Monday 26 March
Psychology of Communication
IPA, 44 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8QS
HOW BEARS SELL MORE WIDGETS
By Michael Bland
We like to think of ourselves as civilised, sophisticated beings – but it only takes a
visit to a football match or a walk past the City bars at 8.0 pm to set alarm bells
ringing.
According to Evolutionary Psychology (EP) theory, we are still primitive, tribal
creatures just under the surface. The theory is controversial but a study of it
provides a fascinating insight into the media agenda. Without realising it, a
journalist’s training arms him or her with a checklist of atavistic priorities – a magic
formula for finding the audience’s primal hot buttons and pressing them.
No-one teaches communication psychology to journalists. But they learn what
makes a ‘story’ in the school of hard knocks. To survive and succeed, they have to
get a feel for what the editor wants – and fast. And what the editor wants is largely
dictated by his or her feel for what the readers, viewers and listeners want. It’s a
Darwinian survival/success process just like the one that gave us EP in the first place.
Over the years, editors learn by trial and error what it is those audiences want. If you
publish photos of the Duchess of York topless and sell three quarters of a million
extra copies (which is what the Sun did), then you have a pretty good idea that what
your readers want is lots of royal flesh. If you get the mix wrong and fail to reinforce
existing prejudice, then your circulation falls, the advertisers drift away and you are
quickly on the scrap heap.
In the process, journalists develop a subconscious feel for the audience’s ‘So What?’
barrier – the invisible shield that makes them either think ‘Hey, this is interesting;
tell me more’ or move on to something else. And the tools with which to crash this
‘So What?’ barrier are, in my view, motivators which set us all a-twitch because they
wake up the cave person under the surface by posing a threat or providing a solution
to our evolutionary instincts. To illustrate this, come back with me a million or so
years:
There you are, peacefully wandering among the trees and minding your own
business, when you suddenly come face to face with a very large, very fierce, and
very hungry looking bear. It stops and looks around for its next meal. Its eyes fall on
you and it starts to come towards you......
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Immediately, all other worries disappear and your entire attention is now focused on
the bear. If you don’t get the hell out of here you’re bear meat, but if you manage to
escape you have achieved the first requisite of life: basic survival.
But now you find yourself on the edge of a dense and foreboding forest, gazing out
over a bare, hostile landscape. It’s getting dark and cold, and huge black clouds on
the horizon tell of torrential rain to come. The landscape is too exposed to stick
around out here, but behind you in the forest you can hear ominous rustlings. And
you are feeling hungry and thirsty. You need shelter, food and water. In other
words, you are aware of your basic needs – so you shift your attention from
escaping the bear to staying alive for the rest of the day.
Once you have achieved this, your built-in ‘worry button’ turns its attention to
staying alive tomorrow, so you focus on finding regular supplies of food, water and
shelter. In other words, a sense of acquisition kicks in.
Next, your thoughts turn to hunting and gathering, to being a member of a tribe so
that you can hunt together more efficiently and gang up to protect each other. But
this comes at a price. It means having to fit in with the way your tribe does things –
knowing the rules of society. If you look at the chief in the wrong way you could end
up dead.
A tribe means competition, jealousy and in-fighting. It means worrying about your
place in the pecking order so you can get the best deals and exercise two more
powerful instincts: power and influence. Never underestimate the importance we
attach to being esteemed by the tribe. And there is always conflict – both within the
tribe and with others.
Nowadays we don’t tend to meet too many wild bears by the office water fountain,
but we are still programmed to be on the lookout for them. We are delivered on
earth with an embedded worry software – we worry about staying alive; we worry
about our jobs, mortgages and savings accounts; we worry about finding a partner;
we worry about getting up the next rung of the ladder.
To see how this translates into a media formula, we need look no further than a
typical daily newspaper. No matter how inherently boring or irrelevant the material,
the editors know that we will read it so long as it contains a key ‘trigger,’ a primal
resonance that makes the tribal creature in us sit up and take notice.
Top of the tree is fear (because of our need to survive). ‘Fear’ stories such as mass
epidemics (the more gruesome and incurable the better), global warming (or
freezing), terrorist attacks, asteroids, earthquakes and economic crashes are music
to the journalist’s ears. He or she knows that if we think we could all die in our beds
tonight we will sit up and pay attention.
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Then there’s need (food, shelter etc). Then acquisition (securing the future). There
are tribal issues a-plenty, especially conflict. It’s like the school playground – when a
fight breaks out, everyone gathers round to watch.
And you can’t get far through the day’s media without encountering the motivators
associated with propagation of the species: romance, sex and protection of
offspring.
And as soon as one threat or need has passed, we immediately strive to satisfy what
we see as the next most immediate one. And when we have satisfied that need, we
become aware of the next one, and so on. This is why we are never satisfied, why
business billionaires who could retire in comfort for life have to make ‘just one more’
acquisition, why movie and pop superstars go on driving themselves to destruction
and indulge in ever stranger habits - because they’ve already got ‘everything’ and
are still not satisfied. And it is why we still want the next job up the ladder or the
bigger house down the road.
We are also still programmed with a razor-sharp sense of curiosity. We need to
know what’s going on around us. When we saw smoke rising from the other side of
the valley we were all a-twitch, asking ourselves: ‘Is this a threat or an opportunity?
Is it a friendly tribe with whom we can join forces and catch more prey - or is it a
hostile tribe who might wipe us out?’
We see this syndrome in the journalists’ maxim: ‘Dog bites man, not news; man
bites dog, news.’ A classic example of this was the tragic death of television
personality Jill Dando. The story ran for a year because we did not know who killed
her or why. If we had known these facts from the outset it would have deprived the
media of a much prized curiosity fest.
I do not claim any scientific provenance for my theory. EP has its critics, but by
taking its principles, borrowing from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and successfully
getting stories in the media for 30 years, I have developed a checklist of motivators
which, while no academic treatise, certainly works in real life.
Faced with another dull-as-ditchwater draft press release to write about Bloggs’s
Widgets, I first ask: ‘Can I scare people shitless with this?’ If not, ‘Does it satisfy their
perceived needs?’ And if still not, ‘Could it make them fat and rich?’ And so on down
the list until I hit an angle which will touch the reader’s hot button – and which the
journalist will therefore instantly recognise as a ‘story.’
I do this consciously, but I believe that successful journalists, spin doctors, politicians
and marketers use an EP approach without realising it. They develop it via their
conditioning, and by trial and error. It is at the heart of their ability to spin a story.
Indeed, mention was made earlier of the need to ‘reinforce existing prejudice,’ a
term borrowed from someone who knew a thing or two about spin: Josef Goebbels.
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A chilling thought.
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Michael Bland’s ‘EP Hierarchy’ Human Motivator
& Media Priorities Checklist
Survival of the Individual
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Fear
Needs
Acquisition
Survival of the Tribe
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Rules of society
Conflict
Esteem – what the neighbours think
Herd behaviour
Propagation of the Species
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Romance
Lust
Protection of offspring
What We Worry About When We Run out of Real Problems
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Quality of life
Meaning of life
Etc…
…and, running throughout the whole EP hierarchy: a powerful sense of curiosity.
Sources:
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Evolutionary Psychology (EP) theory
A.Maslow 1954
3 pints of Kronenbourg
Michael Bland, FIPR, MBCI, is a consultant, author, trainer and speaker in Corporate
Communication, Crisis and Issues Management, Creativity, Media Interviews,
Presentation Skills, Reducing Stress and Enjoying Life.
© Michael Bland 2006
info@michaelbland.com
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www. michaelbland.com
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