When you start a marketing campaign, ask yourself: “why now?”. There has to be a reason for the audience to engage with your content, and they are more likely to do so if the change you are proposing is urgent. Humans are inherently short-termist, so anything that delivers quick results or protects from immediate losses will always grab our attention.
It is important to consider how you frame urgent messages. Behavioural economics tells us that losses loom larger than gains, so messages that emphasise the costs of not doing something instead of the benefits of doing something can instil a greater sense of urgency.
Peter Salovey, president of Yale University and an originator of list of argentina cell phone numbers the concept of emotional intelligence, argues that the framing of urgent messages should vary depending on whether the proposed change in behaviour is safe or risky. If our audience is likely to think the change is safe, then we should emphasise all the gains that will come from making it. If our audience thinks the change is risky, then they are more likely to be comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change are less attractive. That is when it is better to emphasise the bad things that will happen if there is no change (From Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant (2016)).
This has important implications for B2B marketing. Most of the time, we are asking our audiences to make significant – and therefore risky – investments or changes to their businesses: invest in AI and automation; accelerate digital transformation; or set ambitious net zero targets. Salovey’s research suggests that in these instances we are better off focusing on the costs of doing nothing than on the benefits of changing.