In an evaluation of customer behavior known as “Tightwads and Spendthrifts,” Rick, Cryder, and Loewenstein identify that the level to which persons will commit is determined by the psychological “pain” that the spending causes. People today will devote, they argue, until it hurts.

In certain, they determine three types of people today:

1. The “unconflicted,” or the largest group, commit an average amount of cash before pain ensues. For these individuals, advertising and marketing need to sway them to raise their discomfort threshold.
2. The “spendthrifts’ invest readily and conveniently. Common marketing techniques might be employed to attract this type of consumer.
3. The hardest folks to reach would be the “tightwads” who take many persuading to component with their money due to the fact they hit the discomfort threshold sooner. Minimizing the acquiring discomfort for this group is definitely the secret to accomplishment.

The book you are reading bases all of its advertising and marketing approaches on this premise laid out by Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein. Selling a solution to an individual demands the marketer, I contend, to locate approaches to move the meter of one’s discomfort threshold by indicates of some kind of reframing. And what may very well be a lot more potent in the task of reframing pain than by tying our spending habits to our quite identity? The athlete who runs until she or he can hardly walk views the lactic acid accumulating in their legs not as pain but as an investment in future glory around the field. The law student who pulls an all-nighter studying for an exam will not be experiencing the low of discomfort, but is alternatively preparing for the high of results in the classroom.

So when the marketer frames the product in such a way that spending is tied to a larger truth concerning the identity with the customer, then there ceases to become a pain threshold since there ceases to be any pain at all. Getting a product is just not noticed by the customer with regards to just how much it drains from one’s bank account, you see, but is rather observed with regards to how much it adds to one’s identity.
The rest of the book lays out for the reader four on the most potent facets of our identities as they relate to our consumerist tendencies: folks nowadays are especially inattentive, trendy, needy, and tribal.