Page 115 -

B2C Approaches 105

a similar offer making up to nine car payments of $500 each
for customers who have lost their jobs through no fault of
their own. Customers must qualify for state unemployment
to be eligible for the program.

While the competition follow suit, trust and honesty points
go to the first one out of the box. Customers could see that
Hyundai did it voluntarily; Ford and GM did it “because they
had to”.

Counteracting learned helplessness

Contracting and recession economies create and encourage
learned helplessness. Learned helplessness as a technical
term in animal psychology and related human psychology
means a condition of a human being or an animal in which
it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the oppor-
tunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleas-
ant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected.
Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depres-
sion and related mental illnesses result from a perceived
absence of control over the outcome of a situation (Seligman,
1975). Approaches to overcome learned helplessness is to
create products and services that create self-help market
niches in addition to regular markets in prospering
economies.

One particular Canadian province was overrun by applica-
tions for unemployment insurance. The way they dealt with
this was to offer “self-help” seminars. These were focused
on the consumer segments that contained learned help-
lessness. This not only alleviated much of the angst in
applying for unemployment insurance but also gave the
citizens a sense of empowerment in place of their sense of
helplessness.