Why do people buy?

As someone who has spent their entire career trading words and ideas for money, I’ve spent my life answering one question: why do people act? To be specific, how can you induce people to take specific actions that you want them to take? In marketing and sales – why do people buy what you’re selling?

It’s an easy question to answer but not an easy thing to do.

The answer to why people buy (or act) in the ways they do is that they seek emotional gain from doing so, even when the risks or potential harms are greater than the rewards.

Men (and women) cheat on their spouses because of the rewards of sex, not considering the potential harm to their spouses or their relationships with others. People commit crimes for the rewards brought about by those acts without factoring in the consequences of being caught or incarcerated.

Ultimately, there are two large groups of people in the world: people driven by a logic of consequences – I do things because I’m driven by “not getting caught” or what I can get if I don’t get caught; and people who are driven by a logic of morals – I do things because of who I think I am. These people, absent the police, would not be running around raping and murdering everyone. They don’t cheat on their spouses. They don’t rob and steal. They don’t sneak a cigarette or a drink when nobody’s looking.

Believe it or not, the same logic drives both sets of people; their actions comport with their perceived identities. In the case of people driven by a logic of consequences, those individuals perceive their identity through a lens that I’d describe as being “present hedonistic” and care only about today’s pleasures. Meanwhile, people driven by a logic of morals are primarily concerned with their “future self” identity and feel good about who they are tomorrow.

Ultimately, our actions are driven by how we see ourselves now and in the future. Our future selves drive our present behaviors. So, if you understand how someone sees their future selves, you can understand their motivations in the sales context.

In any sales context.

Typically, there are a couple of motivations present. The most common ones are greed, fear, and lust. You see these three motivations all the time in advertising because they are the most prevalent in humanity.

People are constantly afraid they are not smart, pretty, or good enough. Triggering these fears is relatively simple.

Do you have "ring around the collar?"

OH NO! (I mean, seriously, is that even a thing before Whisk invented it?)

Or my all-time favorite – Geritol. Do you have “tired blood?”

(Again, was that even a thing?)

Fear motivation.

In my Aviation Agency’s field, fear is a primary motivator. The amount of money and the risks involved in failure are so high that fear as a cue is a primary motivator. When failure happens, people are likely to die, or tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars may be put at risk. People are going to lose really nice jobs. Businesses go under. So, avoidance of risk is a primary motivator in those buying decisions. So, selling on “gain” isn’t a good strategy. Instead, buying is predicated on risk avoidance, not the prospect of gain.

(There is a whole discipline of political science and economics on that idea called “prospect theory” for those who might be interested. People are way more attuned to the loss of money than they are to the gain of profit.)

Many people think price is always the biggest thing in a sales conversation. Price matters, but it matters only as a metric of determining risk and value (usually). Price in and of itself is typically meaningless. A hundred-thousand-dollar item to a man with a hundred million dollars may seem risky. That same item to a company with ten million dollars may seem fine. It’s all based on perception.

Greed is a great cue to tap into if you can. Billions have been made off of it – especially by con men. I’ve always been fascinated by con men because con men can make a sale with people who know the sale is “too good to be true,” and yet they engage in the sale anyway. Take Bernie Madoff, for example. He scammed the richest of the richest in the world. He scammed the Rothchild’s for example. For example, he scammed Elie Weisel, David Gottesman, and Norman Braman; these are not stupid people by any means. How does something like that happen?

Con men are successful not because they ask the victims to place their faith in the con man. That’s way too hard of a sale. Con men know it’s too hard to get victims to trust them. They know they come across as scammy and untrustworthy. Instead, con men place their trust in their victims. They place their trust in their victim’s greed. In the case of Bernie Madoff, he placed his trust in the fact that he knew that these people wanted massive returns and didn’t want to ask too many questions about it. So he set up a situation where it seemed entirely plausible that Madoff’s funds were generating massive returns, even when the entire scheme wouldn’t make a ton of sense. The avarice of all these investors drove their desire to believe that Madoff’s story was true. Madoff placed his faith in their desire to be greedy. That’s how he made that sale.

That’s how he created the largest fraud in history.

Ultimately, getting people to buy is about understanding the emotional position from which they start. It’s usually one of satisfying an emotional need.

These needs are simple—greed, lust, fear, and love. After reading that humans are roughly 90% water, roughly the same as cucumbers, a friend of mine jokingly remarked to me that people were little more than cucumbers with emotions, anxiety, and disposable income.

To an extent, that’s true.

Our buying habits are largely the result of our emotional needs. Once our emotions are satisfied, we concoct all kinds of “logical” reasons to set our emotions in concrete, but it’s the emotional reasons that set in motion our actions in the first place.

Ask a child why they did something, they never know. Of course they don’t know – reasoning doesn’t happen in the part of the brain that leads to action as a child. Guess what, it doesn’t get any better as an adult, either. The “choice” part of our brain still lies in that emotional brain as well.

That’s where the sale lies. That’s where getting people to act lies.

It’s not, perhaps, where the entirety of the discussion lies.

But it’s definitely where the start of the discussion lies.

After interviewing hundreds of people about why they buy things, I found that every one of those stories was about the same thing: they bought the product or service because it made them feel better about themselves.