"CUSTOMER" review (Article - 6)

INTRODUCTION

Recently I enrolled for a Mini-degree in "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" from CXL Institute. I would love to share whatever I will learn from this Mini-degree through a series of articles.

This is my 6th "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" review article in a series of a total of 12 articles. I will be posting an article on each weekend for consecutive 6 upcoming weeks in which I will cover all the tactics and principles of Digital psychology, Consumer Behavior, and Persuasion and Neuro-Marketing which will surely help anyone passionate about marketing.

Identifying Customer Needs: 

Consumers are often unaware of their needs and have trouble explaining them to researchers. Inferring consumers’ needs based only on their behaviors is also difficult because a given need might not be linked to a specific behavior. In other words, the same need (for example, affiliation) can be exhibited in various and diverse behaviors (visiting friends, going to the gym), and the same behavior (going to the gym) can reflect various needs (affiliation, achievement). Consider the activity of shopping. One study found that when women shop in drugstores, they are seeking information about items that provide peace of mind (satisfying needs for safety and well-being). When they shop in club stores like Costco or Price Chopper, they are seeking adventure and entertainment (satisfying the need for stimulation).

A different purpose for the same product:

Inferring needs in a cross-cultural context is particularly difficult. For example, some research indicates that Indian and U.S. consumers use toothpaste primarily for its cavity reducing capabilities (a functional need). In contrast, consumers in England and some French-speaking areas of Canada use toothpaste primarily to freshen breath (a hedonic need). French women drink mineral water so they will look better (a symbolic need), whereas Indian and U.S. consumers drink it for its health powers (a functional need). Given these difficulties, marketers sometimes use indirect techniques to uncover consumers’ needs. One technique is to ask consumers to interpret a set of relatively ambiguous stimuli such as cartoons, word associations, incomplete sentences, and incomplete stories. One consumer might reveal needs for esteem by interpreting the man in the cartoon as thinking, “My friends will think I’m really cool for riding in this car!” Another might reveal needs for affiliation by filling in the cartoon with “I could take all my friends for rides with me.

How do Consumers perceive?

A number of studies have compared the information processing activities of consumers who have a lot of product knowledge or expertise with those of consumers who do not. These differences in prior knowledge clearly affect how consumers make decisions. For example, consumers trying to lease a car rarely understand the concept of capitalizing costs (the figure used to determine lease payments), how these costs are determined, or the need to negotiate lower costs to lower their payments. The inability to understand these costs may result in a less than an optimal decision. According to research, novices and experts process information in different ways. Experts can process information stated in terms of attributes (what the product has such as a 200-gigabyte hard drive), whereas novices process information better when it’s stated in terms of benefits (what the product can do—such as store a lot of data). Novices may be able to process information when marketers provide a helpful analogy (e.g., can hold a library’s worth of data)

Strong Schemas:

Schemas, images, and personalities are clearly important to consumer knowledge. Brands that have strong and desirable Images are more valuable to companies. That is, they contribute to brand equity or the value of the brand to the company. Because the images of liked brands can translate into strong brand loyalty, marketers need to identify and understand the various associations that consumers link to a particular brand. Note that consumers as young as middle school age start associating brand images with their images of themselves. Understanding the associations that consumers see as part of themselves or want to see as part of themselves helps marketers develop brand images, change them, and protect them.

Sensory triggers:

Consumers will only consciously perceive a marketing stimulus when the message triggers their mind above minimum threshold attention. Thus, if images or words in a commercial are too small or the sound level is too low, consumers’ sensory receptors will not be activated, and the stimulus will not be consciously perceived. Obviously, we like some products—for example, perfumes and scented candles—for the smells they produce. However, we may like other products, such as mouthwashes and deodorants, because they mask aromas. Procter & Gamble’s Febreze started as an odor eliminator and now offers fragrance-enhancing products for the home and laundry. However, the smell does not always work to the marketers’ advantage: Some consumers may dislike the scent in the ambient retail environment or find it irritating. In addition, some consumers value particular products because they have no smell, such as unscented deodorants, carpet cleaners, and laundry detergents. Finally, consumers’ preferences for smells differ across cultures. Spices that are commonly used in one culture can literally make consumers in another ill. Only one smell (cola) is universally regarded as pleasant, a finding that is good news for companies like Coke and Pepsi that are expanding globally.

Indirect Environmental triggers:

Classmate uses environment triggers very smartly. Every classmate notebook prints on its back cover, "We contribute towards Nature by making environment-friendly Notebooks. Marketers are directly and indirectly involved in efforts to foster environmentally conscious behavior and to address concerns about global warming. Another concern is the increasing amount of trash or garbage in our environment. Research about recycling demonstrates that specific beliefs about its importance and attitudes toward recycling, in general, can directly affect whether consumers engage in recycling behaviors and whether they perceive that recycling is inconvenient. On the other hand, environmentally conscious behaviors are most likely to occur when consumers perceive that their actions will make a difference— called perceived consumer effectiveness The need to conserve is especially vital in light of the rapidly escalating problems of the garbage disposal and depletion of natural resources. Companies are now realizing that garbage has been a misused resource and are finding creative ways to make products more durable and to reuse materials. In particular, consumer researchers have been interested in two aspects of conservation behavior: When are consumers likely to conserve and how can consumers be motivated to act in more environmentally friendly ways? When Are Consumers Likely to Conserve? These questions are really deep and diving in their core depends on the region and the type of industry we are working on.

As a conclusion, we must not underestimate the powers of human behavior and marketing psychology in order to get success as a good marketer and to grow our business exponentially.

Congrats! You are now one step ahead in the competition after understanding Marketing Psychology and Consumer behavior.

Stay tuned for the next Article!

 (This article is a review for the mini degree, "Digital Psychology and Persuasion" from CXL institute".)

Thanks :-)

Gaurav Panwar