What 20.9 Billion Real-World Messages Revealed About Customer Motivation
The 2023 Customer Motivation Report is Persado's annual synthesis of what language actually moved consumers over the past year. The source data is unusual in its scale: 20.9 billion messages, across more than 3,200 language experiments, run by Persado customers in 2022. Against a backdrop of inflation, supply-chain disruption, the Omicron surge, and the war in Ukraine, the report looks at which narratives broke through — and which traditional marketing framings fell flat.
Authored by the Persado Content Intelligence team, drawing on Persado's proprietary knowledge base of words and phrases trained on a decade of enterprise messaging (Persado was founded on 12/12/12).
The Narratives That Won (and the Ones That Didn't) in 2022
The headline insight: personal narrative — the story a campaign tells about the customer's life, ambitions, or context — was the single most powerful language element in 2022, accounting for 46% of total message performance on average. The other 54% was distributed across emotion, formatting, descriptive language, positioning, and call to action.
- Fashion & retail — the year of smart spending: TIMELESSNESS was the top-performing narrative, winning 68% of experiments in which it appeared. In one apparel experiment, TIMELESSNESS outperformed HYPE and VERSATILITY by 27% on click-through. Classic fashion narratives like HYPE, INDIVIDUALITY, and PRESTIGE were unreliable motivators.
- Financial services — the year of ease: CONVENIENCE was the opposite story — the worst-performing narrative in retail, but the top performer in financial services, winning 53% of experiments in which it appeared, across acquisition, servicing, and compliance campaigns.
- Context trumps rules of thumb: What motivates one audience in one channel can fall flat in another. CONVENIENCE being simultaneously the weakest narrative in fashion and the strongest in financial services is the clearest example in the dataset.
- QUALITY narratives beat VERSATILITY in home goods: In one Facebook experiment, a QUALITY-led narrative outperformed a VERSATILITY-led one by 37% on clicks — reinforcing that consumers in 2022 rewarded brands that justified purchases rather than merely described them.
- Self-confidence narratives lagged but are set to rebound: SELF-CONFIDENCE framings under-performed through 2022 as consumers stayed cautious, but Persado's team expects a fast comeback as economic pressures ease.
Test the Narrative, Not Just the Subject Line
The report's practical message to CMOs is to stop treating narrative as a fixed brand input and start treating it as a testable variable that shifts with context. A narrative that won in fashion in 2019 may be the weakest performer in fashion in 2022, while winning in a completely different category. The 20.9-billion-message dataset shows that no single narrative is universally "best" — narratives win or lose based on industry, channel, campaign purpose, and the moment in the consumer's life when the message lands.
For marketers heading into 2023, the report's guidance is to lean into narratives of durability and practical value where budgets are tight — TIMELESSNESS, QUALITY, VERSATILITY — and to keep CONVENIENCE as a reliable lever for financial services engagement. More importantly, the report recommends running experiments with enough variants to let the data tell the brand which narrative moves which segment. Trusting yesterday's playbook in this market is expensive.
Download the full 2023 Customer Motivation Report for the complete industry deep-dives on fashion & retail, financial services, and travel & leisure, plus the 2023 outlook.
