What Marketers Can Learn From the Neuroscience of Pain

Photo by Earl Wilcox, Unsplash

Which of the following hits you harder: losing something or gaining something? 

The above thought exercise is the crux of your relationship with pleasure and pain. This article will take a closer look at pain, its effect on consumer behavior, and how to market accordingly. 

Sure, pleasure is a strong motivator but pain is one of the strongest sources of motivation there is. Pain hurts more than pleasure feels good. 

The clearest example of this comes from examining how you treat money. Think about pain as losing something and pleasure as gaining something. 

Consider the following question: you have a fifty percent chance of receiving $150 and a fifty percent chance of losing $100. Would you take the gamble? From a mathematical standpoint, you should take this bet every single time.

However, the brain doesn’t run simulations this way. Potential losses are weighted much heavier than potential gains. 

The fear of losing what you already have drives you and your consumers to make decisions aimed at avoiding this outcome. This fear is known as loss aversion. According to neuroscientist Daniel Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, loss version is the motivation to avoid the greater psychological pain of a loss.  

And when you think about it, it makes evolutionary sense: hunter-gatherers felt the pain of missing a meal more strongly than the pleasure of gaining one. 

So, distilling pain down to loss aversion, is the crux of the resulting marketing philosophy.

The key takeaway is consumers are loss averse: Potential losses hurt more than potential gains feel good. 

As a marketer, put this to use through framing. Any given product can be framed either in terms of its potential gains, a ‘gain frame’ or its potential losses, a ‘pain frame’.

A good example to illustrate this are multi-vitamins. A gain frame would be: “Take these vitamins for a stronger immune system”. A pain frame would be “take these vitamins so you don’t get sick”.  

Gain frames show what people will gain from buying this product. Pain frames make clear what the consumer would lose by NOT buying this product. Unsurprisingly, pain frames are stronger.

Loss aversion can be especially useful in one of the 4 P’s of marketing, promotion. Sure, it feels nice to gain a discount of fifty dollars. But what if that $50 is framed as a fee which is then waived? 

Along similar lines, think about promotions via email marketing. Is the messaging closer to a gain frame or a pain frame? Something as simple as the offer in the subject line can be turned into a pain frame - $50 Discount Disappears Tomorrow for example vs the usual ‘Holiday Sale’. 

In the end, the overall price for the consumer is the same - they pay fifty dollars less than they would ordinarily. But framing it as an avoidance of a loss can be more motivating. 

Remember, your consumers don’t play to win, they play not to lose. When you recognize that, you can implement messaging that addresses this mindset. 

While there isn’t a catch-all answer for using pain as a motivator for your messaging, you can run different A/B tests to examine and determine what will be most effective in activating your consumer base. 

Keep in mind that, while pain and loss can be effective at motivating behavior, they are clearly unpleasant emotions. Excessive use may reflect negatively on the brand, product, or the promotion and leave the wrong impression. So please, use this lesson cautiously and ethically.

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