Brands today invest massively to provide good products and customer service to their clients.
There is a cut-throat competition between businesses to deliver best-in-class overall service.
You may be treating your customers with extra care and attention, but you can’t go and tell this to everyone.
To make the shopping experience memorable and tailored to the desires of customers, you need to understand marketing psychology.
It can help businesses get a structured framework for customers to remain loyal to them.
In this blog, we will discuss marketing psychology and consumer behaviour to help your brand engage better with the audience.
Read More: Conversion Rate in Digital Marketing: 7 Great Tips For Businesses
What is Marketing Psychology?
Marketing psychology is the practice of applying research to understand human thought and behaviour.
By incorporating common psychological principles into their plans, marketers can better understand how consumers react to their messages.
Marketing psychology helps marketers understand human behaviour and persuade customers to behave in a particular way. This usually includes making them loyal customers or buying their products.
One of the foundational terms for neuromarketing is marketing psychology. Neuromarketing uses neuroscientific techniques to analyze and assess customer behaviour and connect it to marketing initiatives.
Three disciplines are the source of the word neuromarketing. These include psychology, marketing, and neuroscience.
Neuromarketing offers valuable perspectives and potent methodologies for customer analysis and marketing research.
Researchers in science and business link human subconscious responses and particular brain activity to consumer expectations and preferences.
This data is useful for optimizing marketing campaigns and helping marketers comprehend consumer behaviour.
Neuromarketing makes understanding marketing psychology and consumer behaviour easy so businesses can formulate powerful campaigns.
In simple terms, the brain has a special way of working and makes shortcuts to help individuals make decisions.
Gaining a knowledge of those shortcuts will help you expand your audience.
Effective Strategies Based on Marketing Psychology
Here are some strategies based on marketing psychology and consumer behaviour:
1. Recognizing the Intended Audience
Whether it is marketing psychology or any other type of campaign, knowing the target audience always comes first.
Understanding the target audience’s wants and preferences is imperative for marketing tactics to be effective.
Businesses need to understand their customers in order to create products and marketing strategies that appeal to their target demographic.
This entails determining the demographic that a certain product is intended for, including the gender, age, and socioeconomic standing of the average consumer.
2. Performing Market Analysis
If you want to implement marketing psychology tactics, the next step is to do research to identify potential customers’ demographics, habits, and activities.
By thoroughly understanding the category that will be your potential buyer, businesses may craft marketing messages that connect with their target audience and influence their buying decisions.
For instance, the marketing psychology strategy for a snack ad would be running an ad in the late afternoons. That is because customers are more responsive to food advertising when hungry.
Consumer psychologists frequently devote considerable effort to studying what motivates consumers to try their products.
3. Sway Consumers Through Perceived Value
The idea of perceived value is one of the cornerstones of marketing psychology.
Perceived value is the worth that a customer assigns to a good or service based on how much they believe it will cost vs. how much they believe it will benefit them.
Marketers can sway a consumer’s view of value by stressing the advantages of their goods or services while downplaying their drawbacks.
4. Offering Social Proof
When consumers observe others utilizing and appreciating a company’s products, they are more inclined to purchase from that business.
A prospective consumer is more likely to purchase from your brand if you have positive user-generated content, many active users, and positive reviews.
It is especially beneficial for brands to use social proof to draw in new customers.
Since they haven’t used the product, they ask previous or present users about their experiences.
Furthermore, studies have consistently demonstrated that consumers are more likely to believe what other consumers say about brands than what those brands say about themselves.
Running a UGC campaign is always an option. For instance, the skincare range of the brand Drunk Elephant is pretty expensive.
So, the brand focuses on highlighting how clean its products are for both the skin and the environment and how seamlessly they can fit into anyone’s already established skincare routine.
If you want to learn more about creating user-generated content, here are a few examples.
Request approval before posting positive reviews from a satisfied consumer on your social media accounts.
A referral scheme is another excellent strategy for getting present clients to promote your company.
Learn More: The Impact Of Testimonial Advertising On Marketing Campaigns
5. Applying the Concept of Loss Aversion
This is another facet that proves that the connection between psychology marketing and consumer behaviour runs deep.
The loss aversion principle describes people’s preference for preventing a loss over acquiring a similar amount.
Intense dread and anxiety are linked to loss, and research indicates that negative emotions have a longer-lasting effect on people than happy ones.
You must warn customers they might lose something they already own to elicit loss aversion.
To implement this marketing psychology concept, try rephrasing your current advertising to allow the audience to see what they may be losing.
If you provide free trials, ensure the customer knows what they will lose after the trial period expires.
Or, let’s say you provide free shipping to customers whose orders total more than a particular amount.
Show them the difference between the amount they must add to their cart to qualify for free delivery and the amount they will lose to shipping charges if they checkout before the total reaches zero.
In the example below, you can see how the brand TOMS has used a timer for people to create a sense of urgency. The audience will lose the 15% discount if they don’t subscribe in the given time. So, it will push them to subscribe to their newsletter.
6. Comprehending Cognitive Biases
Comprehending cognitive biases like anchoring and confirmation bias lets marketers gently influence decision-making processes.
Brands have the power to influence consumer perceptions and preferences by framing information and offering options that appeal to their innate biases.
Subscription-based brands provide free trials to take advantage of the endowment effect. In marketing psychology, this occurs when people place a higher value on things they already own.
7. Opt for Emotional Marketing
As far as consumer decision-making is concerned, emotions may even precede logical factors.
Marketers can establish stronger bonds with their target audience and increase engagement by arousing particular emotions, such as happiness, nostalgia, or terror.
For instance, the brand Unique Vintage introduced vintage pieces in their spring collection to evoke a sense of nostalgia in their audience.
8. Use Strong Words Smartly
In marketing psychology, the power of storytelling is well acknowledged. Your slogan and campaign language have the power to move people, evoke powerful feelings in them, and even spur them on to execute the desired action.
That is the reason why every marketer mentions adding powerful CTAs when you run an online campaign.
Words, as was covered in the part before this one, can also help people prime their memories by evoking comfortable and pleasant recollections.
Let’s look at some sentences and terms that may be used to trigger different emotions:
Exclusivity: For members only, VIP, confidential, Get informed, or be part of an exclusive community, etc.
Urgency: Immediately, Fast, Before it runs out, ASAP, etc.
Simplicity: Fundamental, Simple, Step-by-step, beginner’s manual, etc.
9. Using Behavioural Economics Insights
By using behavioural economics insights, marketers can create incentives and pricing plans.
Price anchoring, bundling, and decoy pricing are a few strategies that might affect buying decisions and improve perceived value.
For instance, by showing the original price in addition to the discounted rate, H&M uses price anchoring to create the impression of big savings and promote quick sales.
Decoy Effect
The decoy effect is virtually exclusively used in marketing psychology, even though most concepts have wide implications outside of marketing.
A cognitive bias occurs when a third, less appealing choice is presented, making the more expensive product appear more appealing than if there were just two options.
Customers compare the products’ prices and qualities directly when there are just two possibilities.
The third choice alters the customer’s perception of the products that are offered and increases the likelihood that they will select the more costly alternative.
How to Use Color Psychology in Marketing
Marketing colour psychology is a strategy that plays an important part in any campaign.
Although many experts have tried to reduce colours to a few fundamental characteristics or impressions, psychology can help companies better comprehend the effects of colour selection.
For example, it’s important to understand that red does not always imply enthusiasm and that green does not always imply growth.
A study demonstrates that colours influence 62%-90% of the audience’s assessment of a brand.
It shows that many consumers consider a colour’s suitability for a brand when purchasing.
Customers may react less favourably to a hue that they feel is inconsistent with a brand than to one more in line with its message.
Hence, advertisers need to be very conscious of the perception they want to project about their brand and if the colours they choose support that image.
The following are the aspects that may have an impact on colour psychology marketing:
1. Gender
According to studies, gender seems to have a quantifiable effect on the psychology of people of colour.
Men have the strongest preference for blue, even if both sexes may love this colour more than any other.
On the flip side, women exhibit a far larger liking for the colour family of blue and green than males. However, both genders tend to prefer cool colours.
Marketers should take these variations in perception and preference into account when using colour psychology.
2. Culture
Consumers worldwide perceive and respond to colour in various ways. Therefore, marketing psychology tactics around the world vary from one another.
For example, residents of the North American region tend to associate purple with calmness and yellow with optimism; consumers in other locations may see the same colours quite differently.
Due to this, global marketers may consider conducting local studies to ensure their efforts have the intended impact.
As a result, they get more insight into how the psychology of colour influences their target market.
Learn more: Color Psychology in Website Development: Can It Increase Conversions?
FAQs
What is the marketing scarcity principle?
The scarcity principle is based on the notion that items have a higher perceived worth when they are scarce or limited. To increase sales, marketers instil a sense of urgency through time-limited promotions, special discounts, or limited-edition goods.
How does reciprocity affect marketing?
In marketing, reciprocity refers to the idea that when a company offers customers something of value (such as free samples, information, or discounts), the customer has an obligation to repay the favour, usually by making a purchase.
How do marketers persuade consumers using psychology?
Marketers employ a range of psychological strategies to influence consumer behaviour, including scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, and emotional appeals. These tactics can persuade consumers to make decisions that support marketing objectives, interact with companies, or purchase goods.
In Conclusion
By understanding their behaviour, marketing psychology helps you connect with new and old customers, leading to better sales and business-client relations.
Satisfying initial customers is key as they will subsequently shape the brand choices of many subsequent customers.
Before you start trying the strategies that work on the principles of marketing psychology and consumer behaviour, make sure you do thorough research on what is most likely to give you better results.
If you have trouble understanding or implementing these strategies in your campaign, The Dreams Agency can help you get started.
We can help you with all types of digital marketing campaigns that propel your business to new heights.