This true warrior wants to know what you think the difference is between the following opportunities?
You are given $50 and are offered the following gamble:
A) Keep $20
B) Lose $30
Which choice describes your preferable outcome?
How you frame concepts creates the difference. In marketing, it is all about framing! The true warrior sees that the framing in this case creates a difference that doesn’t really exist. Mathematically, it is the same. Emotionally, keeping the $20 is perceived as better somehow than losing the $30.The true warrior knows that framing of this sort has a significant impact in real life.
Sometimes one gets the option to opt in or opt out of an offer of some sort.
Across Europe, on driver’s license renewal forms, one can either opt in or opt out of organ donation. In those countries that frame it by giving one the opportunity to opt out, you are an organ donor unless you do so, and there is nearly one hundred per cent participation in their organ-donor programs—good for society at large. On the flip side, opt-in countries have less than five per cent participation, which means that a lot of good organs are not available for saving lives. Here is a simple example in which framing has a high level of social/moral impact.
The true warrior knows that the general population has trouble believing that we are so fickle and easily influenced or manipulated. The facts are endless and indisputable, however, regarding these issues, and you and I are just as susceptible to it, without defence. This is the warrior advantage! The true warrior believes and practices the art of effective framing, as well as many other techniques and tools that are available to us all. We just have to pick up the tool and use it.
You may be wondering if trying to defend against these influences is hopeless for us too. No, it’s not, but just like your wealth plan, it takes effort. In this case, take ten per cent of your mind—just kidding.
Just stop, look, and listen! Engage your brain before opening your mouth; calculate outcomes; trust the computed answer, and use your brain. Don’t take the easy way. Get a second opinion. Recast in the alternative. Use a broad data set. Work at it.
What’s the difference between stated outcomes that mean the same, mathematically, but feel different? The difference is in the behaviour that is triggered by either statement.
If there were a hundred people on a plane and it crashed, and it was announced at the airport that someone had died, the reaction would be far more visceral than if it were announced that 99 percent of passengers were safe and unaffected. If you saw or heard the first message at the airport, while waiting for a flight, and there was a vending machine nearby, selling flight-accident insurance, what do you think would be the likely sales outcome—for you and everyone else hearing that message?
True warriors know that it will be a huge difference, and this is a key tool/weapon in their arsenal. The true warrior understands that everything published, in any forum, is framed as either a win or a loss.
Sixty per cent of businesses fail in the first five years!
Forty per cent of businesses go on to become spectacular successes!
Frame the behaviour you want as a win, and frame the behaviour you discourage as a loss. This is what many media venues are doing—putting things within a framework of doomand-gloom loss—and the lemmings lap it up. Stop with the loser attitude, and become a winner! You are warriors, and you will prevail more often with effective framing. So it has been written.