Enliven Influence by Viewing Life Scripts

Elderly adults generally strive to see the upside in any situation. At the same time, they tend to see their own lives as becoming more negatively-toned in advanced years. Researchers at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University and Brock University found this fact about life scripts to be similarly true for people across the varying cultures of twelve developed countries. Moreover, it was true for the life scripts of younger adults as well as those of the elderly.
     A life script consists of a person’s description of key events they expect to experience between birth and death. A common technique for eliciting a life script is to ask the individual to imagine an average newborn in their culture and then list the seven most important milestones this newborn would likely encounter over a subsequent lifetime.
     Because of the similarity in life script trajectories across cultures, attention to features of life scripts is especially useful to marketers who are attempting to influence groups of consumers worldwide with whom the marketers lack personal contact. We can safely assume that our target markets believe their lives will become increasingly more challenging as they enter into and then continue through their senior years. Consumers can be interested in planning to maintain what they possess and compensate for what they anticipate losing. It may take a targeted effort, though. For example, some young adults are no more motivated to save for retirement than to give money to a stranger. Those young adults view a self in the distant future to be like a stranger.
     The researchers’ review of studies considered how elderly adults perceive the trajectory of their lives, not necessarily the actual life trajectories. Because heavy responsibilities increase during young adulthood, the typical life script about that period is notably more positive than the actual sense of well-being. In the transition from middle age to old age, well-being is usually stable or increases, at least up until death approaches. However, the life scripts expressed by adults tend to overstate the downsides of the transition.
     It is consumers’ perceptions of themselves—and, in this case, the course of their lives—which are of more interest to marketers than the objective realities. People are persuaded best with appeals to their perceptions of their realities. Adults of all ages could be motivated by appeals to an underlying assumption that life satisfaction is threatened as they approach advanced age.

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