Fascinate

Sally Hogshead

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061966163
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

A newly revised and updated edition of the influential guide that explores one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and influence behavior—fascination—and how businesses, products, and ideas can become irresistible to consumers.

In an oversaturated culture defined by limited time and focus, how do we draw attention to our messages, our ideas, and our products when we only have seconds to compete?

Award-winning consultant and speaker Sally Hogshead turned to a wide realm of disciplines, including neurobiology, psychology, and evolutionary anthropology. She began to see specific and interesting patterns that all centered on one element: fascination.

Fascination is the most powerful way to capture an audience and influence behavior. This essential book examines the principles behind fascination and explores how those insights can be put to use to sway:

• Which brand of frozen peas you pick in the case

• Which city, neighborhood, and house you choose

• Which profession and company you join

• Where you go on vacation

• Which book you buy off the shelf

Structured around the seven languages of fascination Hogshead has studied and developed—power, passion, innovation, alarm, mystique, prestige, and alert— Fascinate explores how anyone can use these triggers to make products, messages, and services more fascinating—and more successful.

PART I

Fascinate or Fail

Will You Fascinate? Or Will You Fail?

The Big O

Speaking of Fascination, Let’s Start with Sex, Shall We?

The darkened cocktail lounge of the St. Paul airport Marriott is a social petri dish, commingling business travelers from otherwise unrelated companies, cities, and professions. The lounge’s ferns-and-brass ambiance offers these road warriors a comforting mixture of familiarity and anonymity.

In between serving Sam Adams and Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, bartenders witness the nightly routine of strangers engaged in flirtation, a timeworn ritual that often progresses from suggestive glances to the elevator banks in two hours or less. Had these bartenders studied Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s research in evolutionary anthropology, they’d realize that they’re front and center at a nightly performance of the flirtation tango—a series of dance steps choreographed over the millennia by the Martha Graham of mating dances, Mother Nature herself.

Whether a woman regularly quotes Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City or belongs to a society with no written language, she’ll flirt using almost exactly the same nonverbal signals as other women across continents, cultures, and geographies. Eibl-Eibesfeldt discovered that women from around the globe—from craggy, remote islands to metropolitan epicenters—use the same repertoire of gestures when determining whether a potential mate is available and interested. Flirting, like all fascinations, is innate.

The Canoodling Tango

In her aptly named book, Sex, Joann Ellison Rodgers describes Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s discovery on just how all women flirt. A female begins fascinating a male by smiling at him, raising her brows to make her eyes appear wider and more childlike, quickly lowering her lids while tucking her chin slightly down, in an effort to bring him closer. After averting her gaze to the side, she will, within moments and almost without exception, put her hands on or near her mouth and giggle, lick her lips, or thrust out her chest while gazing at the object of her intended affection. And it’s consistent, regardless of language, socioeconomic status, or religious upbringing. For men, says Rodgers, the fascination ritual is less submissive but no less standardized. He’ll puff out his chest, jut his chin, arch his back, gesture with his hands and arms, and swagger in dominant motions to draw attention to his power (not unlike the way a male pigeon puffs his chest, or a male gorilla struts). Like a woman’s flirtation, he’s advertising critical cues about his reproductive fitness.

Fascination. Flirtation. Fornication.

Just as we’re born to be fascinated by specific signals from potential mates, we’re also born knowing how to fascinate them as well. Flirtation is the most elemental of all fascinations, one of a handful of instinctive cues upon which all life depends. No flirtation, no mating. No mating, no offspring. No offspring, no family, no passing of the genes, no species.

Fascination isn’t the same as sex, of course. However, sex does provide a conveniently accurate metaphor. And unlike, say, South American bird watching, sex is a universal phenomenon. So for purposes of making our point academically, sex it shall be.

Fascination Is a Force of Attraction

This force of attraction heightens intellectual, emotional, and physical focus. Couples in the St. Paul Marriott fall into this captivated grip, and you experience it, too. When you impulsively decide to see a certain movie, when you crave your favorite chocolate almond ice cream, or when you hit repeat on your iPod to hear that song one more time, you’re experiencing a similar—if less intense—attraction.

Attraction doesn’t have to make sense. In most cases, at traction is highly irrational. We generally don’t decide to be fascinated any more than we decide to be attracted to a certain person, because root causes for our fascinations are hardwired into us long before we have any say in the matter.

Fascination takes many forms, but all tap into instinctive triggers, such as the need to hunt, to control, to feel secure, to nurture and be nurtured. Some fascinations last only a heartbeat, while others last beyond a seventy-fifth wedding anniversary. No matter how long it lasts, or what behavior it motivates, or which trigger inspires it, every fascination binds with a singularly intense connection. We are, if only for a moment, utterly spellbound. Herein lies the power of fascination: It strips away our usual rational barriers, exposing our minds, leaving us vulnerable to influence, naked to persuasion.

Speaking of naked, let’s check back in with our couples flirting in the St. Paul airport Marriott lounge.

At the bar, a paralegal is progressing nicely through her flirtation with the service engineer from Sacramento. They’re performing their steps in the mating dance with predictable precision. Yes, it’s all a bit crazy. But if the notion that you’re not in control of your flirtation seems crazy, take heart: You’re not as crazy as you will become, once infatuated.

The Mental Disorder Known as Infatuation

As things progress during flirtation, our neurochemistry rewards us with a psychotic journey known as “infatuation.” Fascination and infatuation both originate in the limbic area of the brain, the part that houses rage, ecstasy, sadness, sexual arousal, and fight-or-flight.

In the book Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, Frank Tallis writes that if we take the symptoms of falling in love and “check them against accepted diagnostic criteria for mental illness, we find that most ‘lovers’ qualify for diagnoses of obsessional illness, depression or manic depression.” Other symptoms include insomnia, hyperactivity, and loss of appetite. Ah, ain’t love grand? Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel describes how falling in love can “make otherwise normal people do very wild things. They’ll stalk, hack into e-mail, eavesdrop and do other things they’d never do in a rational frame of mind.” Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist, explains that the elevated dopamine levels experienced during the rush of falling in love can drive us to take risks that might otherwise seem unthinkable.* So love really does conquer all, and not always in a good way.

But wait. Hold on. Why would our brains throw us into a temporary insanity? What’s the evolutionary purpose for this whacked-out loss of control? To understand why fascination grasps us so irresistibly, keep in mind the illogic of flirtation, and the lunacy of love.

Fascination, as we’ve seen, is a visceral and primal decision-making process, one that’s largely involuntary. Fisher says that our brains are literally “built to fall in love” because it’s in our evolutionary best interest not to think clearly during the two-year time period it takes to meet, court, and produce a child, or else we might come to our senses and avoid the inconvenience of child rearing altogether. Tallis agrees, proposing that evolution has hardwired us for psychopathological romantic obsessions that last “just long enough to ensure the survival of genes from one generation to the next.”

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes the Survival of the Species in a Baby Carriage

Most elements of fascination work at the subconscious level. Unlike the act of paying attention, which is rational, our fascinations have more in common with less logical behaviors of passion. We don’t even realize it’s happening, any more than we realize that we’re flirting for reasons that have less to do with hearts and flowers and more to do with our biological urge to procreate. Whether you realize it or not, you experience fascination’s irrational grip.

Now that we’ve covered flirtation and falling in love, it’s time to go a step further, and find out why your body is equipped to manufacture the quintessential fascination.

Orgasm: The Ultimate Fascination

If flirtation and sex are metaphors for fascination, then the experience of orgasm itself is fascination in the extreme. Ground-breaking human sex researcher Alfred Kinsey described the fascination of sexual climax: “Some, and perhaps most persons may become momentarily unconscious at the moment of orgasm…only vaguely aware of reality.” Freud noted that orgasm brings an almost complete disappearance of thought, a hypnoid state with a temporary loss of self-awareness.* This focused state plays itself out in everyday life. Think of when you’re “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes what he calls a “flow state,” and its loss of self-consciousness. “Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus.”

Picture how your body zones out when you’re engrossed in a movie, or mid-thought. You might stand perfectly still, jaw slackened, pulse rising, so transfixed that you lose track of time and the world around you. You might be so engrossed that you’re lost in thought during a lecture, or you may experience the sense of being “in the zone” in a basketball game. Again, a loss of self-awareness.

Fascinating messages, like fascinating people, have the potential to consume us as almost nothing else can, sucking us into a vortex of intensity. Csikszentmihalyi describes this in the addictive nature of flow, and “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Moments of fascination can become peak life experiences, calling us forth to engage more fully than at any other time, giving ourselves over to the vividness of complete and total engagement.

So compelling are such fascinations that in the extreme, only a thin line separates fascination from its evil twin: obsession.

When Fascination Becomes Obsession

Most of us at some time lose connection with the world around us in a healthy “flow state.” However, when the connection turns into obsession or compulsion, it causes a severe disconnect with society, and even a disconnect with reality. All fascination creates a momentary connection, but obsessions create an ongoing unhealthy connection. In the grip of obsession we lose control, held hostage to the compulsive behavior. Phobias are one example. Drug addiction is another.

The Fascination Scale of Intensity

All fascinations sit on a spectrum. Some are mild; others, quite intense. Take, for example, organizing a pantry. You might organize the cans and jars in your kitchen pantry without really thinking about it. For someone with OCD, however, those same shelves can become a fixation that defies normal behavior, causing tremendous anxiety and stress. Same behavior (organizing the kitchen pantry), yet with markedly different levels of intensity.

FASCINATION SCALE

Many people get into playing video games on a PS2 or Wii, usually as a way to relax or socialize. For some, however, it becomes more extreme. These players spend days in a room, staring at the screen without break, focusing on nothing but the game. In Japan, this is known as “geømu otaku”: an obsessive interest in video games. Same activity, just different levels of intensity and behavior.

Here’s a way to visualize this spectrum of attraction, ranging from avoidance to compulsion. (This scale is by no means absolute, but helps illustrate ten points upon which any fascination can fall.)

To illustrate this scale, let’s take an example to which we can all relate. (No, not sex, get your mind out of the gutter....