “the chase” really can be more exciting than the prize. Neuroscientists explored this premise in a simple experiment. They examined brain scans of monkeys eyeing a luscious treat: a grape.?
The conclusion: As a motivator, desire is more powerful than fulfillment.
The pursuit of pleasure is often more fascinating than the pleasure itself. Keeping that desire unfulfilled, or at least never entirely satisfied, is the key to long-term fascination through lust. Otherwise, the champagne goes flat. Lust engages our imagination. It allows us to participate in the process, filling in the possibilities. As with the mystique trigger, lust makes us want more, yet once we experience the complete truth, our desire might weaken. There’s a reason that burlesque shows are rarely performed in the harsh morning light. Other triggers focus on the follow-through of a message, such as power and trust. But lust, like mystique and alarm, is more about implications.?
Lust ends, at least temporarily, once a craving is fulfilled.
Cirque du Soleil uses several triggers, including mystique (its tightly held secrets), prestige (high-end execution), and power (extraordinary training and skill). Yet most fascinating of all is the way in which Cirque du Soleil flirts with the audience.
Acrobats use a playful style of interaction that gaily sidesteps lead-footed seriousness. From the elaborate costumes and makeup to the avant-garde aerial artistry, at the end of the show, audiences crave more.?
Lust leads to behavior that’s irrational, unreasonable, and, in many cases, flat-out absurd. For many types of messages, this is good news. Critical, actually. For products that are irrationally expensive or unhealthy, or for?messages that require people to step beyond their normal sense of restraint, lust can tip things over the line. Lust turns “I really shouldn’t” into “I really shouldn’t, but I will anyway.” Combined with the vice and prestige triggers, lust compels people to buy products with higher sensory fulfillment, even if they’re irrationally expensive.
If your message must compel people to want something—really, really want it, despite rational evidence to the contrary—employ the factors of sight, sound, taste, touch, and scent.?
Lust and mystique are good friends and often work in tandem.
They both revolve around unfulfilled interest, piquing curiosity, and the desire for more. To pique your curiosity, consider this: Mystique compels people to buy products they don’t need, or even want. And in one case, as you’ll soon find out, it compels them to pay a premium for a product they actively dislike.?
MYSTIQUE
The bittersweetly harsh taste is unmistakable.
Many companies pour a jigger of mystique into their brands. The more information these brands withhold, the more consumers want those products.?
After a few shots, your memory of the evening’s events could well be an unsolved mystery.
What Is Mystique?
Eye-catching enough to get noticed, yet complex enough to stay interesting. Revealing enough to pique curiosity, yet shadowy enough to prompt questions.
Mystique flirts with us, provoking our imagination, hinting at the possibilities, inviting us to move closer while eluding our grasp. It doles out information, without ever actually giving anything away.
Like the lust trigger, this trigger is rooted in fulfillment.
The magic trick ends if you find out how the white rabbit appears from the black hat. Of the seven triggers, this is the most nuanced, and perhaps the most difficult to achieve. Mystique invites others closer, without giving them what they seek. A delicate balance to be sure, but successfully achieved its fascination’s exemplar.
Mystique can add anticipation and curiosity to any relationship, from new business pitches to social invitations, by motivating others to return for more.
There are four main ways to trigger mystique’s delicate balance: Spark curiosity. Withhold information. Build mythology. And limit access. Begin by sparking an intense behavioral motivator: curiosity.?
Intriguing people make us curious to learn more. We think about them, we talk with our friends about them, we might research them, we want to be close to them emotionally, intellectually, or physically.
Products affect us the same way. When a product has successfully fascinated us through mystique, we might ask friends about it to hear their experiences, research it online, read the manual, spend time learning about its history and process, and spend time in the store.
If we’re deeply fascinated by a brand, we might join hash groups on Twitter, or travel to a conference where it’s featured.
If you fascinate others with mystique, they’ll want more information. Reveal that information very carefully, if at all. Show a glimpse without giving away the money shot.?
We’re fascinated by mystique because of our natural desire to fill in the missing information. If there’s a question, we want an answer. “What happens next? How will the story end? Who gets the girl?” Withholding information can be a valuable tactic for any professional, but for some, it’s a full-time pursuit.?
At the highest level of play, winning depends not merely on the skill, experience, statistics, or even luck with the cards, but also on an intimate understanding of human nature.
In poker, the truth isn’t written just all over your face. The truth is written all over your body.?
Tournament poker is no longer a game of cards, but a game of interpretation, deception, and self-control.
We selectively reveal our strengths and weaknesses to those around us and choose which secrets to share. At the same time, we search for tells—pieces of information to answer our questions and predict others’ behavior.?
Withholding information, as we know, is vital to the mystique.
The more valued the prize, the more others will vie for the information required to win it.
Once your message captures a high level of interest, you can withhold more information, thereby provoking further mystique. The higher the stakes, the more all-consuming the participation.
In addition to withholding certain information, we can also build a mystique around a message by gradually introducing new information and meaning, adding layers of mythology.?
“Mythology” is the collection of stories, traditions, and beliefs belonging to a particular group or event. It can be strategically fostered, or it might just?naturally build over time.?
Mystique offers a competitive advantage, even for parity products or stale companies, because mystique doesn’t require a complete reinvention.
Stories are more powerful messages than facts. They allow others to participate and draw their own conclusions.
Over time, a group’s “tribal knowledge” turns into mythology, creating an unspoken shorthand for bigger?events and stories. Religions use stories rather than facts to build mystique, as do shows such as J. J. Abrams’s Lost, and even Barack Obama’s candidacy.
Facts alone can help with other triggers, such as power and trust, but not this one. If you want to build mythology within your company, rather than circulating a PowerPoint of data, cultivate legend and lore. As we now know, information kills mystique.
Coca-Cola’s secret ingredient, the cryptically dubbed “Merchandise 7X,” has remained a secret since the soda’s invention in 1886. The company has kept its prized list of ingredients in a vault inside the Trust Company’s bank since 1925. This much is known.
From there, it’s difficult to tell fact from fiction, because Coca-Cola itself builds specialness around its drink by feeding mythology to reporters and consumers.
One urban myth states that only two Coca-Cola executives know Coke’s formula; however, they each know only half. The truth, apparently, is a bit different but no less mythologically lavish. Coca-Cola shrewdly builds mythology in conversation and the media, boosting our perception of the drink’s value and cachet.
Executives who know the recipe cannot travel in the same airplane, because in case of a crash, the recipe would be lost forever.
Information is the lifeblood of the company.
Secret formulas can turn an otherwise mundane recipe of any sort into a source of fascination. If mystique is the life-blood of sugar water, consider what it might accomplish for your company.?
Successfully mysterious people and groups limit access. They maintain control by making people feel special to be “on the inside.” When people feel that they’re part of the select few, they’re more committed. And they make all those people on the outside want to get inside to see what all the fuss is about, building mystique envy.?
These days, the mystique has, alas, become rare. Confidentiality is all but extinct because we have too much access.
If mystique is your main trigger, remember, your mystique ends when the chase ends.
Once lost, mystique cannot be regained.
It must be impeccably maintained, without ever fulfilling the desire for more information, or else the spell will be shattered forever.
Know when to end your message. And on that note, we’ll end here.?
ALARM
What Is Alarm?
Physiologically, people are programmed to focus and act. Under the influence of alarm, people respond in one of two ways: attempt to get rid of the danger, or panic and flee the perceived danger. Fight or flight.
In either case, they often ignore rational thought, acting instead under far more instinctive motives. Our bodies involuntarily respond to an alarm in specific ways, such as increased heart rate, decreased motor skills, and the perceptual narrowing of tunnel vision. It all translates to simple physical responses: that thin trickle of sweat sliding down your temple as you sit for your performance review, or the kaboom-kaboom in your chest when the HR department calls and asks if you’ve “got a minute.” Something’s about to happen, and the situation demands focus. These instinctive reactions started before the modern workplace before we were even human. At the beginning of our evolutionary journey, in the swamps of Pangaea, the alarm was our most important trigger for survival.
We work hard to eliminate mortal dangers in our environment. We sterilize, we vaccinate, we declaw, we bubble-wrap. Given this, how, exactly, can we explain the popularity of risk-chasing pastimes such as skydiving, or running with the bulls?
It all comes down to the adrenaline rush. A few generations ago, humans experienced danger at every turn. Now we miss the rush, according to scientists, and some of us even crave it. Without the daily prospect of death, we artificially generate adrenaline by tempting fate.
The alarm trigger has a unique ability to compel people to do things they otherwise don’t care to do, in order to avoid consequences.
Consequences usually follow a similar formula: “If you don’t do this, then that will happen.”?
The more clearly a message points to consequences, and the greater those consequences, the more urgently people focus on the message.
To increase the likelihood of action around your consequences, strengthen your argument with a deadline. Whether gentle or rigorous, deadlines heighten immediacy.?
The alarm is such a universal and involuntary trigger that people manipulate it for a variety of different uses: leadership, politics, fund-raising, and parenting. (And marketing, of course.)
Deadlines can effectively persuade people to accomplish unpleasant tasks. The same principle applies in motivating many types of behavior toward goals. Through deadlines, leaders can positively motivate large groups of people, especially when used in combination with triggers such as trust, power, and prestige. When people are getting in shape, personal trainers help them stay focused on a specific weight or fitness goal. Year-end sales quotas can help sales reps stay on track.
We generally don’t like to lose potential options. When deadlines are applied, we’re forced to make a decision. Indecision is a decision.
Ever have trouble focusing on a task, delaying it again and again until finally the deadline is perilously close, and you suddenly seem to magically snap into focus? As a procrastinator, you have an alarm to thank for your sudden ability to accomplish the task. Alarm, we now know, sparks a series of involuntary physical responses, one of which is the adrenal focus. When a deadline is comfortably far away, procrastinators don’t feel enough alarm to merit attention. As the deadline looms, the consequences of missing the deadline become more imminent. Studies show that’s the point at which alarm reaches a critical mass, and the task becomes fascinating in order to avoid the consequences.?
Ever have trouble focusing on a task, delaying it again and again until finally the deadline is perilously close, and you suddenly seem to magically snap into focus? As a procrastinator, you have an alarm to thank for your sudden ability to accomplish the task.
Alarm, we now know, sparks a series of involuntary physical responses, one of which is the adrenal focus. When a deadline is comfortably far away, procrastinators don’t feel enough alarm to merit attention. As the deadline looms, the consequences of missing the deadline become more imminent. Studies show that’s the point at which alarm reaches a critical mass, and the task becomes fascinating in order to avoid the consequences.?
If the alarm gets dialed up to the point of panic, the benefits diminish.
Neuroscience shows that after the fear system of the brain kicks into overdrive, decision-making stops. We stop thinking creatively and start reacting purely out of fear. If you’re a manager, apply threats constructively.
Whether real or perceived, alarm flings people into high alert, filling them with a sense of readiness, danger, or even terror.
In the face of too much pressure, with consequences that are too great, people can’t perform. They simply shut down, thrust into a frozen deer-in-headlights confusion. A manager’s message is no longer fascinating if her group is unable to respond.?
It’s a simple equation: Alarm threatens. We act.
Of all the seven triggers, this one is the most visceral, and never is it more visceral than when applied to the human body itself.?
Every message has the potential to activate alarm.
Rather than overcoming our so-called flaws, we should push them into service for our higher purpose.?
By identifying an audience’s hot buttons, a message can target which alarm creates enough fascination to change behavior. Often, the most frightful risks are highly implausible, and might not be immediately obvious.
Alarm responses don’t always make sense. Think back to the comparison of a fire drill versus fire in a theater. In the actual fire, people will go to any lengths to escape the source of alarm. This does make sense if escaping the theater is a matter of life or death.
But what about the opposite? Would an audience also begin a stampede on their way inside a theater? On one bitterly cold December evening, that very thing happened.
Like the other six triggers, an alarm doesn’t always make sense. But it does compel people to act, and act quickly. For positive action, point this action toward desired behavior.?
Often, people mistakenly think of alarm as inherently negative. Not so. Like all triggers, this one isn’t inherently “good” or “bad.” It often has very positive results.
Until people became fascinated through the alarm, they were perfectly happy to toss paper and glass in the same bin. Until people became fascinated through the alarm, they were perfectly happy to toss paper and glass in the same bin.?There are many important messages out in the world. Most, almost all, will go ignored. It doesn’t matter how valid and critical your message is if no one listens and responds.
We may not always like or enjoy messages that generate the alarm. Often we don’t. However, we do pay attention. Similarly, we may not always like or enjoy those we respect, but they earn our fascination. In our next trigger, prestige, we’ll find out why.?
PRESTIGE
It’s in our nature to prove worth and value. People today are still drawn to objects and endeavors that represent social standing, and probably always will be. We’ll be fascinated by prestige as long as we remain hardwired to compare ourselves to those around us.?
What Is Prestige?
Fancy logos, designer brands, and famous European hotels might come to?mind. But that’s merely the obvious side of prestige. This trigger reveals a group’s values and beliefs by identifying the pecking order among its members. Prestige rates people and objects relative to one another.?
People go to great lengths to attain the object of their fascination. How can you make people fascinated to attain you? No matter what your personality or product, prestige can increase your perceived value.
There are four ways: Develop emblems, set new standards, limit availability, and earn them.
To begin, let’s find out how emblems work.
Emblems fulfill a deep, instinctive need because they say something about us. Abraham Maslow calls this “esteem”: the need to feel important, respected, and recognized as an achiever. We satisfy this need by communicating our value to the world around us.
Emblems can be simple or elaborate, expensive or humble, but all share some degree of unattainability. Emblems incentivize people to stay a step ahead of everyone else.
By developing symbols of value, groups can strengthen participation and commitment. People eagerly work to acquire and show off emblems. So it only makes sense that companies should develop emblems of value. Prestigious groups monitor access to remain sought-after, rare, and valuable.?
To establish fresh prestige, consider the existing standards—and how to set a new one.?
Setting a new standard doesn’t just change perceptions of a company; it shifts its entire category. Once set apart, a prestigious brand will have no alternatives, merely inferior substitutes.?
In 1867, Karl Marx had commented in Das Kapital, “If we could succeed, at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.” Quite fortunately, the House of Winston proved him wrong, and their diamonds retained prestige. Any product can prove Marx wrong, and avoid commoditization, as long as it triggers fascination.?
If a manager can create an environment in which people compare themselves to one another, they often naturally seek to achieve just slightly more than those around them.
领英推荐
Living Up to the Hype
Forcing others to wait (whether for an appointment, or a new product release) can raise prestige. However, limiting availability only works when people get something worthwhile in exchange. Every detail must justify the heightened cost.
Economies change, and with them, tastes.
Prestige demands meaning in order to justify the fascination.?Prestige demands meaning in order to justify the fascination.?
Increasingly, prestige lives in our accomplishments, network, and personal reputation (elements more within our control than being a royal firstborn).?
Like our next trigger, power, the most authentic and lasting fascinations require you to earn them.?
POWER
Under the influence of the power trigger, people submit to being controlled.
What Is “Power”?
No matter where you rank on the pecking order, no matter your age or gender, no matter your continent or political view, power fascinates you. It’s a response as involuntary as it is primal. As the alphas of the pack, powerful people control our behavior in a myriad of ways.
Wordlessly, they set the rules.
Who’s powerful?
Though their leadership differs, powerful people share an ability to both make decisions and influence decisions.
Anything can trigger power if it controls its environment.
Power is, of course, hard to quantify. Wealth is often a source of power. Position regularly translates into power. Perhaps the most ancient source of power is grounded in subtler things, like access or ideas.
There is no single or universally accepted metric for power, so a certain amount of subjective judgment is inevitable. Determining who has it and who does not is made more difficult because some of the most influential among us commonly mask their power or use it infrequently.?
In positive circumstances, power can motivate others to rise to their best. Used differently, it can unjustly intimidate or persecute.?
All seven triggers live on a spectrum. In the case of power, it ranges from delicate suggestion to crushing force.
Under the influence of extreme power, individuals have little choice.
Their behavior is controlled by someone (or something) else. People obey because they must, as a matter of survival.
Power isn’t necessarily overpowering. It can guide gently, even lovingly. It’s a necessary ingredient in many forms of structure, training, and motivation to achieve higher results.?
Whether parental or dictatorial, authority figures use power to control us. This trigger weaves itself throughout our life every day, guiding our behavior.
Used intelligently and selectively, this trigger strengthens your reputation and earns respect. In a competitive marketplace, it can give a decided upper hand.
Power offers three paths: dominate, control the environment, and, finally, reward and punish.
In the presence of power, we instinctively become submissive. When we’re in the presence of someone who is more powerful, our innate response mechanisms are altered—translating into essentially a “deer in headlights” response, because “your body is preparing to have heightened attentiveness to what others are doing and how you’re being evaluated,” says Deborah Gruenfeld of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
When we are talking to a more powerful person, experts report, our personal boundaries can lower, making us resistant or skeptical. Our body language and speech patterns usually become deferential. We’re more open to suggestions, more easily persuaded, and more likely to be dominated.?
We all willingly allow ourselves to take a backseat in certain situations. But some people go to a greater extreme. They eagerly pay to be dominated. Even humiliated.
“People value praise more when it comes from people who don’t give it out easily.”
Can you persuade others to obey you? Yes, you can.
Who said fascinating people always play nice? Not in this trigger they don’t.?
Marketers kindle insecurities all the time, and with great effectiveness.
The alarm trigger shows that negative consequences prompt action. This principle applies here as well. Consumers buy products to solve problems; the more negative and immediate the consequences, the greater a consumer’s fascination with purchase. By provoking insecurities around our parenting skills, sexual prowess, intellect, and financial savvy, products trigger fascination.?
Many groups invoke power by establishing a clear ranking system.
Without much effort, cliques form unspoken rules about who’s in charge. Social networking sites do this all the time, listing each user’s number of followers, offering easy public tools to rank a user’s influence within the network.?
Just as we’re instinctively?fascinated by faces, we stare at the power.?
Every day, we allow others to control our personal environment.?
The Most Fascinating Organization in the World?
The six Gold Hallmarks of a Fascinating Message:
Psychologists suggest that when people are no longer in charge of basic elements of a situation (such as where they sit, or when they go to the restroom), they must give over some degree of control that they normally use to define their independence, and thus themselves.
Many researchers have proven that once people have agreed to let go of small details, they become more willing to submit to the more significant changes.
By gradually releasing self-control, they open themselves up to more significant changes, and to the leader.
The leader’s message sinks in far more deeply, “destabilizing” an individual and shedding his natural resistance.?
By convincing the audience to follow specific rules, leaders can make their message become more fascinating.
Rarely do we seek to be manipulative or dictatorial. But we do want to persuade. A fascinating meeting clearly positions a leader and allows an audience to immerse themselves in the message. Begin that process from the very first impression.?
Remember the tagline “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”? Ma?tre d’s know this, telling us when and where we’ll be going. Nightclub bouncers don’t get chatty about their decision-making process for who gains access to the Cristal-drenched VIP room.* You already know that a strong first impression begins with confident body language and eye contact, and a firm handshake. Yet this approach doesn’t apply just to in-person meetings.
The same is also true when introducing any type of message, from a disciplinary warning to a routine internal memo. Carefully manage your message and reinforce it. Minimizing errors becomes even more essential when power is your trigger. Mistakes, such as website glitches or incomplete data, deflate your position. Nobody wants to watch how the sausage is made. Whether subtle or overt, this style of interaction increases domination. This domination exerts some degree of pressure on others, making them less likely to?reject a message.
VICE
Smart organizations recognize a business opportunity when they see it.
What Is “Vice”?
The devil sitting on your shoulder, whispering in your ear? He’s the whispering vice. When we’re told we can’t have something, this trigger of fascination can?take hold and make us want more. Cultures have always recognized this phenomenon.
Pandora had her box, Lot’s wife’s curiosity turned her into a pillar of salt, Romeo and Juliet loved more passionately (and died more passionately) because their parents tried to keep them apart. One bite of an apple got Adam and Eve booted out of paradise. And let’s not forget the cat, whose curiosity proved her undoing. Rules are not often fascinating, but bending them, very much so.
When we’re tempted to push a boundary or deviate from standard norms, we’re in a vice grip.
Vice includes everything you want to do, and know you shouldn’t do, but still just might do.?
Not every type of vice fascinates every person, but we all have a few gleeful gratifications hidden in our behavior.
A little vice goes a long way, so customize your message by using it in combination with other triggers. Few of us intend to deliberately lead someone into temptation. Yet unless we understand how we’re influencing action, we could be doing just that, making this trigger unexpectedly important. We’ll soon find out how a message that unintentionally triggers vice can accomplish an entirely different result than intended.?
We have four pillars of vice at our disposal: Create taboos. Lead others astray. Define absolutes. And give a wink.
Forbidden fruit would not taste so juicy if it weren’t forbidden.
To compete in any crowded marketplace, you must lead someone astray from his usual behavior.
Sometimes, changing behavior starts with changing the channel.
Rules and policies are an important part of a functioning workplace, but can backfire when employees feel micromanaged, or don’t understand the reasoning behind them.
Now let’s go in the opposite direction. How could you discourage vice, and encourage smarter choices? To overcome vice, adjust three other triggers: decrease mystique, and increase power and trust.
Start by decreasing the mystique trigger. Answer questions with open communication. Offer an honest appraisal of consequences. Don’t allow secrets to building intrigue or confusion. The more transparent you are, the less mystique can lure someone away from your message. Next, make your group feel more powerful, by giving them control of some aspect of their environment. Encourage mutual respect, rather than a master/servant dynamic.?
Most important, invest a great deal of time and energy in the trust trigger, making your group feel they can rely upon you. The more people trust what they’re being told, and the more they trust the person giving them this information, the more likely they are to follow it. One last note.
The father of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote, “The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
Similarly, the word “virtue” would lose its meaning if not balanced by vice. Keep it all in perspective, balancing virtue and vice.
Each trigger changes behavior in a unique way. A message with lust draws people in because they crave a sensory experience. A message with prestige elevates itself above the rest. A message with alarm prods people to act quickly. These have clear applications for companies. How, and when, does vice apply? Unconventional companies and “challenger brands” often benefit from stirring up new energy around a topic.
Category leaders such as Fortune 100 corporations or incumbent politicians generally envision different fascination goals for themselves. These leaders tend to have long-standing relationships, with highly ingrained customer habits and decades-long messages and want to maintain the status quo. They use vice less often, focusing instead on triggers that maintain established norms: prestige, power, or trust. However, ignoring vice isn’t always the wisest choice. Used wisely, the vice can offer a fresh sense of unexpectedness to an otherwise straightforward message.
Like the mystique trigger, vice piques our curiosity to know more. And like the alarm trigger, it surprises us with a potential change in direction, grabbing our instant attention.?
Certain people and brands tempt consumers with a taste of forbidden fruit.?
To see how we might apply vice to your environment, start by tweaking established expectations.
Two triggers, used together, can be stronger than either one alone. Just as sliced green apples complement a crisp sauvignon blanc, certain triggers perfectly pair together with vice.
Vice + Alarm?
Vice + Power
Vice + Lust?
The purpose of a message with vice isn’t to lure your audience into sin,?but rather to lure them away from their standard choices.
A message with vice encourages people to change their patterns and try something different: a most useful tactic for anyone who wants to change ingrained beliefs or behavior.
If you’re interested in building a long-term relationship, vice isn’t your trigger. Trust is. After peeking at mystique, alerting to alarm, and flirting with vice, let’s now find out how to build meaningful and authentic relationships over time.?
TRUST
What Is Trust??
Other triggers often guide our decision-making by provoking us in some way. Alarm thrills us with immediacy or change. Mystique stimulates us with curiosity. Trust, however, guides everyday decision-making in a different way: familiarity and comfort.
As we’ve seen, we’re living in an ADD world. Even if we ourselves don’t have ADD, we have to deal with fragmented schedules, competing demands, and priorities pulling our attention in different directions. Even our relationships change more frequently, making everyday life feel more scattered. In the face of overwhelming stimuli, the most trusted options relax and reassure us. Continuity makes us feel safe.
How to establish and enhance trust?
Five pillars for trust: Become familiar. Repeat and retell. Be authentic. Accelerate trust in a shorter time frame.
And “unfascinate” an unhealthy message. Messages will use different pillars depending upon their stage and purpose, but as our strongest pillar in relationships, drawing upon one or more of these pillars can win the battle for attention.
Earning trust demands an investment of time and effort, because predictability requires a guaranteed certainty. Trusted brands carefully pay attention to detail, reinforcing consistency between expectations they set and results they deliver. In return, the reward for earning trust is a big one: loyalty.?
The more predictable a message, the more we rely on it.
Trusted messages are also consistent, with very little conflicting input, because inconsistency breaks trust. To build consistency, repeat your message, and retell your story.
As we saw earlier, if an organization wants to persuade followers through trust, it must deliver a very consistent, reliable message. If people hear that message repeatedly and consistently, and if that message has few deviations and little conflicting information around it, they “trust” it.
In the absence of conflicting input, even a false message will be trusted. If there are opposing viewpoints, however—if an audience hears a variety of messages—then as a whole, they’re more likely to start asking questions.
Audiences form opinions and make their own decisions, becoming less likely to blindly trust anyone's specific message. The audience fragments, trusting different messages.
If you’re a propagandist, this presents a real problem. Propagandists don’t want opposing viewpoints. That is especially true of a propagandist whose?message violates his audience’s deeper beliefs. For these communicators, it is not enough to merely repeat the message—dissenters must also be squelched. Propagandists use information control to enforce exact consistency. They monitor every possible piece of information their audience might absorb, rigorously reinforcing their agendas while going to great lengths to prevent outside contradicting influences.
No matter how illogical or heinous their argument may be, followers are almost forced to trust it. It’s all they know.
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was a master of manipulating trust through consistent repetition. He wrote, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it….
It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent.” Adolf Hitler, in his autobiography Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), instructs that the purpose of propaganda is to attract the attention of the crowd, “so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real,” by not overestimating the intelligence of the masses. He summarizes, “The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed.”
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
Marketing isn’t necessarily propaganda. All propaganda, however, is marketing.
Trust doesn’t demand a moral absolute—only absolute consistency. Repeating a message and retelling a story will drill in a blind trust. However, to build a genuine relationship with an audience, a message must reflect sincerity and authenticity.
We measure how much we “trust” something by comparing our expectations against deviations. The more similar something is to our expectations, the more we count on it. Reputations confirm this.
Reputations influence decision-making. People make trust judgments based on comparisons to past experiences. If your success relies on instant gratification or surprise, then use trust at your leisure. However, if your success relies on trust, then you must, without question, deliver what people expect. The more specific your promise, the more urgent the need to deliver.?
The brands that we consistently trust are those that fulfill expectations.
For iconic people and companies, fads can erode credibility. Or worse, damage trust. Trusted messages are not mercurial.
We’re wired to attach our own security and safety to the idea of trust, so when those bonds are broken, we feel threatened. Broken trust can have disastrous effects, requiring serious effort, time, and a savvy plan to rebuild.?
Everyone makes mistakes. Even with the best intentions, messages can turn out differently than planned, especially after making a mistake. They point out the break-in expectations, in order to rebuild patterns of trust.
A message can become established fairly quickly, as Hitler’s did, through repetition without contradictory input. In most cases, however, an enduringly trusted message takes time to build. The message doesn’t need to be the biggest, best, or first of its kind.
Repetition alone is rarely enough to make a message fascinating. To earn trust, ideally, the message itself will extend over time. To accelerate trust, however, a message can tap into values that extend over time.
Companies occasionally rebuild trust by going back into their own history and bringing back old marketing devices.
Companies lacking in perennial trust cues often simply borrow someone else’s.
Remember the “exposure effect”? We’re drawn to people and situations that feel familiar. They fit a pattern we already know.
By linking a new message to one that’s already firmly trusted, we can shorten the time frame needed to develop trust.?
Can a message become too fascinating—so fascinating that for a certain group of people, it’s no longer possible to logically evaluate it? Cults are too fascinating, and so are ultra-extremist political groups. They influence to the?point of brainwashing, with messages that can overwhelm all other choices. Embedded with trust, these messages can be extremely difficult to neutralize.?
It is possible to break an unhealthy decision-making cycle by replacing one message with another. The unhealthy message must first become “unfastened,” and replaced by a new, healthier message.
Trust can deter, or even reverse, negative behavior caused by other triggers.
Just as trust encourages us to gravitate to a familiar image rather than an unfamiliar one, so do we gravitate to familiar messages. And we gravitate to familiar messages whether they’re healthy or not.?
Banning unhealthy practices, or rejecting negative beliefs, will only spark vice, creating “forbidden fruit.”
At some point, many of us face the difficult task of reversing a deeply ingrained opinion or belief. By identifying a new positive message, and introducing a variety of new ways to experience that message, we can start to loosen the grip of the old one.
People learn by doing because it ingrains new trust beliefs and habits in a variety of ways.
If you’re new to the trust trigger and believe it’s worth the investment, take a lesson from trusted people and companies. When introducing yourself, find ways that your message can feel instantly familiar. Pinpoint shared values with your audience, since people bond more quickly with others who have similar values and traits to their own. Identify the patterns you want to fascinate others with. If you build upon them and stick to them, trust will build gradually and naturally over time.
In the meantime, while trust builds, activate another trigger to generate fascination: prestige and power are trust’s closest substitutes.
FASCINATE:
Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
Author: Sally Hogshead
The Fascination Plan of Attack
How to Make Your Own Messages More Fascinating?
After establishing why people become fascinated, acquiring lessons learned which triggers fascinate, it is time to approach to start to develop your plan to make your own message more fascinating.
Fascinating ideas are precious. They can change the course of a company’s revenue, or change the course of history.
Ideas are precious, yes—but not in and of themselves. They don’t live in a vacuum. They become precious only once they successfully answer a specific need; otherwise, they’re just scribbles.?
Three Stages for Your Plan of Attack:
Accelerated Lessons and Exercises for You and Your Team
Stage 1: Evaluation
Stage 2: Development
Stage 3: Execution
Before you start getting ready to cram your own filing cabinets full of precious ideas, here are a few quick housekeeping items. First, it’s unrealistic to think you’ll motor through this whole curriculum at once, so consider doing this program as an intensive meeting over the course of two or three days. Next, document everything you generate, because ideas that seem unrealistic at first can be viable later. Finally, there must be snacks involved.
The discussion, exercises, and questions that follow will help your team embark on three critical steps for innovation: Assess your current levels of fascination, create new forms of fascination, and then successfully apply potential ideas.?
STAGE 1: EVALUATION
Fascination persuades people to do things they don’t understand?believe messages that don’t make sense and buy things they don’t even enjoy.
Fascination lives not in your own communication to the world, but rather in how the world communicates about you. Sure, marketers used to control the message, but today, the market controls the message.
Gold Hallmark of a Fascinating Message
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Provoking Strong and Immediate Emotional Reactions
The unfortunate reality is that most marketers set out to create messages that offend the fewest people. They’re playing not to lose.
Some reactions are positive, some not, but they do fascinate. If you’re not generating a negative reaction from someone, you’re probably not fascinating anyone. List the reactions, both positive and negative, that you provoke.?
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Creating Advocates
Your fans may be a small slice of your overall base, but they’re the most passionate and vocal, and they’ll participate in your marketing work.
Can you create ambassadors? How would you reward them, inspire them, and support their communication with you, and with one another? If you don’t currently have a fan base for your message, challenge yourself with the following questions: What would it take to compel someone to pay for a T-shirt bearing your logo? What would it take to make people stand in line for hours to purchase your product? What would it take for people to pay double to obtain your product—even if the utility of the product didn’t change? What would it take for your product to become so beloved that it never, ever went on sale??
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Embodying Specific Core Values
In an attempt to be all things to all people, most brands end up saying nothing to anyone.
Fascinating companies earn attention by focusing on a specific message: Home Depot (do-it-yourself), Patagonia (sustainability), Target (accessible style), Nordstrom (overachieving service), or De Beers (romantic expression). Tiffany & Co. made a tough decision to reduce their line of trendy silver pieces, but in doing so, preserved trust and prestige. Even tiny details represent bigger core values
Ask Yourself:?
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re “Cultural Shorthand” for a Set of Actions or Values
People identify with fascinating brands: They identify themselves, their opinions, and their community.
Ask Yourself:
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Inciting Conversations
People don’t want to connect with brands. They want to connect with one another.
It doesn’t matter if you agree with the game, you can’t ignore why it got so many potential recruits talking, and connecting. The more people become fascinated by you and your message, the more they want to interact with you: playing with you, talking about you,?learning from you, and above all, connecting with you and then with one another.
Ask Yourself:
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Forcing Competitors to Realign
Ask Yourself:
Exercise: Evaluate Whether You’re Tapping Into, or Triggering Social Revolutions
When people become fascinated, they merge with larger groups of people fascinated by the same message. These groups can do much of your work for you, inciting others to join a bigger cultural movement.
Social revolutions aren’t once-in-a-decade events. They’re happening constantly, every single day: from political beliefs, use of technology, fashion, and consumption of media, to local communities and family structure. Even if you don’t trigger a social revolution, as Harley did, you can certainly tap into cultural changes.
Ask Yourself:
You’re already using triggers (whether you intend to or not, and whether you?want to or not). By now you probably have an idea of your primary fascination trigger—the one that most closely embodies the way in which you fascinate others. You might also have an idea of your secondary triggers. While clarifying your triggers, and the ways in which you use them, it helps to print out a list of the seven triggers to have in front of you:?
LUST is the desire or craving for sensory gratification.
MYSTIQUE lures with a puzzle or unanswered question.
ALARM threatens with immediate consequences.
PRESTIGE earns respect through symbols of achievement.
POWER is commanded over others.
VICE tempts with “forbidden fruit,” causing us to step outside our usual habits or behaviors.
TRUST comforts us with certainty and reliability.?
The Walt Disney World experience is based upon stories, and stories form a foundation of mystique. In addition, visitors know they’ll step inside a highly sensory environment. And for many of us, Disney World fulfills a trusted?expectation: Our children will enjoy something similar to our own first Disney experiences years ago.
The seven triggers apply to every type of message and personality, and even to archetypical comic book superheroes.
Exercise: Your Brand’s “Chemistry Set”
Imagine seven beakers on the table in front of you. Each beaker has a label: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust. Some beakers are close to empty, some are half full, and if you’re lucky, one is filled near the top. These seven elements combine in a sort of chemical formula, a.k.a your brand. These seven potential fascination triggers offer an infinite number of brand combinations. You can blend or separate them, dial them up or pull them back. You can reinvigorate your whole identity by adding or subtracting small amounts of a single trigger or revising your ratios depending on your goals. The point will be to develop the most irresistible recipe and make it your own. Your “chemical formula” may also use?secondary triggers, ones used less frequently or to a lesser degree. On a piece of paper or whiteboard, draw the seven beakers, one for each trigger. Now estimate your current levels of fascination: How full is each beaker? Which beakers should be more full, or less full, in order to fulfill your goals? Keep these levels in mind as we move forward into Stage 2, so you can calibrate according to your badges, and your bell curve.
OKAY, NOW YOU’VE EVALUATED your message. How might you use the seven triggers to develop it??
STAGE 2: DEVELOPMENT
Create and Heighten Fascination
Having an idea of how to generate fascination—and how much of it you generate, the next stage is: Develop new ways to fascinate others.
Time to put creativity to work for us.
“Fascination Badges”?
So how, exactly, are you fascinating?
Seven potential areas:
Badges allow employees, customers, and fans to identify themselves with you, and through you, beyond product usage. They invite people inside your brand, allowing them to participate and take ownership. Find them,* and then methodically refine and expand them.
Exercise: Create New Badges
One by one, go through the seven types of badges and brainstorm every possible association for each. Starting with your “purpose,” for example, list all the words, ideas, and associations, gleaned from every possible source, from your mission statement to your implied intentions. The more specific, the better.
?A few real-life badges to get you started:
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the book Outliers, says that “outlier” is “a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.”
Exercise: Finding the Edge of Your Bell Curve
This exercise draws upon everything we’ve done so far in this section: badges, hallmarks, and bell curve, as well as your seven fascination trigger options.
The steps:
Draw a bell curve, take all the aspects of a single badge that you brainstormed above, and plot them on the curve.?
Ask Yourself:
What could happen if you took an uninteresting badge and pushed it a little further, and a little further, to see how far you can go? Sears introduced a “products” badge: the first replacement guarantee of its kind, for any tool bearing the Craftsman name. This new guarantee wasn’t one year or ten years as other competitors offered; it was a lifetime replacement guarantee, reaching out to the edge of the bell curve and becoming a powerful trust badge. Sears was willing to go all the way to the edge, where no one in the category had gone.
The Fringe
The degree to which you are willing to step outside your category norms is the degree to which you’ll fascinate others.?
Exercise: Identify Outliers of Your fringe
Ask Yourself:
Incorporating A New Trigger
At certain growth stages, a trigger that was once fascinating can become a weakness.
If your trigger is trust, you’re building a reputation upon consistency. Yet trust can eventually begin to feel ho-hum and predictable. What if you laced a little alarm into the mix? You’d increase urgency and action around your message, and add just enough adrenaline to keep things interesting.?
If you increase a bit of lust, you’ll encourage people to step in more closely and participate.
If you currently trigger prestige, you’re elevating your status and rank. Yet be careful not to become so aloof and unattainable that your target feels uncomfortable with your message.?
Mystique will make people want to ask questions, learn more, and share what they know. That curiosity keeps it from feeling cliché or status-conscious.
Additionally, prestige brands must take care in releasing new communication, since tossing out random information can cloud your message or fail to meet expectations. Again, mystique can strengthen prestige here as well, allowing you to withhold information and release only the minimum necessary
Is power your thing? The power trigger is a favorite with corporations because it establishes leadership. Yet messages with power run the risk of feeling corporate and self-inflated, or worse, steely and detached. To avoid intimidating your audience, add just a drop or two of lust for warmth and approachability in your message.
If your message is feeling stale or ponderous, consider a whit of vice, which encourages your audience to consider new alternative ways of thinking and behaving. This zesty little trigger helps people experience your message anew, rather than taking it for granted as the “same old, same old.”
Exercise: Combine Your Primary Trigger with?a New One
Ask Yourself:
Cautionary Tale: Use Care When Switching Triggers
It’s good and necessary to evolve your message over time. However, changing your trigger entirely and without warning might just end up creating the alarm trigger for your accountants.?
What If...?
Okay! This is where the brainstorming really kicks in. “What if” questions sit at the heart of any fascination development process, allowing us to apply everything we’ve established in the exercises so far. What if you ramped up your primary trigger? What if you incorporated a new trigger? What if you went 180 degrees in the other direction of your category’s expected triggers??
STAGE 3: EXECUTION
Bringing Your Fascination to Life
Ideas are only precious in a specific context.
Every message needs advocates in order to survive. When presenting ideas, as is always the case, fascination isn’t measured in what you say, but in what others say about you.?
It’s one thing to come up with new ideas, but quite another to create advocates from your partners, clients, investors, board of directors, or anyone else holding the mighty approval stamp. At first, fascinating ideas can feel risky, so managing this process wisely takes extra thought.
For thousands of years, everyone from academics to ordinary folk viewed fascination as witchcraft and hopefully, by now?we agree that fascination isn’t witchcraft, and can be measured, researched, and reevaluated.
Measure, Research, Reevaluate
Track Your Progress
Traditionally, tracking a company’s marketing success would revolve around the number of products sold or services hired. But by following a number of indicators, you can more tangibly and specifically measure your increase in fascination.
Removing Barriers To Fascination
Companies that fascinate audiences over the long term share certain qualities. Evaluation, development, and execution of fascinating ideas should be a collective goal, one with resources and support from the C suite all the way through the ranks.?
By applying the seven triggers to a product or message, and by measuring results against the Gold Hallmarks, a company can consistently engage consumers, carving out a niche that cannot be filled by anyone or anything else. But before any of this branding goodness can happen, the company must first develop a culture of fascination within its own organization. For some groups, this requires a significant shift. If the purpose of fascination is to help people connect, then we must first support an environment of connecting with each other in the workplace, so our most fascinating ideas survive and?flourish.?
Fascination is an intense captivation. When something is fascinating, it captures your attention in an unusually intense way. It’s more than “interesting.” It distracts you from other things around you and makes you want to pay complete attention. You might be fascinated by a favorite book, a project at?work, or even a new love. Note that when something is fascinating, it is not inherently good or bad, only that it captures your full attention.?
In terms of the role, fascination plays in our lives, it’s more than described above.
Fascination is a fundamental part of our relationships and our quality of life. It affects how hard we work, whom we marry, even how we feel about ourselves.?
Fascination at a Glance
Overall Principles:
Trends Driving the Need for Fascination:
Gold Hallmarks of a Fascinating Message:?
The Seven Triggers
These seven universal triggers spark a variety of responses, any one of which heightens our physical, emotional, and intellectual focus. Effectively activated, each trigger creates a different type of response.?
1: Lust
Pillars of Lust:
2: Mystique
Pillars of Mystique:?
3: Alarm
Pillars of Alarm:
4: Prestige
Pillars of Prestige:
5: Power
Pillars of Power:
6: Vice
Pillars of Vice:
7: Trust
Pillars of Trust
Your Potential Fascination Badges
Seven potential areas for what you represent:
Purpose: Your reason for being; your function as a brand.
Core beliefs: The code of values and principles that guides you; what you stand for.
Heritage: Your reputation and history; the “backstory” of how you came to be.
Products: The goods, services, or information you produce.
Benefits: The promises of reward for purchasing the product, both tangible and abstract, overt and implied.
Actions: How you conduct yourself.
Culture: All characteristics of your identity, including personality, execution style, and mindset.
Steps to Find the Edge of Your Bell Curve:?
Who Invented the Seven Triggers?
These seven triggers aren’t anything new. They are not invented.
In fact, you’re already using them. You’ve been using them your whole life.
That very first time you gave your mother a big, toothless smile? You were fascinating then, and you’re fascinating now.
Every time you make eye contact, you’re fascinating.
When you teach your kindergartener how to use scissors, or train the dog to stay off the couch, you’re fascinating.
When you keep a secret, stand your ground, fulfill a promise, or hold someone close, you’re fascinating because you’re using your natural strengths to connect with others.
How will you apply the seven triggers to your own message so that the people around you don’t just hear what you’re saying, but act upon it? How could you apply this not only to your product and work relationships but to the people and pursuits closest to you? That’s the bigger purpose.??