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? For example:
❯❯ If you’re in education, does going back to school give people the insight to reach their highest achievements?
❯❯ If you sell luxury goods, does buying your apparel, cars, or other items help individuals achieve the love they seek in life?
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 – the light from the way your customers’ unconscious minds see it.
Along with psychological triggers, social influencers that are rooted in some of the psychology described in the previous section drive people’s thoughts, choices, and actions. The following sections explore some of these social influencers.
Authority
Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram did a study to see how the role of authority influences people to do things that go against their values and conscious. He set up an experiment with one volunteer playing the role of a student and another playing the role of a teacher. The student volunteer was fitted with electrodes that would deliver shocks each time the teacher pushed a button, which he/she was 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 get upset, even physically ill, hearing the pain and agony of the student who was sitting on the other side of a screen. But when the leader, someone in a white coat, told the teachers to increase the volume and push the button to deliver the shock, the majority kept doing it against their own conscious.
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 so much so 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. From childhood, many are taught to respect authorities of various types – police officers, teachers, church leaders, parents, doctors, and so forth.
To tap into the power of authority in your marketing plan, you need to first do the following:
❯❯ Determine which authorities have the most influence in your product category.
❯❯ Find out what expertise they share that makes them an authority and how this expertise is related to your brand values, attributes, and so on.
❯❯ Identify how you can align with authorities to validate your category and your brand. Some methods might include asking them to write a guest blog for your website, inviting them to speak at your events, or even paying them to be a spokesperson for your products.
Another way to tap into the influence of authority is to cite research reports, statistics, and testimonials from experts in your communications to validate your product claims and add strength to your messaging.
Social proof
No matter how sophisticated, intelligent, accomplished, or otherwise your customers are, they’re still driven by social proof, whether they admit it or not. It aligns with the human need for survival as, unconsciously, people feel weak or disadvantaged when others have something they don’t or are achieving something they haven’t yet. In these cases, people often feel inferior, a contrast to the feelings that they unconsciously seek to feel fulfilled and secure.
Robert Cialdini, a psychologist and author, has done many experiments to see how this plays out in various settings. He found that by telling customers that their neighbors, friends, peers, and so forth were doing something worthwhile, like reusing towels at a hotel or participating in an environmental program, they were much more likely to do so as well than if he just told them it was a good thing to do to support a good program.
This is where testimonials play a strong role. Numbers like a 98 percent customer satisfaction rate, a high NPS, or Net Promoter Score, and like attributes show consumers that others are like you and substantially increase their willingness to try your product and/or brand.
When trying to influence behavior, let consumers know that others are engaged in the desired behavior, and watch your response take off. Note that on pages like Amazon.com, there’s a list of like products that other “customers reviewed.” Most people don’t want to miss out on a good thing, so many will review them, too.
Reciprocity
No matter how much we accept the notion that life is not 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. Brands that understand that “giving back” is not just about their corporate social responsibility efforts but about giving back to the individuals who give their business loyalty to them 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. Nothing more 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, 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, it was highly successful in stopping attrition at a time when most banks were losing customers and also in gaining new customers.
Scarcity
A few years ago, 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 even buy 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 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.
For example: If you’re a retailer of organic, toxic‐free