Controlling Your Market With Reverse Psychology by Kyle Sergeant
Marketing and advertising are hard. People don’t just flock to products. They have to be convinced first.
We see over 2,000 marketing/advertising messages per day. We don’t remember half of them. For the most part, everything we see is just noise. In order to get passed the noise and get heard, marketers/advertisers need to break through the barriers people have around themselves.
These individual barriers are the result of demographics (i.e. age, sex, education, geographic location, etc.) and psychographics (i.e. The way we feel about ourselves, the things we value, the things we do in our spare time). One person might only buy green-alternative products, while another only buys brand names. Someone could be price conscious, while another will spend and spend more (even if it’s on credit) just to maintain an affluent lifestyle. So, if people are so different, can you still target more than one cluster? And if so, how?
The answer is yes. And one of the ways to do so is by using reverse psychology.
Reverse psychology was a term coined by critical theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In their 1944 work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno use the term “Culture Industry” to describe how cultural goods such as magazines and radio can be used to manipulate society into a state of passivity. And it is this state that they believe demonstrates psychoanalysis in reverse.
But does reverse psychology work?
Yes.
Reverse psychology works because it has great motivational strength on an individual’s personality. Reverse psychology creates this motivation by fostering the emotional response known as reactance.
Reactance was defined by Jack Brehm in 1966 and is the negative reaction of an individual when a choice has been taken away from them. When reactance is strong enough, an individual will try hard to restore the “threatened freedom.” For marketers/advertisers, this implies that by understanding a targets possible “threatened freedoms” you can better craft a message founded in reverse psychology to get your target to act accordingly. You just need to remember to understand your target market first so that you can craft a message that is blatant, unwanted, or coercive.
Examples of reverse psychology in action:
“Dear sixteen year old me.”
Lady Gaga
Dr. Pepper
Saving the Troy Public Library
Little Caesars
West Virginia Tourism
Ritz-Carlton
Conclusion:
Convincing people to try your product and/or service is difficult. But many tools/theories exist that can help a marketer/advertiser reach and influence a targeted group of people. One of these tools is reverse psychology. By utilizing reverse psychology you challenge an individual’s beliefs passed a certain point, gaining the individual’s interest which will send them along a consumer journey to discover your product/service – something you’ve wanted all along.