It’s a Bad Bad world out there!!

Psychology is a very important aspect when you need to understand your customers. Lets take a sneak peek as how you can implement psychology to your own marketing campaign’s advantage:

1. Run Emotional Ideas
Studies have shown emotional and psychological appeals resonate more with consumers than feature and function appeals. In advertising, benefits, which often have a psychological component generally, outsell features. Demonstrating how a new computer will improve a potential customer’s life tends to have more influence rather than explaining how it works.
Salespeople have long understood the power of emotional appeals. In the 18th century, when the contents of a Brewery were being auctioned off, the auctioneer said: “We are not here to sell boilers and drums, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of greed.”

2. Highlight Your Flaws
It’s no secret that consumers tend to doubt marketing claims for good reasons. Many simply aren’t credible. One way to raise credibility is to point out your product’s shortcomings.
Among the most famous examples was an ad for Volkswagen, which contained a one-word headline: “Lemon.” Opening body copy below a VW photo read: “This Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn’t have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.” The ad went on to discuss a “preoccupation with detail.” The Lemon ad became a textbook example of how to optimize credibility.

3. Reposition Your Competition
In the book ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind’, the author probes into the limited slots consumers have in their brain for products and services, and the importance of positioning one’s business in the ideal slot.
They also write about repositioning i.e. changing the position a business occupies in consumers’ minds. A prominent example of repositioning the competition is when the Jif brand launched the “Choosy moms choose Jif” campaign; competitors were suddenly repositioned as products for mothers who didn’t give a damn about the food their kids consumed. What mother didn’t want to think of herself as a choosy mom?

4. Promote Exclusivity
Near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid sits self-esteem. People want to feel important; like they’re part of an exclusive group. That’s why advertising copy sometimes says: “We’re not for everyone.”
The other day i came across the ‘Jaguar XF’ ad with Kareena Kapoor pitching exclusively this very aspect of the car. They branded themselves into a car owned by a select few. Typical skimming. Perhaps the most famous modern example of exclusivity in advertising is the American Express tagline: “Membership has its privileges.” But to make an exclusivity appeal work in the long run, marketers must mean what they say. Empty claims tend to be counterproductive.

5. Introduce Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD, is often used legitimately by businesses and organizations to make consumers stop, think, and change their behavior. FUD is so powerful that it’s capable of nuking the competition into dust.
You can browse to the fear appeal article on Wikipedia to help you further.

lets take a very recent example of those anti-smoking ads we so often see on daily mass media. Between 1980 and 2012, smoking among Indian men decreased from 33.8 per cent to 23 per cent.

To understand your customers you need to understand your business and what value propositions you set forth. With a clear picture one can successfully convert leads into clientele.

The waterman.