While many marketers treat their advertising as a game of “Simon Says” (“Buy my product! Visit My Store!”), researchers have found that a much more effective strategy might be to consider a game of “Follow the Leader.”
Why?
Well it gets to the point of this installment of our Motivation Marketing series: the Adaptation motive. As we’ll see, Adaptation is something that influences all of us from the very youngest age … and continues to be a powerful factor in our decision making throughout our lives.
We are a race of copycats. As infants, we learn to walk, talk and function primarily through mimicry. As children and into adulthood, this mimicry transforms into a pattern of incorporating into ourselves the behaviors of those we admire or aspire to be more like. And if those behaviors involve wearing a certain brand of athletic shoe, or drinking a certain beverage, or driving a certain car, well, that’s the power of the Adaptation motive.
It’s this motivation that makes the celebrity spokesperson such a staple in advertising. Nike’s classic “I want to be like Mike” is just one unabashed example of the form.
But the fact is, a clear understanding of the Adaptation motive can increase the impact of celebrity endorsers … or give more power and impact to even non-celebrity spokespeople.
The key is understanding that the Adaptation motive hinges on not just on admiration for a specific individual but in the desire for the lifestyle that that individual represents. For example, many people don’t know the name of “The Marlboro Man” (Darrell Winfield most frequently played the part) but the rugged, independent lifestyle he represented was a siren song for smokers.
Likewise, today, in magazines and television, anonymous models and spokespeople demonstrate a variety of lifestyles designed to appeal to specific market segments … lifestyles we can share if we only adopt their behaviors and use the products they’re promoting.
Using a celebrity spokesperson can be a shortcut because it’s presumed that the audience already knows something about the individual’s lifestyle. But, just as with “anonymous” spokespeople, demonstrating aspects of the individual’s lifestyle that the audience desires can strengthen the communication. Especially if the marketing shows the product as one of the means by which the individual achieves these things.
So what’s the bottom line? The Adaptation motive tells us that using spokespeople or attractive models works not just because those individuals are “famous” or “attractive” but because we want something they have … and we’re willing to behave like them in order to get it.
Hopefully that behavior includes heavy use of the product we’re promoting.
See an example of how Redstone presented a spokesperson whose creative use of a client’s product was an inspiration to others.