Safety, Belonging and Esteem: The Essential Psychology Of Customer Behaviour And Persuasion
Being able to make the customer act is the main competitive edge any marketer should offer. Read on to understood a little bit about the brain and how it reacts to marketing.
I heard a great marketing story recently. It was about a organisation trying to reduce HIV in a country. They had spent months, years maybe, talking to their target audience and advising them to wear a condom to avoid contracting HIV. But the message was not getting through, so they started by listening to the transcripts of interviews with the target audience to approach it from a completely different angle, which was to establish what was their primary driver.
It was financial. These were poor people they were talking to. So they thought it would be more effective to run a campaign along the lines of ‘we are bringing some barristers to the country, whose specific remit is to hold to account any man who has a child outside of wedlock’. The message hit home and demand for condoms increased.
Understanding what your target audience is actually thinking, believing and what will effect their behaviour change, is the key to success in marketing any product or service, be it condoms to help combat HIV or paint to make your kitchen walls more pleasing to the eye.
Psychology has made its way into every field, including entertainment, culture and business. In business, it has branched out into different aspects. In recruitment, for example, psychology is used in aptitude tests and career counselling. Organisational culture is also a big part of organisational psychology, i.e. the psychology of workspace. Psychology helps factor in work stress and work-life balance, to ensure employees are healthy and productive — it’s all about safety, belonging and esteem.
And as consumers, we all feel these variety of emotions throughout our buying experience, but there are only a handful of marketing professionals who are trying to truly understand the how and the why of the process.
If one can get inside the heads of consumers and then use what they find to make them alter their habits, marketing effectiveness sky rockets.
What I hope people take away from this article is that for some time people who engage in the making of customer experiences base too much communication on guesses and assumptions. But if they understood a little bit about the brain and how it reacts to environments and people, they might not continue to do the things that they believe are important, but in fact are mostly unseen by customers. Not enough time and rigour are being spent on understanding the target audience. Yet something like half a billion pounds a year is being spent on research in the marketing industry.
There is a famous quote from American marketing pioneer John Wanamaker, who said “I know 50% of my marketing isn’t working, I just don’t know which 50%.” So many today feel exactly the same way. The marketing industry has become quite lazy. Of course, today’s consumer is smarter, more tech savvy, and they know their options — brands need to respond to this in order to capture and keep the consumers’ attention. But the basic buying emotions remain the same.
American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow, best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of theory of needs, suggests that we have a pyramid of needs. One level needs to be completed to get to the next. At the bottom is basic physiological needs like food and shelter. At the very top is self-actualisation- a spiritual level that very few are said to be able to achieve.
I believe there are three prevalent human needs that we need to focus on in order to understand the buying process. The human needs are safety, belonging and esteem. It’s a powerful emotional triangle. Safety because in today’s world security, order and stability are increasingly important. Belonging and esteem because our innate needs as human beings are for protection, trust, support, simplicity, satisfaction and peace of mind.
Remember, one of the reasons a customer says no is because they feel no perceived need for your product or service. If your brand sold expensive watches, for example, that would come in the ‘esteem’ category. The customer could say no because maybe they are still in the ‘safety’ category of the triangle and are concerned with buying products like house alarms.
What you can do? Prove to your customers that they need you. Convince them by asking the right questions. If we take life insurance as an example, everyone should be buying it. Everyone has the need for this because 100 percent of us are going to die. Yet, some of us don’t see the need.
If young parents tell the insurance salesperson they don’t need life insurance, he should ask them, “How will your child be taken care of financially if something happens to you both?” The same type of question should be asked for any product or service.
Belonging is an interesting emotion, particular in terms of marketing. One of the ways Nando’s, the restaurant chain, have tapped into the belonging need is through their High Five Card, sometimes referred to as the Black Card — a piece of metal that can be found in the wallets of a select number of celebrities. For many Nando’s customers, getting their hands on a Black Card is their highest aspiration, and they will do anything to secure one. Ownership guarantees the holder free chicken for themselves and four friends for life. It doesn’t matter if the High Five Card is real or just legend, the point is it gives Nando fans a holy grail to yearn for, satisfying their longing to belong.
By using the perception of belonging (and esteem) a brand can increase advocacy, in the same way you can use the illusion of scarcity to accelerate demand. This false scarcity encourages us to buy sooner and perhaps to buy more than normal. It’s tapping into the safety emotion.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the first instance of scarcity marketing, but companies have used the technique for many years. One of the most notable examples of scarcity marketing — the Disney Vault — started during the 1980s. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment began to reissue limited editions of their films and urge consumers to purchase these films before they went back into the “Disney Vault.” Because each Disney film is only for a limited time before it is put in the vault and not made available for several years until it is released again, consumers are driven to act fast when a new video is released.
Two good examples of this effect have been the recent launches of the iPhone and the seventh Harry Potter book. In both cases, the pre-launch publicity was designed not only to fuel demand but to create the illusion that supplies would be limited. In fact, there were very few supply shortages. In both cases, the marketers anticipated demand levels pretty well.
The Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, California, combine scarcity marketing (tapping into the safety emotion) with empathy and belonging to create a fan (customer) base for their Pliny The Elder product; an American Double / Imperial IPA style beer.
They don’t do any advertising, blog very infrequently on their website and have a low maintenance Facebook page. Despite the sparse marketing, demand for Pliny The Elder couldn’t be greater. On weekends, their brew pub in Santa Rosa is packed. And the couple of hundred stores that sell the beer, limit the number of bottles a customer can buy because, in the past, one customer would come in and buy the whole lot. Such is the obsession with the product, the Russian River Brewery now delivers the beer in unmarked trucks because some fans were known to follow the trucks from store to store.
Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products aid: “Scarcity has this effect of making people perceive products as more valuable simply for the fact that they’re scarce.” He said it’s not just psychological: Studies have shown it’s physiological. “They took a look at what was happening inside people’s brains when they were trying wine of different price points,” Eyal said. In other words, some wines were more valuable and scarce than others. Eyal said its not that people just liked the most expensive wine.
“But their brains actually perceived the wine differently when they tasted the $90 wine versus the cheap wine,” Eyal said. “And then they didn’t tell the participants that it was the same wine all along.” Eyal said what’s happening is that one piece of information — that something is scarce — is short-circuiting the brain. There’s also the fact that scarcity makes for a good story. Eyal said if you tell people, “Hey, this beer uses high-quality hops and is made in small batches,” nobody is going to remember that.
But if you say, “Hey, I have this crazy story about how you can buy a limited amount and can you believe it and the lines?” That’s a really easy story for one person to transmit to the other, Eyan says. Eyal said for scarcity marketing to work, the scarcity has to have, at the very least, an aura of legitimacy.
Scarcity certainly breeds demand and that’s not always by (brand) design. Sometimes safety and belonging can be a winning formula for commodity products, oil for example.
A few years ago, I used scarcity marketing to help a famous lubricant company sell engine oil, by tapping into emotions surrounding the need for safety and belonging. The case study is on my website.
The primary benefit of using scarcity marketing in your business is being able to position your products as services as a commodity. This drives up the perceived value of what you’re selling, and the fear that it has limited availability makes people act fast to purchase.
Scarcity can also present an opportunity to engage your audience in a new way. By creating an interesting background that shares the reason for the scarcity (such as a shortage of product, as was the case with the lubricant company), you can capture and keep the customer’s attention.
Lastly, when it’s done effectively, scarcity marketing can also create a cult following. Going back to the example of Pliny The Elder, every beer drinker wanted to drink it and all of the “cool” drinkers did. It can create a powerful loyalty among your audience.
In addition, we tend to attach more value to things that other people are competing for, a phenomenon that is part of social proof (belonging).
If only we could start to understand what makes our customers tick — if only we could tap into those core (buying) emotions with a degree of accuracy. There is so much of marketing that is wasted. We don’t know the target audience. So we stick our thumb in the air and waste thousands, millions sometimes, on a marketing campaign.
What you can do? Marketing is essentially a modification of perception. Your customer might be seeing things from their frame of reference and refusing to budge on it. Getting the marketing message past their internal filters is the first order of business. Find a way around their filter by taking a detour. Approach the customer from an angle that they care about.
The best way to know what they care about is by listening to them. And getting their feedback is not rocket science. Try surveys, customer forums, social media, communities etc.
I once did some work for a company who sell vitamins. They wanted to know why a certain product wasn’t selling as well as they thought it should. So we got a group of random customers to come in and chat openly and honestly about the emotions they had about health, age, lifestyle etc. We began to understand their need to safety, belonging and esteem.
As a result we revised the advertising messages and in the next 12 months sales of the product sky rocketed. The customer was acting on emotional signals within the marketing strategy.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on December 29, 2015.
