As a marketer, in these past months, I have seen various ways in which psychology plays with the minds of a consumer to help them make a purchase decision.
It’s important to look out for recurring patterns of consumer behaviour, analyse why they occurred and implement the findings into the marketing strategies.
Some of the psychological hacks that I found the best are given below:
Priming
Priming focusses on subconscious reactions that we cannot control and how they impact our conscious decision-making process.
Taking an example of a travel company which is looking out to sell more beach holidays. From the image below, you can see that they have used blue and yellow as the predominant colours in their marketing materials.
Other ways of how can we use priming for marketing psychology are:
Music
Colours
Specific wording
The success of this marketing psychology principle is in the eye for detail. We need to analyse all the components in our communication at every touchpoint with the prospect.
Prime the consumers for the decision that they would like them to make.
Scarcity
This is one of the most recognisable and commonly used tactics.
The reason- it really does have a big influence on consumer behaviour, particularly during their buying decisions.
Scarcity, in here, focusses on the strategy of threatening to take away a consumer’s freedom of choice.
This is because when something is seen as rare, hard to obtain or soon to disappear forever, we perceive it to be much more valuable and desirable.
For example:
Product A costs Rs.100 and it can be purchased at any time, by anyone
Product B costs Rs.200 but it can only be purchased one day of the week and is limited to just one sale per customer.
Product B, although being identical to Product A, is able to sell at a much higher margin than Product A because it uses the marketing psychology principle of scarcity.
By restricting sales, Product B could be viewed as a much more desirable product by consumers.
The choice to buy at these prices is effectively taken away from the consumer.
Social Proof
The theory of social proof states that an idea becomes more correct when more people believe in it
This theory can have a big influence on the way a brand is perceived, as well as the effect on target consumer’s behaviour.
As marketing psychology goes, we often trust the decision of the group over our own individual view.
For example, what type of social media post are you more likely to click on:
A post with 1,500 likes, 200 comments and 50 shares
A post with 1 like 0 comments and 0 shares
That’s why landing pages are stacked with the following types of social proof:
Testimonials
Reviews
Customer/subscriber counts
‘Expert’ opinion
Proof pop-ups
Videos featuring target market using a product..etc.
Goal Dilution
According to this principle, the more singular and focussed something is, the better we believe it to be at that trait.
A clear historical example of this is the battle of the search engines.
To find the answer to that one homework question, we used to juggle between Google, MSN, Yahoo!
And as we know, all these years later, Google ran out the clear winners and now own the internet.
One of the biggest reasons for this was their ability to NOT dilute their goals.
When search engines were coming into prominence, every other website tried to boost their popularity by adding more features to their homepages, and although they offer tons of other services, we still associate Google as a search engine, and nothing else.
If you’re selling multiple types of products/services, it might be worth focusing all your efforts on one in line.
Loss Aversion
Loss aversion is a particularly relevant marketing psychology tactic for brands that offer subscription services, but it can also be used to make a big impact on your sales and marketing.
It is said that the pain of loss for something is more than the happiness for something you gain.
So, losing Rs.100 would give you more overthinking task and increase the density of the brain than winning Rs500 in the same lottery. This tactic is usually used by marketers for their own benefit to get the maximum out of the sales period
By analysing your consumer behaviour, the prospect’s predicted decision making patterns and implementing them into your marketing materials, you can effectively increase your conversion rates.
Within all these marketing psychology principles figure out which of them resonates the best with your brand and product on a daily basis
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