The Creative Alliance, Strategic Marketing, Interactive, Public Relations

The Power of Quantification

One of the most powerful ways to move an audience to action is to quantify your value proposistion in a way that stirs the imagination. To understand this principle, consider these two statements:

1. We should all turn our computers off at the end of the day to save energy.
2. If everyone in America turned off their computers at the end of the workday, it would save $2.8 billion and 20 tons of CO2 per year, and enough energy to power the Empire State Building inside and out for 30 years.

Both statements are true (the latter coming from a recent report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy), but only one makes you seriously consider shutting off your computer today before you go home.

The American Issue Project recently ran an ad campaign critical of the federal stimulus bill with this use of quantification:

“Suppose you spent one million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born and kept spending through today. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.”

What these quantifications do is make an abstract concept concrete, even visual in the first instance: you can almost see the Empire State Building lit up like a Christmas tree in the night. That’s the power of quantification.