You Need: Audience-Centered Claims

Audience-Centered

During the 1950s, the emphasis in advertising shifted focus away from the product to gave more attention to the needs and wants of the target audience. The benefits promised to the buyers were often the intangibles -- of prestige or popularity or sex appeal -- associated with the product. Such psychic benefits resided not in the product, but in the attitudes and emotional feelings, in the dreams and fantasies, of the audience. Such emotional appeals in persuasion may not be rational or logical, but they are very effective.

Commercial ads often have a wider implied narrative, a script or storyline, suggesting a "lifestyles" story with "You" as the central character in a consumer-oriented world, seeking personal, individual happiness (pleasures, wealth, esteem, success) by buying products; or getting relief (from pain, problems, unhappiness) with the product as solution. Do you identify with the good characters, the "friend figures"? Their hopes and fears?

Audience-centered ads use the association technique to link (1) the product with (2) something already liked or desired by (3) the intended audience.

Thus, the first thing advertisers needed was research (using interviews, surveys, polls, focus groups) to find out what various "goods" -- the various needs and wants -- people already desired. From ancient philosophers (e.g. Aristotle) to modern psychologists (e.g. Maslow), many lists of human needs had already existed. My list, which incorporates many of these others, was made from observation of ads. These common human needs and wants can be usefully labeled and grouped together here as:
- Our basic needs (Food, Activity, Surroundings, Sex, Health, Security, Economy)
- Our needs for certitude, or approval from outside sources, (Religion, Science,"Best People," "Most People," "Average People")
- Our needs for space or territory (Neighborhood, Nation, Nature)
- Our needs for belonging (Intimacy, Family, Groups)
- Our "growth" needs (Esteem, Play, Generosity, Curiosity, Creativity, Success)

Browse these 24 screens. Before you click, try to guess 5 or 10 words and images commonly used in each category. These 24 general categories here cover many human needs, wants, desires -- the "good things" which ads try to associate with their products.

Food	Economy	Neighborhood	Esteem
Activity	Religion	Nation	Play
Surroundings	Science	Nature	Generosity
Sex	Best People	Intimacy	Curiosity
Health	Most People	Family	Creativity
Security	Average People	Groups	Success

Negatives

For every human dream or hope, there's a negative counterpart -- a nightmare or fear. Some ads (especially those offering the benefits of relief, protection, or prevention) emphasize problems, then offer the product as a solution. Often, this is called "anxiety arousal and satisfaction." Here, I'll simply label such ads as Scare-and-sell ads.

Multiplicity

Ads usually associate the product, simultaneously, with many of these 24 kinds of human needs, wants, and desires.

Change

Different people, at different times in their lives (young or old), and in different situations (sick or healthy), will have different mixes and priorities.

For example, some advertising researchers (using different terms, which I highlight here), writing about the needs of children, say:

"There is no verified list of the needs that are most important to children. Routine observations, however, indicate that play would be at the top of any such list. What needs follow in importance is guessable, but various research indicates that sentience (the need for sensory expression), affiliation (the need for cooperative relationships with others), and achievement (the need to accomplish something difficult, including becoming adult-like) are the next most important needs for most kids. It appears, also, that kids have a strong need for variety (new experiences), and often fuse this need with the others. Based on what was said earlier, we might hypothesize that there is a need for kids to be kids, whatever we might call it, but it has not been isolated and identified by motivation researchers." -- from -- James McNeal, Kids as Customers, p.190.

Other ad writers try to specify just what "kidness" is, or what kids think is fun, or the special needs of kids. For example. Gene Del Vecchio, in Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketing Guide to a Kid's Heart, p. 25, writes:

"In many ways, the timeless needs that children strive to satisfy are not all that different from those of adults. Some are innate; some are acquired. Children must satisfy physiological demands such as the need for food and shelter. They strive to achieve safety and security. Children seek the social needs of love, belonging, acceptance, appreciation, and friendship. They attempt to fulfill their ego, which demands self-respect and pride. Given a child's tender years, such needs are intense, especially since children depend so much on others to fulfill them. So children strive to be independent, capable, and in control. They need to learn, aspire, and achieve. They need to dream many dreams."

There are other ways to categorize, to classify, to group -- and to label persuasive appeals.

For example, the economist Thorsten Veblen, in his famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), first used the term "conspicuous consumption" to describe "the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth."

Since then, many other have written about why people like to brag, to show off to others how rich they are by buying very expensive things (cars, clothes), often throw-aways, very wasteful. Such behaviors -- from a very limited utilitarian view-- are often irrational, illogical, senseless, impractical. But, people do strange things. Even in a supposedly egalitarian society, we like ranking, hierarchy, social dominance; we are status seekers.

Vance Packard, after becoming famous for The Hidden Persuaders (1957) his influential book about modern advertising, turned his attention away from the persuaders using "motivation research" to the persuadees, consumers caught up in the "upward mobility" of The Status Seekers (1959). While Packard's examples seem dated today, both books popularized these ideas to a very large audience.

Desmond Morris, a British zoologist, also had a widespread impact -- selling over 10 million copies -- with his popular books The Naked Ape (1967) and The Human Zoo (1969). Both of these described human behaviors in terms of evolutionary biology, as being derived from earlier primate behaviors. Later biologists -- such as F. B. M. deWaal, Chimpanzee Politics (1983); Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (1992); Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (1969) -- have added insights and introduced concepts to a wider popular audience.

Thus, many people today are likely to have heard of, and even use, many animal behavioral terms such as alpha males, bonding behaviors, display behaviors, eye-contact, flattery, food-sharing, grooming, hoarding, mating behaviors, marrying up, pecking orders, trophy wife.

No one (as far as I know) has yet systematically analyzed advertising strategies in such terms (as I have done in the 24 categories, above, in the traditional terms of needs/wants/desires), but it's likely to happen soon.

If you want to pursue these ideas, read Richard Coniff's The Natural History of the Rich (2002), a delightly written book applying many concepts specifically to some of today's very rich and very well-known celebrities. Yet, readers will likely recognize these same behaviors -- from their own high school experience.

By the 2008 election campaign, political persuaders had adapted the tactics of commercial advertisers -- and the huge data banks of information about consumers -- to microtarget specific audiences using "predictive analytics."