The field of marketing has deep roots in psychology and human behavior. After all, if you want to influence people to act a certain way, you must first understand what drives them. While psychology concepts are vast and complex, here are a few you can quickly leverage to influence consumer behavior with your brand and help you stand out from the competition.
1. Emotion Rules
Although we humans like to think of ourselves as highly logical and rational beings, the truth is, we make decisions first with emotion, intuition, and a sense of connection, then rationalize our decision afterwards. If you can understand the impulsive feelings that drive consumers’ actions, you can develop a finely-tuned strategy that triggers the right emotions at the right time at the right place along the path to purchase.
2. Associations are Key
As humans, we have a keen ability to relate to one another’s pain, success, and happiness. A prime example of this is when you feel nervous, anxious, and exhilarated when you watch someone else perform a feat, like walking a tightrope between two high-rise buildings. This is due to mirror neurons, or empathy neurons, in our brains that respond equally whether we perform an action or we simply watch someone else perform the same action.
Furthering the importance of tip 1, when you connect with your consumers on an emotional level, you are activating these mirror neurons in your consumers, which builds brand confidence and creates higher engagement.
Cultivate Consistency
One of the things you’ll hear if you hang around our offices here at blu is: “Trust is the residue of promises kept.” Consumers experience your brand online and offline through many different ways and forms of communication—and consistent messaging, tone, and design results in a reliable brand experience.
But consistency in brand engagement goes beyond trust to something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the frequency of illusion. This is the illusion that once you’ve seen something, it seems to appear everywhere around you.
The frequency illusion creates an experience of your brand on several distinct channels with consistent messaging, which coalesces into a reliable brand experience all along the path to purchase.
Repetition is essential in learning, so a consistent brand look, tone, and messaging make it easy for your audience to not only remember, but embrace, your product or service.
The industry is constantly changing, but human behavior tends to stay the same—so no matter what is going on in the business and marketing world, applying timeless psychology principles is always a great first step in ensuring your brand experience leaves a lasting impact in the minds of consumers.
