BY KASHIF ALI
It is a method in which a product allows consumers to express themselves or feel better. Any marketing campaign or strategy aims to influence a consumer to make a decision that benefits a business, company or organization.
The link between marketing and psychology is evident by considering these factors; marketers can create campaigns and messages that favourably sway the target consumers’ behaviour. Physiology is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. Marketing psychologists are important to those companies, government agencies and businesses whose roles depend greatly on product purchases. Psychologists also seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience.
The financial media and analysts often use the term to explain a market movement that other metrics, such as fundamentals, may not define. A psychologist can help people improve their decision-making, stress management and behaviour based on understanding past behaviour to predict future behaviour better. It allows managers at all levels of organizations select, support, motivate and train employees. It also will enable businesses to design products, build better workspaces and foster healthy behaviour.
Psychology plays an important role in marketing, and marketers must have a solid understanding of human behaviour to succeed. We unconsciously apply psychology in almost everything we do. We build friendships based on their response to various emotional questions we ask. The same applies to marketing. It is useful to think of marketing as traditional sales, focusing on the entire consumer base instead of a single customer. It is a critically important component of a well-run business and generally oversees the more specific sales function. While marketing is using the right buzzwords to ignite someone’s behaviour to do what you want them to do. When you understand psychology and incorporate it into marketing, you can change someone’s behaviour or influence that behaviour to get the desired result.
The sole purpose of marketing is to trigger emotions in the target audience because all buying decisions are made from an emotional base and then wrapped up in logic. It helps in making the product one of a kind. Psychology studies human behaviours and how people think, act, and behave. And while marketers are not psychologists, they use several psychologically-based observations about human behaviour to communicate effectively with potential customers and increase conversions daily.
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the world to his “Theory of Human Motivation,” later known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This identified the basic needs that human beings have, in order of their importance: physiological needs, safety needs, and the needs for belonging, self-esteem and “self-actualization. “This theory consists of five vital human needs, with the most basic of needs falling at the bottom. This hierarchy looks like a pyramid with physiological needs at the base. As you move up the pyramid, you see safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization at the top.
- Psychological Studies for Marketers’ to Know
- The Endowment Effect
- When we own something, we tend to value it more highly. If we have to sell it, we want more than it is worth.
- The Framing Effect
- We react to a situation differently depending on whether we perceive the problem as a loss or a gain.
- The Loss Aversion
- We feel loss’s negative effects more strongly than an equal gain’s positive effects.
- The Acquiescence Effect
- We give answers based not just on a rational consideration of what is being asked but also on how we will appear to others.
- The Informational Social Influence
- When we do not know how to behave, we copy other people.
- The Buffer Effect of Social Support
- People who feel supported by others feel less stress. If you know your friends will support you and there is someone with whom you can talk things through, somehow stressful situations are more tolerable.