From the course: Neuromarketing: Tap Into your Customer's Primal Brain

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Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure: The dominance of loss aversion

Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure: The dominance of loss aversion

From the course: Neuromarketing: Tap Into your Customer's Primal Brain

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Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure: The dominance of loss aversion

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- Imagine a bowl of your favorite ice cream. Go ahead and reach for it now, but first I'm going to whack your hand with a hammer. Do you still want the ice cream? I didn't think so. You have to be a real ice cream fanatic in order to override the pain of getting hit. This reluctance to reach out for the ice cream is easy to predict from our evolutionary past. Each of your ancestors had to survive in order to reproduce and for you to be here. This often meant avoiding pain and even death in dangerous circumstances. Our brains are wired to look for danger and problems. Depending on the context, pain avoidance is approximately twice as powerful as positive psychology. Unfortunately, most marketers don't actively use pain as motivation, and they even claim that it is off-brand for them. As the old workout motto states, "no pain, no gain." This can also be applied to marketing. Unless you first create a pain in your prospect,…

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