Understanding consumer psychology!

Consumers Behavior- whether you are a brand that is targeting consumers online or offline, plays a very important role in marketing. The most volatile market one can say is that on all digital platforms. With changing trends and constant updates, consumers tend to change their tastes and choices frequently. It is for times like these that marketers need to understand their consumer psychology and play more into how dissonant characteristics can help market their products better generating more sales.

Let us first understand how particularly dissonance or to simplify cognitive dissonance can help marketers.

Cognitive Dissonance in simple words implies that the feelings or thoughts of a person do not align with their their actions. For example, let’s say there is a person who is down with a fever and has a cold, and therefore shouldn't have anything cold. However, when the person goes to an eatery or food joint like McDonald’s ends up ordering a meal and does in fact have the cold beverage Coca-Cola. Now the fact they knew that having anything cold would damage their health, but how can one really deny having Coke when you are having a burger? This is a classic example of playing into the dissonance characteristics of consumers to get them to buy your products or services.

The nature of this digital world is very dynamic. It keeps changing more frequently than the share market. One can still however predict the highs and lows of the market for a day or two, but what will work on any platform or what will be a hit for the audiences is still unpredictable. For such cases, understanding your consumers and marketing them in a way that will persuade your side is the most promising way. Convincing consumers to buy a certain product or use your service is what marketing is all about. But developing a need or want in your consumer that you should have their product is what good marketing does.?

Supposedly you are a fairly new brand that has just launched it’s online stores on digital platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Your brand is new enough to not have a website, but just Instagram and Facebook pages via which you plan to take orders and deliver. Now, this might seem very difficult to start, and sales wise may seem impossible, but if you are giving the people good content, then there are high chances that your sales will skyrocket.?

The biggest benefit that these two mentioned pages have, is CONTENT! If you have eye pleasing images on your page, and aesthetically done reels on trending audios, people will fall for your products. What plays an important role in this purchase, is that because it’s on the internet and people are liking it or posting about it, they want to buy it.?

Even though they might not necessarily need it, or maybe even if they can purchase it from any other physical store, placing an order online on an Instagram Page gives it that high-end touch and puts that “trendy” stamp on them.?

One needs to analyze, what would be the expectations or feelings of your consumers or what possible logic would they use before deciding to make a purchase or maybe not make one. Comprehending all the possible reasons and scenarios that might affect their decision will help in outlining a strategy that will work the best in convincing them. If your audiences are easily swayed by trends, then having content and ads, that revolve around trending topics and viral reels will have your consumers convinced to make a purchase. On the other hand, if you have an audience set that isn’t influenced much by content, but is more cautious of everything they see and believe in researching before making a purchase, you will have to put out as much information as you can in order to convince them.?

Consumer psychology is an important aspect that digital marketers need to pay special attention to. It isn’t all about the content that you put out, it's more about whom you put out that content for. Your millions of engagements on Instagram pages would mean nothing if you fail to convert those into sales. And to have the conversion, a brand needs to study the needs and wants of its consumers and what will make them take the call from liking the content of your brand page to pressing that buy button on your website!?