I recently read a great book that explains the triggers that can make your message fascinating to your customers. The book is Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation by Sally Hogshead.I’m not going to recap all of the details here. You should read the book. The seven triggers are likely familiar to most marketers in some form or another. You might have more on your list, but I like seven because 1) Most stories can fit into one of the seven and 2) I can remember them. ;-)They are:

• Trust
• Lust (You just have to have it.)
• Alarm
• Rebellion
• Power
• Prestige
• Mystique

Just for fun, here are seven things that are not on the fascination list:

• Accuracy
• Reproducibility
• Speed
• Sensitivity
• Resolution
• Size and
• Range (pick your unit)

The author goes on to explain how to evaluate whether a message is fascinating. She describes the “Golden Hallmarks of Fascination”. These are exactly the things that marketers want to have happen.Fascinating messages provoke emotional reactions, create advocates, and incite conversations to name a few. If our messages aren’t achieving these things, if they are not provocative enough to make a prospect feel something and want to tell others, they are likely to be forgotten. People share things of value. If they don’t share it, maybe it wasn’t that valuable to them in the first place.  Our job is to make sure the value isn’t just novelty, but also usefulness. That doesn’t mean our campaigns can’t be fun.Do your campaigns provoke an emotional response in your prospects? What kinds of feelings do they get from your message? Going down the list of seven triggers, the resulting feelings you provoke might be confidence, greed, fear, independence, control, importance, and curiosity. Now we’re getting somewhere.Sally Hogshead gives great examples of how each of the triggers have been used successfully.  Unfortunately, life science marketing examples aren’t among them. So I am going to do it for you. In regular upcoming blog posts, I’ll review the content in this industry and talk about what I see as the successes and opportunities to create more compelling marketing messages with emotionally driven content.If you want to hear fascinating examples of what other marketers inside and outside the life sciences are doing, listen to my podcast.