Commitment is the key

It was September, and I was in the town’s grocery store. After purchasing all too many products there, I was asked by a cashier if I wanted to collect stickers.

Really, stickers? Who needs them? I certainly wasn’t a type of sticker collector, but this was about to change.

I remember when I was a child, I was a sticker collector. My favourite ones were the puffy ones with animals and googly eyes. The thing is that during my times, I couldn’t do anything with them. I could leaf through the album, or if I was lucky, I could trade them with my friend. Stickers were just pieces of paper.

Believe it or not, I have recently become a “born-again’ collector thanks to my seven years old twins and their whining and begging for these small visuals of tiny animals.

Now, whenever I go shopping, I will choose that diabolic grocery and often will throw some more groceries to my basket so that I could avail more stickers for my twins.

I will dutifully ask the cashier not to forget to give out my hard-earned stickers, so I won’t disappoint my kids who are eagerly waiting to stick these babies down until the page of their collector book is filled.

Interesting enough, my twins are no longer interested in lush toys from the toy shop. Instead, they are happily involved in a game of collecting so that they can gain relatively cheap stuffed mascot as a reward.

With all the above, I come to understand why I fell for it, and how smart marketing campaigns can be very useful tools for marketing.

You don’t need to a PhD in psychology to understand that psychology can be used in marketing. For many years now, successful marketers applied psychological principles of commitment in their marketing tactics.

“Once we have made a choice or a promise, we will face personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment”.

Sticker marketing was a perfect fit for the grocery marketing campaign. Once the marketers got my kids attention with colourful animals placed all over the entry door and inside the shop, I could no longer ignore this sticker collection at the cashiers.

We as parents are not in a ‘collecting stickers’ mood but once we make a promise to our kids that we will do it for them because they love it – it’s enough to change our resistance.

Smart marketers know that the best way to earn the loyalty of customers and prospects is to make them commit to something. It remains one of the most powerful marketing tactics used to influence our purchasing decisions and to leverage sales.