I’ve never been a big fan of Freud for a number of reasons, however, Freud’s Pleasure Principle has merit in marketing and website design so it’s worth discussing. The Pleasure Principle states that people will go to great lengths to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. Think about it for a minute. Don’t we spend most of our lives seeking pleasure? Why do we eat lunch or sit down or take an aspirin or buy a new car? Because it feels good. It’s instinctual. We have biological and psychological needs that have to be satisfied and most of them can be boiled down to those two things: avoiding pain and seeking pleasure.
So how’s this helpful in marketing? Well, so many times marketers waste their time trying to think of a unique angle or a clever way to sell something when truthfully, they could just hit it head-on and show how their product either satisfies pleasure or helps the user avoid pain. Those are powerful benefits. They’re visceral and are emotional. People buy on emotion so tapping into those sorts of feelings with a message that’s easy to grasp just might be more powerful than a clever jingle or cliché slogan.