The Problem of Urgency

One of the most common problems in motivating customers to make a purchase is the absence of urgency.  They may recognize that they will need something in the future, but do not feel a sense that they need to act upon it right now.   They have plenty of time, more pressing problems to deal with, and have the sense that they don’t need to purchase right away because it’s something they can do later.   Without some form of pressure to take immediate action, they procrastinate.

As an example, it’s very difficult to get people in their twenties to save for retirement – even when a company offers matching funds for their retirement plans, young employees do not contribute.   You can do the math for them, and demonstrate how the money they save will grow substantially over time – but this doesn’t phase them.   They are struggling to pay the bills this month, whereas retirement is decades away and they can begin to save for it later.   And so they remain nonchalant until they are in their forties, realize that they have nothing saved for retirement, and go into a panic.

What this example demonstrates is that, for many consumers, the sense of urgency is not based on reasoning – because they may recognize the value of taking action and still refuse to do it – but instead, it is based on the emotion of fear.  Specifically, urgency is based on the fear of loss, whether it is a loss that will diminish their status quo or the loss of an opportunity to improve it.  And in the hierarchy of needs, things that threaten a person’s well-being take priority over things that might improve their situation.

And so it follows that the way to motivate customers to take immediate action is to play upon their fears – to tell them that they will suffer harm or miss out on an opportunity forever if they do not take immediate action.   This tactic is often leveraged by cheesy hard-sell marketing tactics such as “limited time offer” and “while supplies last,” but it is also leveraged in soft-sell marketing tactics in more subtle ways.

However, that does not mean that fear alone is an effective and sustainable selling tactic – the emotional center of the brain kicks in immediately, but then the reasoning mind takes over to ask the question of whether that fear is really warranted – and when it is not, the seller loses credibility with the market.   Consider the retailers who have weekly “sale” events to drum up business: any customer of reasonable intelligence recognizes that there is no reason to panic because if they miss the opportunity to save money this week, the every same item will be discounted next week.

And therein lies the problem: fear tactics have been grossly overused, to the point that customers recognize when a seller is attempting to scare them into making an unnecessary purchase.   This has been done so often that an appeal to urgency is no longer an effective method of motivating them, but instead tends to discourage them because they immediately become suspicious when they recognize the fear tactic and associate it with dishonest merchants who have duped them in the past.  In essence, an appeal to urgency is a warning flag.

That’s not to say that scare tactics are not effective – merely that they have to be issued from a reliable source.   People are naturally suspicious of a fast-talking stranger, but will give more attention to a warning from someone they already know and trust, particularly if that source is not constantly issuing false alarms.   Second, scare tactics have to be valid: the rational part of the brain engages after three milliseconds, and it must validate the emotional reaction.

All of this underscores the importance of relationship marketing – the need to establish a trusting relationship with a customer before applying any kind of sales pressure, and the need to be reserved and prudent in its application.