About this article:
The Spark is a personal essay about the first commercial, campaign, song, or cultural moment that made something click and sparked a career in marketing, and the old-school work that still shapes how they think today.
“It won’t get people to buy the most. But it will get them to buy more.”
That was my theory.
And suddenly, I was about to bet the next phase of my career on it. Recently, I’d been hired as the new creative director at a smallish New England agency. It was during a recession, and honestly, I was thrilled to have the job.
However, a few short weeks in, I learned that the agency’s biggest (only?) retainer client was in play. They hadn’t been happy. They wanted better results. And they wanted them soon.
Since I was new, the team looked (hopefully? expectantly?) at me. How would I convince dentists to buy more life insurance?
Yes, that was the client’s assignment. So that’s what I had to figure out.
At the time, I knew little about dentists. And even less about life insurance. But I did know something about human behavior – about the surprising ways people make decisions.
For example, people often don’t thoughtfully consume a marketing message, weigh the pros and cons, and come to a logical conclusion. Instead, they conserve mental energy. They rely on decision defaults – automatic, hardwired behaviors, as reflexive as saying “bless you” when someone sneezes.
So that told me something. It said the client’s current approach, which involved a rational, well-thought-out argument complete with supporting stats, was likely not the optimum approach.
People wouldn’t take the time to read and process it.
And if they did, the argument would be met with a healthy dose of optimism bias, that feeling we all have that those scary statistics apply to other people but not to me.
What made matters worse was that we weren’t being asked to sell insurance to dentists. That would be hard enough. No, we were being asked to sell MORE insurance to dentists. These folks had already looked their mortality in the eye and chosen to purchase a life insurance policy. So for them, that item was checked off the proverbial list. No desire to revisit it. No inkling they really should.
Fortunately, my initial foray into behavioral science had started with reading Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. In it, Cialdini describes the pull of the magnetic middle. This is the idea that people naturally gravitate to the center. Middle options feel safe. Too far to one side and you’re out on the bleeding edge. Too far to the other, and you’ve fallen behind.
That became the foundation for the campaign. We didn’t just tell people to check if they had enough insurance. At a glance, we made them feel like they didn’t!
We showed a graph. At the left end was $0, the least amount of insurance someone could have. At the right end was $3 million, the largest amount this company sold. And we included a marker that showed people where they fell on the graph.
But here’s the beauty of it. The majority of customers had way less than $1.5 million in coverage, and those were the customers we targeted. So when they looked at the chart, they would appear left of center. At a glance, they would feel they were lagging behind.
Did we expect them to increase their coverage to the full $3 million? No. But did we think they’d buy more to move closer to the center? Yes, we did.
And that’s exactly what happened. We delivered a 459% lift over the control. And this was in actual sales. Not inquiries. Not requests for more information. Sales.
That was over a decade ago. The smallish New England agency is no more. Today, I co-run my own, HBT Marketing, along with my business partner, Neal. We add behavioral science to marketing best practices to increase ROI for our clients. And we routinely create campaigns that drive double and triple digit lifts over benchmarks and controls.
But if you ask me what started it all, what was that first campaign that convinced me this was where my career could head, it would be this one. I still talk about it. That client still talks about it. And all the many clients I’ve worked with since benefit from it. Because this was the campaign that put it all on the line and proved how important it is to understand how people make decisions.
In fact, if it weren’t for that campaign, I might not have my own agency now. And I might not have been scouted by a London publisher and asked to write Using Behavioral Science in Marketing, Drive customer action and loyalty by prompting instinctive responses.
A book, coincidentally, that Robert Cialdini calls a “standout in the field.”