Address feelings — don’t avoid them

Few things are more frustrating than having your feelings dismissed by others, including friends, family, or people trying to sell you something. Yet brands tend to do this all the time with messaging that addresses only what they offer and ignores concerns or fears associated with their category. For example, if a consumer is fearful of investing in cryptocurrency, they aren’t likely to invest simply because someone tells them it’s the future of all economies and a sure path to wealth.

As a marketer, you need to understand and validate consumers’ fears about your product if you want them to listen and engage with you. Going back to the cryptocurrency example, digital money not backed by a gold standard, bank, or central authority can feel scary to consumers who grew up in the nondigital age. If you’re trying to sell cryptocurrency, first address the reasons consumers might not want to purchase it. Then explain the upside, use real data to show gains and opportunities, and slowly move your conversations from Why Not to Why. By engaging consumers with the Why Not aspect of a business category or product purchase, you’ll gain their attention and trust, which leads to gaining their interest and eventually a sale.

Show consumers how you’ll protect them

With purchasing anxiety high in times of uncertainty, brands must take fear out of the decision process by protecting consumers against greater losses. You can do this by

• Eliminating long, binding contracts that don’t allow customers to discontinue business with you if their financial situation changes, your products don’t meet their expectations, or they aren’t happy with your service, and so on. For example, software companies and others that lock customers into contracts lasting several years will likely have a harder time closing new sales than those that don’t, because you don’t really know what you’re getting with software until long after implementation, which typically takes months.
• Offering free trials, especially for subscription-based services. Allowing potential customers to try products and services such as software, food delivery apps, or business data and customer relationship management (CRM) tools relieves choice anxiety and lets customers see what really works for them and what doesn’t before they begin making that annual subscription payment.
• Offering a generous return policy. Letting customers try your products with no risk of loss if they aren’t happy takes the fear out of many purchases. In retail, one-year return policies are becoming standard and in many cases are the deciding factor for consumers choosing between suppliers. Nordstroms built a legacy reputation by offering high quality goods with a high level of purchasing confidence due to its no questions asked return policy.

Reward your customers

We all like rewards, and we tend to respond quickly to offers when we believe we have a strong chance of being rewarded. Look for ways to reward customers for engaging and trying your product over others. Rewards can be added-value benefits, monetary discounts, extended contract terms, and so on.

If you offer a free trial, reward those customers with a discount during their first year for giving you a chance to fill their needs and earn their trust over others in your space.

Be transparent and truthful to a fault

Communicating about your products with customers is a given, but how you communicate isn’t always as clear. Transparency about the mistakes you make, the flaws in your products you’re working to improve, or the issues you haven’t yet addressed is critical. And so is truth about your products, materials sourcing, and environmental and social stances. If you are misleading about your environmental, social, and governance practices, you’ll be rebuilding your customer base because of attrition while your honest competitors outpace you for growth.

There’s no forgiveness for misleading product claims. If you say your product is toxin-free, make sure it is. At one point, a multilevel marketing home and personal care products company promoted its natural ingredients to the level that customers believed they were ordering totally natural products without the toxins and dangerous substances found in cheaper products. Yet, if savvy customers noticed multiple labels on product packages for its so-called natural cleaners, and peeled off the first label, they likely saw the poison warning and fine print, which revealed that only a very small percentage of the ingredients were natural. This kind of deception can cost you customers.

Triggers of the unconscious mind: The real driver of choice

Traditionally, advertising has been all about promoting price, convenience, brand reputation, competitive advantage, and other appeals that the conscious mind processes. Yet people don’t always get far enough into advertisements to process the value of a given offer if the ad, content, post, experience — whatever the medium is — doesn’t first appeal to their unconscious mind. If the research is true, you’re wasting 90 percent of your budget by appealing just to the 10 percent of the brain that drives people’s decisions. That doesn’t make for good marketing returns.

The unconscious mind makes rapid judgments about marketing materials and messages and dictates immediately how we should behave. These thoughts and actions are guided by our schema, or set of preconceived thoughts and beliefs, that drive what we consider to be true, real, and valuable.

Psychological triggers that drive sales

Consciously and unconsciously, all human behavior is based on two emotional premises:

• The avoidance of pain
• The pursuit of pleasure

Everything we do, socially, professionally, and personally, is driven by these basic needs. When you understand the pain your customers are consciously and unconsciously avoiding when purchasing your products or services, you can craft highly relevant motivational messaging and experiences.

For example:

• Are customers trying to avoid the pain of feeling inferior to others by not having the same material status as their peers?
• Are they trying to avoid the pain of poor health that can come from eating unhealthy foods?
• Are they seeking the pleasure of knowing they have a fair insurance policy that will protect them from unexpected losses? Or the pleasure of knowing they will improve their job security by making a wise technology investment for their company?

Pleasure covers much more than indulgences. It covers peace of mind, confidence, comfort, and security, which are very strong conscious and unconscious triggers of choice.

Pain and pleasure in marketing terms are simply the fear and joy people experience as life events unfold or as they anticipate something bad or good happening in their lives. For example, purchasing auto insurance minimizes the fear of loss you would have if you weren’t insured. When comparing brands, most of us choose the one that makes us feel the most secure or confident during the shopping process.

Ask your customers about the fears they seek to minimize or pleasure they seek to enhance when making purchases in your category. Do they fear poor customer service, intimidating return policies, or overpaying for what they get? Do they expect to achieve specific goals or successes with your brand’s products or services? When you know the answers to these questions, you can create messaging, content, and experiences that are highly relevant and motivating.

Freud’s personality theory

Freud is known for several theories. One of his most popular is his personality theory, which goes beyond determining who has one and who doesn’t.

Freudian personality theory suggests that we each have three personalities, or voices, in our head that compete with each other when we’re making basic or complex decisions. These personalities are the id, ego, and superego.

• The id acts like a compulsive toddler who has to have what they want when they want it and doesn’t care about future consequences to self or others.
• The ego wants to please the id, but only after thinking through a plan to accomplish it in an appropriate manner.
• The superego is the voice of reason, deciding appropriate actions to take based on social norms and life experiences, what’s right, what’s wrong, and so on.

Whichever voice wins out most often dictates people’s individual personalities and, for marketers, predicts their behavior when it comes to shopping and assigning brand loyalty.

Think about which personality is most involved in making the decision to purchase your category and your brand within it. Imagine you’re selling cookies or doughnuts and you want to spark an impulsive drive to buy some. You need to appeal to the id in a way that overpowers the consumer’s ego and superego, which might argue cookies or doughnuts aren’t on the diet.

If, however, you’re marketing fitness and nutrition products, apps, or the like, you may want to first appeal to the ego with information about responsible diet and exercise habits and then mention low-calorie cookies that satisfy the id without throwing out any plans to stay on track for reaching healthy goals.

Jung’s personality theory

Carl Jung, known for his theory of archetypes, believed that the human psyche is nothing more than mass confusion because so much of what people do and think is unconscious. He is widely known for his personality theory, which presents two different attitude types: introverts, or people who tend to be withdrawn, and extroverts, who are more outgoing and outspoken. He suggests that both attitude types engage in the same mental functions but process them differently. These functions include thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.

What marketers should grasp from Jung’s theory is that introverts and extroverts can experience the same situations, process them, and respond very differently. If you’re selling a product, service, or experience that largely appeals to introverts, you need to understand how introverts think and what type of sensory appeal makes them most comfortable. Using the wrong appeal may put them in fight-or-flight mode.

Another perspective Jung discusses in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul provides great direction for a brand’s positioning and messaging strategies:

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are given by experience.

If this is truly what people seek in life, how does your product support the journey to attaining these emotional outcomes?

Ask yourself key questions about the psychological fulfillment your brand helps support. Doing so will help you see your product’s value in a much different light.

Authority

The late Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram did a study in the 1960s to see how the role of authority influences people to do things that go against their values and conscience. He set up an experiment with volunteers playing the role of students and teachers. The student volunteer was fitted with electrodes that would deliver shocks each time the teacher pushed a button, which they were instructed to do each time the student got a question wrong.

As the experiment went on, the student missed more questions, and the shock got stronger. The teacher volunteers started to become upset, even physically ill, hearing the pain and agony of the students, who were sitting on the other side of a screen. But when the leader, someone in a white coat, told the teachers to increase the voltage and push the button to deliver the shock, remarkably, 65 percent of the volunteers kept following the instructions from the person in authority. According to the study’s report, subjects were anxious and stressed about inflicting pain, and some were so upset that they were “sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.”

This shows how powerful authorities are in influencing behavior. It also demonstrates that marketers have to use the influence of authority responsibly.

Any kind of marketing appeal that influences behavior by tapping into psychological triggers needs to be done so in ways that are in the best interests of all involved, not just the brand’s. Marketers have a social, moral, and ethical responsibility to use all the insights provided in this chapter for the greater good, not just their brand’s gain.

You can tap into the power of authority by:

• Aligning with respected brands whose employees are considered to have distinct expertise or knowledge in your industry.
• Featuring authorities in blogs, inviting them to participate in your events, and so on.
• Paying respected experts or influencers to be spokespeople for your products.

Social proof

No matter how sophisticated, intelligent, accomplished, or otherwise knowledgeable your customers are, they’re still driven by social proof, whether they admit it or not. It aligns with the human need for survival because, unconsciously, people feel weak or disadvantaged when others have something they don’t or are achieving something they haven’t yet.

Robert Cialdini, a psychologist, professor, and author, has done many experiments to see how this plays out in various settings. He found that when he told people that their neighbors, friends, peers, and so forth were doing something worthwhile, like participating in an environmental program, they were more likely to also do it than if he just told them it was a good thing to do.

This illustrates the role of testimonials and sharing customer satisfaction ratings and Net Promoter Scores (which measure a customer’s willingness to recommend a product or service) in helping to influence behavior.

When trying to influence behavior, let consumers know that others are engaged in the desired behavior and watch their response take off. Note that on websites like Amazon.com, there’s a list of similar products that other customers reviewed. Most people don’t want to miss out on a good thing, so many will review those products, too.

Reciprocity

No matter how much we accept the notion that life isn’t fair, we still hope it will be. At least when it comes to how people treat us. We thrive when one good deed creates another and embrace those who treat us reciprocally. This applies to our personal and professional relationships alike. Brands that understand that giving back isn’t just about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts but is also about giving back to the customers who are loyal to their business are the ones with the most sustainability in good times and bad.

When people feel recognized and appreciated by businesses they patronize, their satisfaction is higher and so is their repeat business and referrals.

A favorite example of reciprocity for marketers is a campaign conducted by a regional bank called First Bank. It ran a billboard campaign with nothing more than the words math tutor, dog walker, wedding singer, and a name with a phone number below each title. No information about the bank’s offerings, advantages, and so on. It was truly running a campaign to help its customers. It really did have customers with those names and jobs, and when the phone rang, they really did refer people to that bank.

This was a brilliant campaign because it showed customers that the bank truly cared about giving back to them, no matter how big or small their accounts were, and instead of just using words to make that point, it used actions and a lot of its advertising budget. According to the VP of marketing at the time, the bank was highly successful in stopping attrition at a time when most banks were losing customers and also in gaining new customers.

Reciprocity is a simple and very affordable marketing tool. It doesn’t take a lot to give back to customers through better service, rewards points, free gifts, mentions in your newsletters, content marketing, social posts, and so on. But the payback can be huge.

When you develop your customer surveys, as discussed in Chapter 5, add a question asking customers to tell you how they would like to be rewarded.

Scarcity

Once upon a time, Hostess Brands got in trouble and had to shut down, discontinuing some of America’s favorite snack foods, including the Twinkie, almost overnight. Suddenly, people had to have what they hadn’t even wanted in years. Adults who remembered the Twinkie from their youth stormed stores and bought boxes of Twinkies before they could no longer buy even one. Sales went up 31,000 percent (not a typo) in just days.

This is a strong example of the huge power that scarcity has on consumers’ thoughts and behavior. It’s true. People often don’t want or value something until they can’t have it anymore. Then they can’t get it fast enough or get enough of it.

You see this all the time in marketing: “one seat left at this price,” “one left in stock,” and so on. Whether it’s true or not and whether people believe it or not, they’ll often buy it, just in case.

When you craft messaging around emotional and psychological values, you are essentially building ESPs. As you build customer profiles and segments, these ESPs will change according to the driving values of each segment, and sometimes according to age, geography, and personality type.

For example: If you’re a retailer of organic, toxin-free household items, your ESP may read like this:

We deliver confidence knowing that your home is free from toxins that affect your health and the joy of knowing your children are protected from issues that could affect their quality of life. Families that use our products can relax and focus on other life issues, knowing that they are protected at home.

Your ESP now involves creating messaging and positioning around confidence, joy, and relaxing as a result of using a product that delivers all three.