Irrational?

In the Financial Times today, an interesting article about a question the American Democrats had a lot of difficulty answering: “What’s the matter with Kansas?”. It’s also the title of a book, describing “the tendency of lower-income voters to ignore their economic self-interest, as championed by the Democrats, in favour of their cultural agenda, as articulated by the Republicans.”

Obama reversed the problem: it is striking how many support he got from people making over 200.000 $ a year, the kind of people who would pay more taxes in his plan. So, in analogy with their lower-income counterparts, why do they vote against their economic interests?

The answer is, once again, and not surprisingly, that voters, as any other consumers, are no rational beings. This does not make them irrational; it makes them just more focused on the emotional effects of a decision (”how does it make me feel?”) than the rational ones (”will I pay more taxes?”). There’s a valuable, if not really new, lesson there for all advertisers: how a brand makes your customers feel is much more important than its rational attributes.

Anyone who has ever witnessed the power of a brand knows this, that’s not the problem. The problem is, we so easily forget …