The power of sales promotion to cure hiccups

There’s a great letter to the Independent about a kid having interminable hiccups at school during a maths lesson. They started about half an hour before the lesson and the teacher was becoming really exasperated at the poor kid. Eventually she put this proposition to him: “If you can hiccup three more times, I’ll let you off homework for the next month.” Apparently they stopped immediately – you can imagine how totally gutted that pupil was at his loss.

The letter writer claims to have tried this method on various occasions at parties and it’s been successful every time. He reckons the key thing is to offer the sufferer something they want that’s unattainable. (If he was at parties where hiccups were prevalent the offers may have been quite interesting   His experience is that offers like world peace or an end to global hunger won’t do it, whereas the chance of sex, more beer or a housework-free week usually does the trick.

Fascinating discovery, but it just shows to me that you need to understand what drives your audience to make a successful offer. So what’s new …