{"id":182,"date":"2023-03-23T23:02:37","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T23:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/?p=182"},"modified":"2024-09-27T16:55:47","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T16:55:47","slug":"goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/goals\/","title":{"rendered":"Goals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

But first, a question:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Why do people buy this thing?<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"A<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

If you’ve read Chapter 1, you know the answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s holes.” We hear you say. “People want holes, duh!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where we have to make a tiny confession. When we said “holes” we may not have been telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (to borrow a phrase from American courtrooms). We may even have been fibbing a little. Not bad lies though! The lies to children<\/a>#up kind.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
#down. We lie to children constantly, and this is good. We tell them \"food is good for you, you need to eat\" and once they've got that we can say \"actually I lied. Only some kinds of food are healthy\". And when they've got that we say \"I lied again. Some 'unhealthy' foods are fine if you eat them in limited amounts\". Each step adds a layer of complexity that challenges their existing understanding without overwhelming them in details. Some people don't think of this as telling lies (perahps they imagine peeling back the layers of an onion instead) but that is a philosophical debate for another day (and in our opinion the 'lies' framing is, at minimum, a lot more fun)<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Don’t believe us? Let us convince you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look, nobody wants holes. In your life, you have seen tens of millions of adverts trying to sell you things, and not one of them has ever tried to win you over with: “We have the best holes! Holes in wood! Holes in plastic! Holes in concrete! Just give us your money and you can have holes today!”. It sounds ridiculous, right, but this is what we were believing until 30 seconds ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what do you really <\/strong>want? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead of thinking of that question in the abstract (“I want world peace”), let’s consider the conditions of your daily life. Maybe you live in a place like this:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
\"Interior
minimalist student chic<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
But maybe, just perhaps, you would like it to look a little more like this:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
\"A
“We just need some wood with holes in it. And a bit of paint, right?”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
So you don’t want holes. What you do want is a nicer house. Or, at least, something to put your books on. Or maybe you just like to build things as a hobby. The point is, what you really have are goals<\/strong>. What you are actually buying is help with meeting your goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are goals the only way to think about motivation? Is that why it’s our key theory?<\/h5>
\n
No, of course not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are many other ways. There’s an old tradition in psychology that saw motivations as basically a part of your personality: Some people are motivated to seek power, some achievement, etc <\/span>. Other traditions have talked about motivation as reward-seeking; Vroom’s Expectancy theory famously claims that people will try more or less hard at a task depending on a) the amount of effort they feel they will have to put in, b) how likely they think they are to get a reward for it, and c) how good they think having that reward is likely to be <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Goals are just a particularly useful way of thinking about consumer behaviour, though, because of the way they help us understand people’s sometimes wanting the same things over time, and other times shifting whims from moment to moment. This has been particularly true since psychologists started developing a cognition-as-motivation framework in the 1990’s <\/span>. Keep reading to find out what that means. Bon apetit!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
What are goals?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In everyday life, we usually talk about goals as big future targets that we aspire to reach. Losing weight, for example, or being able to run a marathon. or remembering your partner’s birthday (“why are they so mad today? Is it something I said?”)#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
#down. That's a joke. We are all lovely considerate partners, right <\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Cognitive psychology#up has a simpler meaning of ‘goals’: They are ideas that exist in our mind, of a thing that we want to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
By this meaning, goals can certainly be the big aspirational things that we usually think of (i.e., run that marathon, get an A+ in your CB class), but they can also be tiny things that pop into our heads from moment to moment (i.e., turn the room lights off, or fetch peanut butter from the cupboard). It might be odd to think of those as goals, but that is what they are. Much of our waking life (and maybe some of our dreaming life too) is a constant flow of goals, as we shift from one to another.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
#down. A branch of psychology that tries to work out the 'mechanisms' by which our minds process information<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Almost all buying involves consumers having goals. If you decide you want to build a shelf, that’s a goal. If you want to learn carpentry skills, or hang a picture of your mother on a brick wall, those are both goals too. If you reach for a chocolate bar on a supermarket shelf, that also is a goal (if a very small and transitory one, towards which you might have other complicated goals too).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are there times we aren’t flowing from one goal to another?<\/h5>
\n
Very much, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Psychologists talk about there being different ‘modes of consciousness’, and only one of these is the goal-directed state in which we are focused on getting things done. Another is a ‘lantern mode’ in which we are looking around us, observing the world, but trying to do things ourselves. Another mode uses what neuroscientists call the brain’s ‘default mode network<\/a>‘ – this is when we are awake, but our thoughts are wandering; Perhaps to people we know, or things that happened, or even things that might happen in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other states are possible too. Some types of meditation aim to focus all of our awareness onto just one thing (often our breath) so that we can “be present” and let go of thinking about the future (and all the goals we have for it). Other times we are deeply absorbed in a film or a movie and so aren’t animated by any goals, though we might be mentally simulating the goals of characters in the story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So there are possibilities!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Structure of this chapter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Knowing that goals exist is not all that exciting. Not on its own. “People want to do stuff?” you say, “Who knew.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But you don’t have to get much deeper before it starts getting really interesting. How do goals work? Which goals do we follow, and when?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For maximum clarity, we are going to use the same five headings for discussing both goals and basic needs (which is our other organizing principle for this chapter). This will help us see where the two things are different and where they are similar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Topics we will cover:<\/strong><\/td>Goals<\/strong><\/td>Basic needs<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Dynamics<\/td>?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
Possible statuses<\/td>?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
What they do to us<\/td>?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
Interact with each other?<\/td>?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
Awareness?<\/td>?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Let’s dive in!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Goal dynamics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Goals follow a very simple pattern:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Activated \u2192 Sticky \u2192 Release<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Here’s a quick overview example: A goal pops into your head (“hey, that old pizza in the fridge sure sounds yummy right now”), and this is it being ‘activated’. If you don’t achieve this goal right away, it might hang around in your head and send you little mental prompts (“hey, this CB book is awesome but where’s my pizza!”), which is what we mean by them being ‘sticky’. Finally, if you achieve the goal (“munch munch”) then it is ‘released’, which feels nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Topics we will cover:<\/strong><\/td>Goals<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Dynamics<\/td>Activated \u2192 Sticky \u2192 Release<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Possible statuses<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
What they do to us<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
Interact with each other?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr>
Awareness?<\/td>?<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Let’s explore each of those steps a little more deeply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Goals get activated<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In a marketing context, it’s not enough that people think nice things about your product – that’s nice, but it won’t pay your bills. What you need is for people’s warm feelings to cross over into being an activated goal to buy your product. Marketers have different terms that relate to people trying to make this jump, such as “bottom of funnel#up” marketing, and “calls to action”. We are going to explain the second of those two <\/p>\n\n\n
\n
#down. If you want to know what the marketing funnel is, we describe it in more detail here<\/a> in he communications chapter.<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
A common sign that a marketer is trying to initiate goals in their audience is that they have included a “call to action” – in their advert, on their web page, or at any other touch point. These are messages and buttons saying things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n