My spam folder, like yours, rarely holds too many surprises. I’ve become jaded to the ads promoting ways to increase the size of certain body parts…IPads for the price of a taxi tip or offers from people who want to bequeath their family fortune to me despite an inability to correctly spell my last name.
The other day however, I was jolted out of my jadedness by an ad I’d never seen before. It was for a product called Liquid Truth by Vero Labs. It’s a trust spray. Just spritz this on a prospective client before that big meeting and the deal is as good as done, the copy suggests.
To this, I thought, spray a prospective client with anything and gaining trust will be the least of my problems.
Nevertheless, my curiosity piqued, I followed the link to the Liquid Truth website. Once there, a female avatar with working girl looks and a voice that could get a monk to rethink his occupation announced, “use this spray and everyone will trust you. For trust is power.”
And if you don’t believe her, just read what Joe has to say about it:
”While I was using Liquid Trust my relationship with my girlfriend wasn’t going well. Without really knowing what was going on it went from bad to wonderful. Best of all, she asked me to marry her! I would highly recommend this product. It can and will change lives for the better.”
The magic ingredient in this spray is oxytocin, a human hormone that is known to be released within our system when we experience trust. So Vero Labs claims to have figured out a way to make it, package it, and sell it.
Still not convinced that I ought to carry around an aerosol can of trust spray in my brief case (special pocket sizes are available, too). Digging deeper, I was able to find that a great deal of legitimate research exists on the causes of oxytocin releases in our bodies. In one case, researchers showed that oxytocin is liberated with touch, as in a massage, and during emotional movies.
In another study, scientists demonstrated that ”in both humans and dogs, oxytocin levels in the blood rose after five to twenty-four minutes of a petting session. I’m thinking that if I ever engage in a twenty-four minute petting session with a research volunteer, I won’t need trust as much as I’ll need a good lawyer. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is possible for oxytocin to play a role in establishing emotional bonds between humans and dogs.
For marketers, we all know that trust is a primary ingredient that any brand must affect in order to be successful. I’m certainly not advocating that oxytocin be directly applied to prospects in order to manipulate buying behaviors. But If oxytocin is indeed a barometer of achieved trust, than there’s a lot we can learn from who, what, when, and how its release can be affected by different marketing and advertising approaches (excluding Scratch