Handling Motivational Conflicts

In previous articles, I’ve outlined the decision making process and summarized some persuasion techniques.  Although these discuss the general process that consumers go through to make decisions, the guidance in these articles has been fairly one-sided.

Most of the discussion has been from the perspective of the product or service that you are offering to the consumer.  The consumer, however, is always comparing your offering to something else.  Everything in marketing is relative.

The concept of ‘motivational conflict’ refers to the internal conflict that all consumers feel when making a decision.  To understand the buying behaviour, we must consider the two main types of motivational conflicts.

Types of Motivational Conflicts

Approach-Approach Conflict

The ‘approach-approach’ conflict can be thought of as, “I want this, and I want that, but I can only have one.”

When a consumer makes a buying decision, he or she typically must choose one option amongst the available alternatives.  Unless there is an obvious winner in their mind, they will typically feel a sense of loss for not being able ‘have it all’.

Use perception maps to position your offering to address your consumer’s approach-approach motivational conflict.  If your offering is correctly positioned, you can make it the ‘obvious’ winner, and reduce the sense of loss that your customer would otherwise feel for not selecting a competing product or service.

Approach-Avoidance Conflict

This type of conflict can be a bit tougher to manage.  This is when the consumer wants to make a choice, but wants to avoid the downside.  For example, “I want a large vehicle, but I don’t want to impact the environment.,” or “I want that decadent desert, but I don’t want to spend 3 hours in the gym working off the calories.”

Almost all choices consumers make have some downside or risk.  We can’t always eliminate the downside, but we must recognize it exists.

A good option to mitigate the downside is to offer complimentary products or services.

For example, a tire store might want to sell winter tires, but it knows that a downside is that the customer will need to switch between summer and winter tires twice a year.  That involves a cost of both time and money on for the consumer.  To mitigate this approach-avoidance conflict, the tire store can offer free or discounted tire exchange.

Everything in marketing is relative and consumers always have alternatives.  When positioning your product or service, consider the motivational conflicts your customers face.  It might cost you relatively little to have a big effect on reducing that conflict for your customers.

Chris McPhee, MBA
Email: Chris.McPhee@Marketing-Matters.org