WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

 

My wife is Chinese so, obviously, all my in-laws are Chinese.

I always knew the Chinese liked to gamble, but what I’ve learned is that an even stronger emotion is they hate waste.

They hate wasting time, wasting food, wasting money, anything.

That’s why the Taiwanese government was having trouble collecting taxes. The Chinese work hard for their money, but they’re not fond of paying tax. It seems wasteful. Why would you let someone else take what you worked for?

All over Taiwan, the economy is largely based on small shops. And the ordinary Chinese working people don’t trust credit cards. They trust cash.

So most of the transactions in these shops were untraceable. Goods and money changed hands without receipts. If there are no receipts there’s no record, so the authorities can’t collect tax.

What the government needed was for shops to give a receipt with every purchase so tax could be easily collected.

But how could they get the shops to give out receipts when no one wanted to do it?

The creative answer was to get people to want receipts.

Which is where the Taiwanese authorities got creative.

They put themselves in the customers’ position and asked “What’s in it for me?”

Then they created the Uniform Invoice lottery.

Every receipt has different numbers printed on it. All the receipts are entered into a lottery. The winning numbers are read out on TV.

People with all eight numbers win $200,000 dollars. Those with seven numbers win $40,000.  Six numbers – $10,000.  Five numbers – $4,000.  Four numbers – $1,000.  Three numbers = $200.

And at every draw, there’s a special prize of $2 million which was televised.

Immediately after the lottery started, the government saw a 75% increase in tax revenues. And it was all voluntary.

The tax authorities didn’t have to enforce anything. Because no customer would leave a store without insisting on the receipt that could win them thousands of dollars.

And the shops advertise all their winners in their windows. It’s good for business.

They want to appear to be a “lucky” shop.

Now the customers insist on receipts because it’s a free lottery ticket.

And all of it is done by thinking like a customer and asking “What’s in it for me?”

It costs the government nothing because it’s paid for by giving back a fraction of the extra tax money collected.

All that was achieved by doing the simple thing we should all be doing, but we never do.

Something that everyone who doesn’t work in advertising knows automatically.

If you want someone to do something, you have to stand in their shoes and ask:

“What’s in it for me?”