Why this idea means business : We explore how brand trial works. Learn what influences the brain to drive customers’ buying decisions. Read this so that more customers say “buy” than “bye-bye” to your brand.
A common challenge for marketers is moving customers from consideration to purchase.
So this week’s focus is on finding the right prompts and proof points to drive brand trial.
This magic moment in the customer journey is sometimes called the “Zero Moment of Truth”.
Sounds dramatic, but it highlights the importance of convincing customers to buy.
How most people think customers make buying decisions
You may be thinking customers aren’t stupid.
Surely, they explore options and logically pick the brand that best meets their needs, right?
They weigh up the pros and cons. Evaluate consequences. This happens in some categories, but mostly, it’s more complicated than that.
Many other factors influence brand trial, especially our brain’s emotional and instinctive responses.
However, before we get into those, let’s explore some examples of when logic is the dominant brain power in driving brand trial :-
- big purchases.
- visible purchases.
- group purchases.
Big purchases
Our logical brain takes over when there are meaningful consequences to our buying decisions. For example, when we spend large sums of money or buy something that we’ll use regularly and rely on (e.g. buying a new car).
The logical brain slows and deepens our thinking so that we don’t make bad decisions.
That’s not to say emotions and instincts can’t influence the brand trial decision with such purchases. They can.
However, logic usually gets in first and dismisses options that don’t make sense. For example, if a brand’s too expensive, too impractical or too much of a risk. Your market research usually reveals what these logic-busting issues are.
Visible purchases
These consequences can also relate to a perceived social risk.
The brands we buy say something about us. Consequently, other people form opinions about us, based on what we buy. For example, you imagine a Bugatti owner to be very different from a Toyota owner, right?
This is especially noticeable in categories where we wear or carry the results of our brand trial round with us. Fashion, for example.
We put more logical thought into choosing our shoe brand, for example, than our toilet paper brand, as the former is much more visible to other people.
Group purchases
The final type of brand trial choice where the logical brain plays a big role is when you’re buying as a group (or for a group) rather than as an individual.
The most obvious example is in Business-to-Business (B2B) purchases. The bigger the business and the bigger the purchase, the more logic comes in.
Procurement managers create complex purchasing processes with lots of paperwork. Multiple stakeholders have to review and approve the choice.
These reviews are usually handled with logic.
However, despite all this logical thinking, we all still often make poor choices at the brand trial stage. We choose the flashy car over the practical one. The shiny shoes over the comfortable ones. And many businesses still choose agencies based on how confident rather than how competent they are.
Logical Lou on brand trial
Before we explore why these poor choices happen, let’s first hear what Logical Lou, our characterisation of the logical brain, has to say about brand trial :-
“This is a simple question of capacity. There are just too many decisions to make for the time and energy I have available to make them. So, I triage decisions when it comes to brand trial. I jump in when it’s clear the purchase needs deeper thought. But for low-risk purchases, I often leave it to Emotional Eddy or Instinctive Izzy to decide. They work much faster than I do. Even if that means, they get it wrong more often”.
The role of emotion in brand trial
Many people are ashamed to admit that their heart overruled their head about a purchase decision. But it happens more often than you’d think. And generally, we have little control over it.
A useful analogy is to imagine your emotions are like an elephant and logic its rider*. Your emotional elephant is normally quite sedate and goes where the logical rider points them to. But if aroused, it takes over and does what it wants – and there’s very little the logical brain rider can do to stop it.
In fact, it’s been shown that we can’t make decisions without emotions playing a part. This was famously demonstrated in the case of patient Elliot by psychologist Antonio Damasio. Elliot had a brain tumour removed that directly affected his emotional (limbic) system. His logical brain (neocortex) was unaffected, so he could still analyse and process information and data. But without emotions, he found it almost impossible to decide between his options. He needed emotions to nudge his final decision.
The implications of this for how you might influence brand trial are huge. Logically, customers should pick the “best” brand. But unless the differences between brands are obvious, it’s usually emotional influences which swing the final choice. So marketers need to be able to :-
- research emotions.
- create emotional brand activation.
- track emotional impact.
Research emotions
The most common way to research emotional influence on purchase decisions is qualitative research. However, this can challenge the interviewer. It takes skill to get someone to reveal their emotions to a stranger.
For a start, customers may not even realise emotions influence their choices. One way around this is for the interviewer to ask what the respondent thinks other customers feel when deciding what to buy. It’s usually easier to imagine other people’s feelings than to describe our own.
Even if the customer is aware of emotions influencing their choice, they may be embarrassed to admit them to the interviewer. So, the interviewer usually has to build rapport before they can get customers to feel comfortable sharing their feelings.
Create emotional brand activation
There’s a regular debate that happens between agencies and clients.
The agency creative team say you need to add more emotion to your advertising, website, packaging or whatever. And the client replies that they don’t believe that’s why customers buy, and they fear that customers won’t get it.
The answer, as in most debates, is finding the sweet spot between the two views.
This is usually driven by context – the specific moment in the customer’s journey and the job to be done. Our emotional brains have already had their “say” at the brand awareness and brand consideration stages. However, this “feeling” about which brand to choose then rarely changes unless the logical brain intervenes.
So you create emotional impact with your activation. Via headlines, images, music, stories and so on, so that’s what the customer experiences first. You then progressively disclose (see more on this here) logical fact-based backup as and when it’s needed. If they decide to try your brand because they like your advert’s jingle, no need to provide a long list of features for them.
Track emotional impact
Finally, you can track the impact of your efforts by your level of brand trial (e.g. sales). However, you should also track changes in how customers feel about your brand. One-off purchases (or sampling) have short-term impact.
Your ultimate goal, though is to give the customer such an enjoyable experience that they want to come back and buy again. That’s driven by how they feel about your brand.
There are two main ways to do this.
For some products and services, you can ask or observe customers at the point of purchase / consumption. For example, if you trial a new drinks brand in a bar, you can get feedback directly from customers (before they’ve drunk too much, obviously).
The more common way, though, is to run a brand health tracking quantitative study. You ask a regular (monthly or quarterly) panel of customers about their thoughts, feelings and actions regarding the category and its brands. This would include the change in feelings of those who’ve tried a brand.
The challenge is to identify which specific emotion you’re trying to drive. Normally, this would be a positive emotion like happiness or excitement. However, there are exceptions. For example, a political campaign to drive a change in government policy might need to drive anger or fear to get people to act.
Emotional Eddy on brand trial
Before we move on to instincts, let’s hear what Emotional Eddy, our characterisation of the emotional brain, has to say about brand trial :-
“Well, I’ve usually already made my feelings quite clear on which brand I prefer. Something about one particular brand will have made me smile or made my heart race just that little bit more than all the others. That’s the one to go for. Life’s too short to go into great detail about every single purchase. So unless it’s really important (in which case, Logical Lou deals with it), it’s usually just easier to pick the brand that feels right.”
The role of instinct in brand trial
It might feel like our instinctive brains have already done their job by the time we reach the brand trial stage. Any brand that’s obviously “wrong” would have been dismissed by now, right?
Well, yes. But here’s the thing. Our instincts never switch off. And the context in which we become aware of and consider brands is quite different.
At neither of those stages do we put money on the table and commit to buying. But at brand trial, we do commit, and there’s no way back from that.
So, our instinctive brains will usually have one final swing at our decision.
This usually means supporting the emotional brain’s feeling of what’s the best choice. Our emotional and instinctive brains rarely disagree. In fact, they’ll often gang up and overrule our logical brain. It’s not just our hearts that overrule our heads, it’s our guts too.
This challenges marketers, as customers are often unaware of instinctive choices. They’ll usually be unable to express it clearly. Something just felt right about this brand rather than that one. I felt drawn to the red one, not the blue one. I know that one was more expensive, but I just wanted it more.
Again, good market research skills are key to unearthing these hidden influences on brand trial. Observing customers when they buy. Doing qualitative research with them to dig into what’s going through their heads. Plus, doing some creative secondary research to build hypotheses for what’s driving their choices.
Hypotheses for driving instinctive brand choices
For example, is it based on learned responses? Colour psychology is a good example. Green signals nature, blue signals calmness and so on.
Is it based on existing beliefs? Perhaps a political belief about how the world works. Or a social belief about what types of people (and brands) you can trust. This can affect your tone of voice.
Some customers prefer brands that use technical terms and longer words. They sound more authoritative. However, others prefer brands that get to the point quicker and tell it how it is.
Maybe it’s just a habit the customer has got into. They pick the brand with which they’re most familiar. Or the one recommended by family and friends. Great for market leaders but challenging for challenger brands.
The key is to understand the customer so well that you know exactly how to nudge their instincts towards picking your brand.
Actions to influence instinctive brand choice
How you drive this “nudge” very much depends on the context again. However, for our purposes here, let’s explore some examples from e-Commerce, a channel that does instinctive influence very well.
One more advanced e-Commerce technique is to use scarcity to drive brand trial. Communicating that the offer’s only available for a certain time triggers our instincts into a fear of missing out. Even though we don’t “have” that product, the feeling that the opportunity to buy it on those terms might disappear often drives us to buy.
Similarly, products that have limited availability or stock can also trigger our instincts to act. If we can buy a more exclusive or hard-to-get product, it raises our status. We feel like part of a special club. There’s no logical reason to believe this. Your situation is unchanged if you don’t buy. However, instinctively, something that’s not open to everyone makes it more desirable.
Lastly, there’s the “added value” nudge to the offer. You throw in something extra (that usually costs you very little) so the customer feels like they’re getting a special deal. It’s why TV shopping channels, after they make the initial offer, always make a follow-up offer. “But wait. There’s more!”. Examples include buy one, get one free deals, free accessories or extended warranties.
Customers might feel these are spontaneous and generous offers. That the brand values them. This makes it instinctively easier to say yes. However, all such “offers” are usually carefully planned (and budgeted) for. Clever marketers use them to nudge customers who are on the verge of making a buying decision.
Instinctive Izzy on brand trial
Let’s end with what Instinctive Izzy, our characterisation of the instinctive brain, has to say about brand trial :-
“Yes, I’ve got my eyes on what’s going on when deciding which brand to choose. But I’m looking at a million other things, too. So from a pure efficiency view, I’ll do just enough to make sure you make a decision you’ll be happy with. You can’t research every brand’s features and benefits. That’s very inefficient. I help you make sure you pick one that’s good enough for what you need and that you won’t regret. Unless something goes wrong with it”.
Conclusion - Brand trial - buy or bye-bye!
When customers decide to buy your brand or not is a key moment in their journey. At this brand trial point, customers are aware of and considering brands. Your job is to nudge them into buying your brand. As we’ve outlined, 3 parts of the brain shape how that decision goes.
Our logical brains get most involved when there are consequences to the buying decision. For example, with big purchases, highly visible purchases and with group purchases (e.g. B2B buying).
However, our emotional and instinctive brains also influence which brands we choose. We choose brands that make us feel better about ourselves and which support our habits and beliefs about how the world works. We might not know it, but these non-logical factors influence most of what we choose to buy.
Savvy marketers use market research and customer understanding to uncover the insights that drive these brain-powered brand trial decisions.
Check out our articles on brand awareness and brand consideration for more on the psychology of brand choice. Or get in touch if you need some extra brainpower on how to drive brand trial.
* adapted from the excellent Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers.
Photo credits
Legal scales (adapted) : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Abacus : Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash
Bugatti : Photo by David Levêque on Unsplash
Phone with Nike logo : Photo by Kristian Egelund on Unsplash
Converse Shoes : Photo by Camila Damásio on Unsplash
Business meeting : Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Heart Button : Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Conversation : Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash
Confetti : Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash
Zero hearts neon sign : Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
Woman covering face under blanket : Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash
