When We Save, Everybody In

We All Want Explanations For Why We Behave As We Do And For The Ways The World Around Us Functions. Even When Our Feeble Explanations Have Little To Do With Reality. We’re Storytelling Creatures By Nature, And We Tell Ourselves Story After Story Until We Come Up With An Explanation That We Like And That Sounds Reasonable Enough To Believe. And When The Story Portrays Us In A More Glowing And Positive Light, So Much The Better.

What Reminds You In Your Environment About Saving? Nothing.

The Bad News Is That Ignoring The Performance Of People Is Almost As Bad As Shredding Their Effort In Front Of Their Eyes. Ignoring Gets You A Whole Way Out There. The Good News Is That By Simply Looking At Something That Somebody Has Done, Scanning It And Saying "uh Huh," That Seems To Be Quite Sufficient To Dramatically Improve People's Motivations.

It Was Shocking To Realize How Many Low-income Americans Don't Have Savings Accounts.

Brands Communicate In Two Directions: They Help Us Tell Other People Something About Ourselves, But They Also Help Us Form Ideas About Who We Are.