Member-only story
Steal These Advertising Secrets to Trick Yourself Into Reaching Your Goals
You can override your less-than-helpful instincts by learning techniques from the persuasion business
The reason why you hate being micromanaged by your boss is the same reason why, as a kid, you refused to put your coat on when your mom told you to bundle up. We’re all wired with a knee-jerk “don’t tell me what to do!” response called psychological reactance — and it can kick in even when it’s you telling yourself what to do.
Saturday Night Live recently captured this tendency with a skit about the “Pelotaunt,” getting riders to workout not through encouragement, but through passive aggression. A woman in the spoof says, “If I hear the phrase, ‘You can do it!’ I literally won’t.” But when her coach taunts her instead, she pedals faster to prove them wrong.
That’s psychological reactance in action: Our desire to protect our sense of autonomy is so strong that we’ll even do the exact opposite of what we’re told just to prove a point. The SNL ad is obviously fake, but real advertising can teach us how to disarm our tendency to rebel indiscriminately. After all, advertising is intended to move people to action. Sometimes, ads can compel us to action by gliding under the reactance radar — and we can do the same to ourselves by understanding how to work with, not against, our hatred of being bossed around.
Offer the right rewards
When my daughter was younger and we’d ask her where she wanted to go to eat, her instant response was almost always, “McDonald’s!” She insisted it was because the food was “so yummy,” but we knew that what she really wanted most of all was the toy that came with the meal — though over time, we went to McDonald’s enough that it really did start to seem like the yummiest food in town.
That’s “temptation bundling,” or using the rewards from one behavior to incentivize another: Get a customer to come for the toy…
