Why this idea means business : We explore where to start with marketing psychology. Learn the key marketing areas where psychology gives you a head start. Read this to learn how psychology can smarten up your marketing.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To apply lessons from psychology to improve the impact of your marketing activities. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – More customers
- Skill area – Psychology | Marketing
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. new customers = + 95 (+9.5%)
- Est. sales increase = +$9.5k (monthly) | +$114k (annual)
Most marketers agree that psychology plays a vital role in marketing.
But ask them to explain or show how it’s used, and most will head for the exit faster than a Scotland team at the World Cup.
The buzzword effect comes about because marketing psychology sounds clever. But it only becomes clever when some deep thinking goes into it, beyond the superficial surface-level appeal.
Marketing psychology - what it is
So, what actually is marketing psychology?
Well, at its simplest level, it’s a combination of marketing and psychology. (Well, d’uh, you might be thinking). But let’s look at what we mean by both those words.
Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour.
Put the two together and what do you get?
A skill that focuses on customer and buying behaviour. You use insights from psychology to better understand how customers choose which brands to buy.
Building your brand around this understanding makes your brand more appealing. That means customers are more likely to buy your brand. So, put simply, cleverly used marketing psychology leads to more sales.
Easy to say. But hard to do. And where do you start? Well, let’s take marketing first.
The 3 main activities of marketing
Marketing can get complicated quite quickly. But it doesn’t have to.
At its core, marketing is about doing 3 activities well.
First is customer. Or more specifically, understanding customers. You research potential customers and work out what they need.
Then, brand. You build your brand’s identity and positioning to best meet your customers’ needs.
And lastly, activation. You craft your marketing mix to deliver on product, place, price and promotion. The outputs of this work persuades customers to buy your brand.
Now, let’s look at how psychology can help with each of these 3 marketing jobs to be done.
Understand customers
It might sound obvious to say that you have to understand customers to be able to sell to them. But it can often be hard to look at what brands do, and see what sort of customer thinking went on.
For example, when brands try to save costs by using AI to write or design their content. But they end up looking and sounding like every other brand that uses AI. And customers can tell.
Or when they reduce a product’s size but keep the price the same to “hide” a price rise. (known as shrinkflation). But again, customers can usually tell.
While you might see some short-term business benefits from these sorts of activities, they usually negatively impact on a customer’s long-term perception of your brand. This won’t be good for your sales numbers.
A much better approach is to use psychology to work out what will make customers more or less likely to choose your brand.
For example, you can dig into their instinctive reactions. Do their reflexes, biases and habits make them more or less likely to find your brand relevant to their needs? If their gut says buy, chances are they’ll buy.
Of course, buying decisions can also be influenced by other parts of the brain. For example, marketing psychology helps you understand which emotions shape certain buying behaviours. Surprise can help capture attention. Joy can build attraction. Fear can drive action, and so on.
It also helps you understand the logical thought processes that might go on with more complex buying decisions. How customers might compare different options in the category.
Customers buy brands they feel most connected to. The insights from marketing psychology help you strengthen the quality of that connection.
Build brands
However, you also need to do something with this customer understanding. Otherwise, your insights only live on pretty PowerPoint slides from your research agency and never make any impact in real life.
So the next use for marketing psychology is in brand building. It helps you sharpen your positioning and refine your brand identity.
For example, marketing psychology can help you improve your customer segment profile.
This describes your ideal customer, and what drives their decisions and behaviour. The instincts and emotions which influence their choices. Their logical buying criteria that help them choose between products in the category.
Marketing psychology can also help you judge which type of benefit to prioritise. Benefits can be functional (e.g. tastes good) or emotional (e.g. makes you feel more confident). Emotional benefits usually take precedence because they work in the more dominant subconscious part of our brain. So, you’d tap into sensory inputs and memories as the lead way to convert your benefit.
Marketing psychology also influences the tangible part of your brand identity. For example, there’s a whole psychology behind design, colours and typography. Your choices there “say” something about your brand to customers. These choices then guide the creation of tangible assets such as your logo and tone of voice.
Activate with customers
Of course, most customers know you for your brand activation. For example, your advertising and social media. Your website and e-Commerce offers. Even your customer service approach and your overall customer experience.
These activities aim to connect customers with your brand. You want to persuade them to pick your brand over your competitors. But that connection and persuasion only happen in the customers’ heads. It’s where they notice you. Consider you. Decide to try you.
So applying psychology lessons to your marketing activities makes those activities more likely to succeed.
For example, marketing psychology can help you understand the impact of customer biases and habits. You want to maintain these if you’re a market leader and disrupt them if you’re more of a challenger.
It can also help you understand how to stir stronger emotions through your brand activation. Customers are more likely to choose brands that they care about. Marketing psychology can help you sharpen your purpose and values to engage customers more deeply.
And finally, marketing psychology – in the form of market research outputs – can help you discover what the right proof points are for customers when their logical buying brain comes into play.
How to build your marketing psychology skills
So, now you’ve got some ideas about where to use marketing psychology, but how do you actually build the skills and knowledge to know what to do in those areas? Well, many ways. Hiring a consultant (!) would be one. But if you want a quicker, cheaper way to begin, here are a few thought starters.
Read about it
The best place to start is to read up on the subject.
For example, you might be thinking about how to use marketing psychology at different stages of the brand choice funnel, e.g. awareness, consideration, trial and loyalty. In which case, read our behavioural science in marketing article for ideas on exactly how to do that.
Or if you want to start smaller with more practical examples, try our nudge psychology article.
And if you want something more substantial, we usually recommend Richard Shotton’s The Choice Factory as a good place to start. You can also see an example lesson from it here.
Experiment
Beyond reading, the best way to learn marketing psychology is to try it.
Remember, psychology is a science, and scientific learning is based on experimentation.
So, as you gather potential insights from researching marketing psychology, be on the lookout for ways to test them.
This is part of the ideas crafting process.
For example, your social media, website and CRM program can all be great places to test out your marketing psychology ideas. Here are a couple of thought-starter test cases from previous projects :-
- Do fear-driven posts (e.g. this offer runs out in 2 days!) do better than joy-driven ones (e.g. here’s a picture of a cute kitten with our product)?
- Will adding warmer colours and rounder shapes to our website icons drive more engagement? (Versus cooler colours and hard-edged shapes)
- Can we use the buying behaviours of customers in our database to identify which are most likely to be early adopters?
Build winning ideas
Of course, all this marketing psychology “head” stuff is thought-provoking. But it’s pointless unless it influences customer behaviour in the way you want.
That means thinking about how to turn the best ideas from your marketing psychology experiments into ideas that impact the whole market.
Or, in other words, your commercialisation process. How you build business cases and plans, and set up project teams to deliver new initiatives.
There’s a certain amount of psychology involved in making those processes work, too, but they all work much better when you’ve nailed the customer’s thinking up front. That’s really the key benefit that marketing psychology gives you.
Conclusion - Marketing psychology - where to start?
Marketing psychology is about choice. The customer’s choice and how you influence it.
But of course, you also have a choice.
If you choose to ignore marketing psychology as a way to make smarter, more impactful decisions, you’re perfectly free to carry on that way.
But if you choose to open up the Mystery Box that is marketing psychology, then you’re in for some tasty marketing rewards.
Better customer understanding. Brighter brand building. And bolder brand activation. The key is just to start. We hope we’ve given you a few thought starters in this article on how and where to do that.
Check out our behavioural science in marketing article for more on this. Or, feel free to drop us a line if you need specific help in this area.
Photo credits
Hypnosis Pocket Watch : Photo by MK Hamilton on Unsplash
Welcome to Marketing (adapted) : Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash
Glasses : Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
Brand Identity : Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash
Chess : Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
Woman with mug reading : Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash
Grinding an axe (adapted) : Photo by C D-X on Unsplash
Online shopping with phone and credit card : Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels
