Increase Your Audience's Desire to Earn an Award - Make the Virtual Real

Everyone wants to put everything on line.  It's faster, cheaper and in many cases, more effective to conduct business electronically.  We've seen the rise of ebay, amazon and countless other businesses as they leverage the internet to bring us more choice and more options, faster and at less cost.

The incentive industry has not been sitting on the sidelines as this change occurred.  Many programs are designed, launched, operated, tracked and fulfilled entirely on line.  But have we sacrificed effectiveness for efficiency and increased results for decreased costs?

When I was your age...

Years ago incentive programs typically included a catalog of items presented in a four-color format, perfect bound with colorful copy and even more colorful photographs of the awards available to top performers.  Sent to the home, the catalog sat on the coffee table and encouraged the family to participate in the program that Mom, Dad, husband or wife was part of.  This family involvement increased the motivation and desire of the participant and eventually increased program results.

I ran programs for dealers and distributors where not just the catalog, but a sample set of awards were sent to the office building where the participants were housed so that they could see, touch, and experience the awards.

Well, it turns out that we were pretty smart about making the intangible tangible, and not even knowing the reason why.

30-Seconds is all it takes...

I posted a while back on a phenomenon known as the "pseudo-endowment effect" as it related to online bidding auctions.  In that study (from THE Ohio State University) they suggested that those that bid in an auction had a feeling of ownership when they held the high bid and would bid more when someone outbid them because they felt someone was taking something they already owned (loss aversion.)

A new study by researchers at THE Ohio State University found that people have those same feelings of ownership when they physically held an item.  And the important part... those feelings occurred in as little as 30-seconds.  People in the second study would bid more for an item after touching it.  From the post on MSNBC...

"The study, detailed in the August 2008 issue of the journal Judgment and Decision Making, found that on average, people who held the mug for longer bid more for it — $3.91 to $2.44 in the case of the open auction and $3.07 to $2.24 in the closed. In fact, people who held the mug for 30 seconds bid more than the retail price four out of seven times."

Sampling Your Awards

The lesson for today is... if possible, find a way for your participants to touch, feel, hold the awards they want in a program in order to create a stronger attachment to that award.  Creating that attachment will increase their desire to "really" own it instead of just "virtually" owning it.

Some thoughts on how to incorporate this technique into your program...

• If your participant base is located in common physical environments set up a small showroom of items for people to see, touch experience
• Allow participants to pre-order an award of nominal value (borrow against future performance?)
• Have participants create "wish lists" where they list the awards they want and thereby creating that pseudo-endowment effect early in the program.

I'm sure you all can think of more ways for participants to touch, feel, experience the awards in your program.  If you can - you will have a much more successful program.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Be Careful What You Touch, You Might Just Buy It (shoppingblog.com)
• Please: DO handle the merchandise (socialmediatoday.com)
• Endowment effects (economist.com)