Businesses around the world are always on the lookout for finding out new ways to market their offered products and services, and while it may be defined as an exchange of relationships in broader terms, marketing has its roots that are innately grounded on how we interact with each other. This is why many of the best marketing schemes often reflect on how well they used subliminal messaging and create an allure for their offered products and services utilizing aspects related to human behavior and how people think. Which makes us realize the fact that marketing is firmly based on certain characteristics and features which involve a study of psychological traits that make us feel and think in a certain manner when exposed to a particular stimulus. In this post, we would like to share with you some deep and interconnected facets of psychology and marketing which collaborate together in order to bring out a certain response in people. All of this is accomplished so as to comprehend and understand how these two extensive fields of study intercede with each other.
The Impact of Colors in Marketing
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise to know that there is a scientific discipline which focuses its study regarding the influence that colors have on human behavior and our emotional states including our actions and moods. In marketing, we always emphasize on making our products and services distinguishable from the rest and with the help of using the right colors for our branding and promotional activities we can achieve superior results. It should be noted that in recent studies, it was found that 80% of the people who retain information relate it to colors. Colors play a huge role in the packaging of your products, your business and brand’s logo, advertisements, and other forms of representations. Here are some of the results of a recent survey conducted on social networks:
- Blue is regarded as the most favorite color, while yellow is the least.
- 70.4% claim that the color red is associated with love and passion.
- 83% agreed that colors are indeed one of the key marketing factors.
- 66.7% claimed that the packaging design influences their decision to buy a certain product.
- 90.7% believe that color affects their choice to purchase a particular product.
Hence you can very well understand now that colors are indeed quite the influential factor which should be given due consideration in marketing and other forms of promotional communication and messaging. With the right color selection, you can make all the difference in the world for your brands and businesses.
Marketing Principles That Reveal Psychological Connections
When we study marketing we find certain elements and factors that are centered on undertakings which create a psychological effect on people through specific objects located in their surroundings. Services marketing for that matter is heavily focused on crafting a set provocations using the stimulation of the five senses. Here are some of the most commonly used tools and techniques which marketers often commit to within their actions that imply psychological effects:
- Anchoring: using cognitive biases to position individuals in a way which makes them heavily reliant on a certain piece of information to influence their decisions. For example, the utility store where you get your groceries from is offering you a 50% discount during a festive season to make you think you are getting a much better deal than anyone else has offered over the year.
- Decoy Affect: a useful technique to present your prospects with two similar options and guiding them to a preferred solution using carefully planned antics and gimmicks. For example, you go out to an auto dealership to buy a family car. The salesperson offers you two vague solutions based on your info, and then guides you gradually towards a hatchback model that offers you the best of both worlds at a better price.
- Clustering: people generally only remember 7 items on their list of things to do, due to limited short-term memory. Marketers can use this fact to cluster similar things together to enable better retention for their products and services. For example, smartphone packaging may show you phone specifications listed on one side with branding information on the opposite side.
And we can go on with Loss Aversion, Verbatim Effect, and The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but the list would never end. The simple fact is that marketing is very much interconnected with psychological studies and how humans behave or act in a particular way which allows marketers to use our own nature and insights to create the appeal for something and make them attractive to us.
The Usual Tricks up Their Sleeves
By now even the most uninformed person knows that there are certain tactics which marketers use to make us see and think in a particular way about their messages. To sum up, here are some of the most commonly used psychological maneuvers used over the years to great effect:
- Exclusivity: If you want people to feel elated then it is best that you mention them as one of the few lucky ones. This plays well with our vanity and makes us feel like an exclusive group that is entitled.
- Highlighting Flaws: Conditioning you to think that you are missing out on something is the name of the game here. Innovative ideas to make you feel flawed, is one thing marketers never run out of. They will risk everything to prove that their way is the right way.
- Ideas with Emotions: In order to make you resonate with what they are selling, marketers ideally try to get you emotionally involved. If done in the right way, their products and services have huge potential for outselling their competition.
- Inducing Doubt & Fear: FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is a common strategy used by various groups such as cults, public relations firms, politicians, marketers, and sales people. It is usually based on false information used to charm people.
Conclusion
So How Do We Wrap This Up?
From the earliest forms of branding which included billboards used as far back as 1867, and that are still being used today, it is clear that marketing is a human way of selling and can only happen if you know the buyer’s interests or create something for them, regardless of the means taken to achieve that goal, within a controlled setting. In a way, we can find solace in saying that marketing enabled us to know more about our own selves than any psychology class. Marketers put their messages out there and how the public responds is which makes them a success story or not. Like Pam Moore once said: “You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.”
