The Psychology of the DMA Awards

The DMA Awards night 2015 is just around the corner.

You might be kicking yourself that you didn’t complete that application you started. You might have been shortlisted. You might be wondered if it is worth all the effort.

What if I told you that by not applying you could die early?

Whilst I am not saying the two awards are equivalent, research has shown that Nobel Prize winners outlive Nobel nominees by approximately two years. Academy Award winners live roughly four times longer than other actors. This means that all you have to do to extend your life is win a DMA award. No big task then.

However, the point of this article isn’t to promote the DMA Awards (although if that’s a side-product then all the better); the point is to explain the psychological reasoning behind having awards, generally, in society.

Let’s look at the neuroscience.

Winning an award releases serotonin, triggered when someone feels important or significant. It’s this feeling of importance which is critical: people have a strong desire to be better than others. Research has shown that people are willing to make material sacrifices to obtain a higher status (Huber, Loch, & Öncüler, 2004). People want a high status.

According to this research, if a society is already split into different social distinctions or hierarchies then awards would not be needed. Two examples suggest this to be true.

Let’s take the example of Switzerland. Switzerland is separated geographically (high mountains and deep valley), linguistically (it has four different native languages), culturally, religiously and in economic prosperity. It is interesting that the Swiss government does not hand out any order or decorations, not even in the armed forces.

Compare this to Italy, which is politically unified, and dominated by one religion and one language. Italy gives out awards at a fascinating rate. One of its awards, The Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, has no fewer than 250,000 members.

Looking at these two examples, it would appear that the more unified a system the more need for diversification.

This has a few implications for the direct marketing industry.

Direct marketing has relatively few distinguished awards. This would suggest that direct marketing is a relatively homogenous society with few distinguished hierarchies, like Switzerland.

Whilst some may argue this is/was the case, there may be another influencing factor to think about: awards have a great value when the recipient’s performance can be only vaguely determined (Frey, 2007).

In direct marketing, calculating performance is rather difficult. Whilst ROI can be calculated on some aspects of marketing, such as click rates, measuring ROI on other aspects, such as copy, proves to be more difficult.

In addition, some campaigns are not designed to make a profit; for example, Kenco’s Coffee for Change campaign in which the purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness and train young vulnerable people [https://www.coffeevsgangs.com/]. This does this make them lower quality than those that make a marginal profit or break even? Of course not.

In truth, the psychology behind awards remains moot. Do we need the DMA awards because direct marketing as a society is rather similar or due to the nature of the work we produce? Obviously, there could be a range of other reasons; people love winning; people love acknowledgement; people, also,

Whatever the reason, winning a DMA award might mean extending your life span and with the age of retirement getting later and later, who knows - you could use them.