Marketing to the nurturance motive
Editor's note: This article is an edited excerpt from “The Nuturance Motive,” a chapter in The Science of Why, by David Forbes. Used by permission. Forbes is president of Forbes Consulting, a Lexington, Mass., research firm.
Like a great number of animal species, it is our nature to nurture. As a part of our drive to propagate our species, we experience an instinct to make sure our offspring make it to the age where they too can propagate. And nurturing by nature goes further than the local gene pool. Animals famously “adopt” the orphaned young of other species. This phenomenon might be simply an overexpression of the instinct to nurture our own. I think that the forces of evolution may have created the instinct to take care of the small and helpless.
The drive to nurture seems at times as if it trumps other elemental drives for self-interest. Taking in orphaned infants and children and protecting and nourishing them could clearly be a disadvantage for the tribe in many ways. Helpless children and infants consume copious amounts of resources – food, shelter, transportation, energy – that all would have been precious commodities in the hand-to-mouth world of hunting and gathering. But the early human instinct toward altruism, almost certainly an emotional cousin of biological nurturance, pays off in a broader sense, strengthening the gene pool and expanding the genetic variability in the tribe. This adoptive “crossbreeding” allowed us to enhance our abilities to adapt and evolve in response to our surroundings even more quickly. Put another way: Kindness is a formidable evolutionary advantage.
As powerfully social animals we are also drawn to nurture our society, to take care of all the collective cultural accomplishments of the group, including our social relationships and connections, our material culture, our intellectual creations – the ideas, stories and legends that ground and connect the group. We are uniquely tied, emotionally if not biologically, to the artifacts and ideas with which we have filled our environment, caring for and cherishing them almost as if they were our children.
In this larger view, nurturing behavior is good for our groups or communities and, ultimately, really good for our species and our collective culture. And it’s also good for us – literally, physically and in real time.
Scientists have found solid evidence of the hardwiring that’s behind our gestures of caring and cooperation. Studies show that the level of oxytocin, the soothing feel-good hormone produced in our brains, rises when we feel compassion and care for others. And recent studies show that those who volunteer have lower mortality rates, greater functional ability, reduced heart rate, lowered blood pressure, increased endorphin production, enhanced immune system, lowered feelings of stress and lowered rates of depression.
Marketing to consumers with a strong need for nurturance involves promising that your product will help satisfy their desire to care. This message can be conveyed head-on, as has traditionally been the case with food products (“Just like mom’s”). Or the message can be more subtle, such as messages of protection, consideration or thoughtfulness. Hallmark (which literally built a business on our desire to nurture) ran a 2009 campaign with the tagline: “A card. It’s the biggest little thing you can do.”
Nurturance messages can be found in marketing related to practically any product or service connected to caring or caretaking, including self-care. In the health and beauty industry, we don’t have to look far to find messages that focus on pampering, renewing or strengthening us. Olay skincare products do a good job of playing on our motivation to nurture our bodies when they encourage women to “Love the skin you’re in.” Hair care marketing is rife with nurturance messages: fortify your hair with vitamins and nutrients and give it tender loving care to produce a lustrous, healthy “cared-for” look.
Although many marketing messages from financial service companies lead with security (“You can be confident that we know how to make the most of your money”) or empowerment (“You can have the knowledge and insight to invest well”), it turns out that a strong nurturance need motivates consumers’ choices in this service category. Consumers often feel a need to be cared for and to trust in the professionals and institutions that help them manage their money. And the potential symbolism of savings as a “gift to your heirs” is also a significant force in this category – linked to nurturance motivation through the idea that saving or preparing for your child’s future demonstrates how much you love him or her today.
Show their love
Consumers with nurturance motives seek to show their love to friends and family, to themselves and even to beloved possessions. Examples of nurturance-oriented marketing messages include the following:
- We agree that the important things in life aren’t things at all.
- Show (them, yourself, it) a little love.
- We can help you show how much you care.
- Help us help others.
- Part of our proceeds will go to children in need/breast cancer research (or similar causes).
- The makers of this product know that you are a generous and thoughtful person.
- Let us take care of the details so you can focus on what really matters.
- We’ll help you spend more time with those you love.
- Feel closer to those you love.
- We understand and appreciate the beauty in life that you see.
- We’re/they’re so lucky to have you.
- Thanks for always seeing the best in others.
Case studies for the nurturance motive
Frozen food
The drive to nurture manifests itself most strikingly in the context of mothering and, not surprisingly given the roots of our word for this motive (nutritus is Latin for “to suckle”), specifically in the realm of food preparation for the family.
Convenience foods pose interesting benefits for consumers seeking to care for families while leading demanding modern lifestyles but they also pose challenges. On the one hand, these products free up time and help consumers get a hot meal on the table. On the other hand, the level of convenience and lack of hands-on effort can feel almost like a cop-out to nurturant consumers whose self-image is to be good mothers or fathers, husbands, etc.
Our client wanted to understand the best ways to talk to consumers about frozen entrées. The client offered a range of frozen products and wanted to give each product its own identity. We discovered that the different products in the line emerged with different associations for the company’s primary consumers; some products were geared to mastery (“Here’s gourmet eating at its best”), some to identity (“Set your imagination free with an exotic new cuisine”) and some to security (“You can count on this product every time”).
One product emerged as an optimal candidate for enhanced nurturance positioning. It had two important qualifications: it came in a single family-sized portion and was designed to be baked in the oven rather than the microwave. Images for the product focused on steaming, casserole-sized meals emerging from the oven – which carried the nurturant emotional associations to grandma’s dinnertime meals – updated for our modern lives.
Breakfast
A breakfast-food manufacturer was developing a new line of breakfast products for adults. We explored the atmosphere of breakfast time and the feelings that typically accompany eating breakfast and we conducted a motivational analysis to uncover consumers’ unmet emotional needs and wants right at the moment when they are deciding what to have for breakfast.
Data from this analysis indicated that consumers often felt as if their awakening each morning was almost like being reborn. They experienced an urge to “care for their inner infant” at breakfast time and to send themselves off to work with a warm, loving, fortifying meal. An appetite for self-nurturance was clearly on the table at breakfast time.
Based on this insight, our client developed and tested a range of new hot cereal concepts that focused on self-nurturing ideas such as providing “a little hug for your tummy” first thing in the morning. Responses to these ideas were extremely strong and these ideas remain in the brand promise of that client’s products today.
Insect repellent
The motivation to nurture can also manifest in other less-intimate forms of social behavior. A client in the insect repellent business came up against an unusual challenge. A bath oil marketed by a leading cosmetic company was rapidly encroaching on the market on the coattails of a grassroots movement for consumers to use the oil as an insect repellent for themselves and their kids.
Our client’s scientists tested this bath oil extensively and found its effectiveness as a repellent to be marginal at best. Our client’s products, on the other hand, contained the proven ingredient DEET and were shown in the same tests to be highly effective.
The client had always used a “problem/solution” model to illustrate how its repellent would solve users’ insect troubles. Implied emotional benefits focused on needs for security “keep my kids and me safe from these bugs”; “let us enjoy the outdoors with confidence that we won’t be covered in bites.”
But the results of our motivational research established that the true consumer motivation in this product category was about nurturance not security: parents used repellents on their children because they wanted to take good care of them and to be good parents. Hosts at barbecues and pool parties provided insect repellents to their guests because they wanted those guests to be relaxed and happy and because they wanted to be good hosts.
And the fact was that offering an oily, petroleum-scented DEET-based repellent simply didn’t feel like an act of nurturance. The bath oil, by contrast, went on like a lotion and smelled fabulous and it came in a package that looked as if it were intended for skin care; it featured a lot of white and soft, flowing cursive lettering. Our client’s products, on the other hand, came in packaging that looked like it belonged in an auto repair shop, complete with harsh colors and large, black block lettering – altogether not something you’d reach for to express your love.
Once our client recognized the need to speak to the nurturance motivation, the company developed new products with a lotion-like feel, attractive fragrances and packaging that resembled that of skin care products. The public response was resoundingly positive and the bath oil craze gradually disappeared.
Furniture care
One of our more intriguing projects demonstrated that even when surrounded by a world of loved ones, friends, children and pets, we still have a reserve of nurturant energy that can be directed at the inanimate objects in our lives.
A client in the furniture polish business wanted to explore motivation in the furniture care category. This client had been experiencing some challenges to its business when a competitor’s “dusting aid” claimed that its products left nothing behind on the furniture and so avoided any “unsightly buildup.”
Our motivational research revealed that wood furniture, because it came from trees, continued to possess a certain “life” in the minds of consumers that needed to be nurtured. In this way, care for the wood furniture took on many of the emotional qualities of caring for living things. Deep in their subconscious, consumers felt as if their wooden furniture needed “feeding” or it would be starved and become dry and “dead.”
Repositioning the product promise away from dust abatement to “giving your furniture the care it deserves” activated the nurturance motivations in the target group of homemakers.
Takeaways
- The drive to nurture and be nurtured is clearly hardwired. We share the instinct with most other animals but have evolved its expression far beyond its biological roots.
- Altruism and compassion strengthen the bonds within social groups and thus reinforce the powerful evolutionary advantage of “strength in numbers.”
- We can direct our nurturing behavior to children, family, social groups, strangers, ourselves and even inanimate objects.
- Nurturing, including preserving traditions and artifacts, is one basis for the structure of our family and our culture.
- Emphasizing nurturing benefits is an appealing way to market a wide range of products from food products to child care, skin care and even furniture care.
- Cause marketing has a natural target in consumers who are motivated to nurture.
- Our ideals of nurturing behavior are often linked to childhood memories, to sentimental and nostalgic images of when and how we felt particularly nurtured ourselves. The images of “the way mom/grandma did it” are the pinnacle of nurturing imagery.
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