Motivation versus Marketing: What’s The Difference?

There’s an argument to be made that marketing is in fact motivation, tarted up and served without the good intentions that would lead a more intentional life.  Why can’t we just run advertisements to work out and solve all of our metabolic challenges?  If it worked, we’d reduce the cost of healthcare by half for the USA, and save ourselves an easy two trillion dollars.  This is the approach that many governments across the world have embraced, although the data says that these nationwide advertising campaigns haven’t had the kind of impact that their architects dreamed of.  So what gives?  If motivation isn’t marketing, what makes it different from the ads we’re served in almost every interaction that we have in our modern life?  

The reality is that motivation is a tricky undertaking with profound consequences, while marketing can be equated to the amuse bouche of motivation, the first stop on a journey to attempt to satisfy desire. It may be helpful to propose a (highly, highly simplified) model to start a productive conversation about effective motivational models.  At the most basic level, marketing appeals to the dopamine receptors in our brain, while motivation relies more on the limbic system that governs our more durable feelings.  From a scientific perspective, it isn’t reasonable to draw a hard line between the two systems in the brain, but I think it can be very helpful to talk about the most basic differences as they relate to motivation.  

Dopamine, by its nature, is a quick hit that promises pleasure, but it cannot ever be satisfied.  It drives curiosity and desire, but the payoff doesn’t compare to the moment of wanting.  The pop that we feel when we sit down for the first time in our new car or pull a beautiful piece of clothing out of the box is pure dopamine, but as Lieberman and Long emphasize in their book The Molecule of More, we can never actually reach a level of satisfaction from the experience.  Marketers try to sell us on the idea that if we buy what they’re selling, we’ll be transformed and happy, but as we all learn at a very young age, that hit lasts for the briefest of moments, and then we’re back on the hunt for the next pop.  

The limbic system, in contrast, is where our more durable emotions originate. Again, taking advantage of vast oversimplification for our discussion, our limbic system is responsible for feelings that capture the durable emotions that oscillate between the poles of safety and fear, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. This system has adapted over millennia to help us survive in a risk-filled world, and it is the critical mechanism to sustain motivation over the long term.  If we can awaken the most basic desires around safety and fear, joy and sadness, pain and pleasure, then we have a pathway to create durable motivation that can lead us to a more satisfying life.  

Marketing messages may spur that initial exploration and curiosity, but without an effective appeal to the chemistry that underlies the body’s most sustained emotional mechanisms, we’re stuck in a doom loop of quick fixes that can’t last.  Motivation isn’t a job for marketers; it is a job for people who understand the most basic feelings that we have as human beings and our place in the world.