WHAT CAN ARISTOTLE TEACH US ABOUT BRANDING AND MARKETING?
Andy Stonehouse
Effective Brand Strategy with quantified results. Connecting you with your ideal target client through our unique Data-Driven Design process.
We are all aware of the marketers’ constant refrains:
“We need a call to action”, “Make the call to action more immediate/bigger/impactive”, “The CTA needs to be the imperative”, etc. But not all marketers are familiar with the reasons why people actually take action. The good one KNOW that it’s all driven by psychology. And forward-thinking brand strategists have also long been singing from this same song sheet. How human motivation and psychological connections are needed to build a successful, engaging brand. The need to connect with the customers and the strive to create an emotional ‘brand bond’ are crucial.
Coca-Cola’s market value is around $120 billion. But its market cap, excluding brand value, is approximately $50 billion. So that’s equates to $70 billion of brand value! (And that's not to be sniffed at). It is clear that the brand value is a substantial part of Coke’s success.
And just like brand value, an effective call to action can directly correspond to ROI and increased profits, so let’s see what we can apply from Aristotle’s insights about psychological behaviour.
According to Aristotle, the seven causes of human action are:
1. Chance
In our terms of reference – the world of branding and communications – it’s much better to say we should leave nothing to chance. Any call to action needs to be clear – with no room for ‘chance’, misunderstanding or confusion.
Make it clear and make it easy. Anything that involves too much effort for the action taker will result in an aborted effort.
User Experience (UX) design has become a huge aspect of any website design and app design process. On websites, people expect to both find and be able to action things quickly.
Some tests suggest people can spend less than 0.5 seconds on a landing page – they want to identify their route off that page (and do what they came to your site to do) as swiftly as possible.
Others test suggest more than three clicks and the visitor gets frustrated and may leave your site without completing any actions. Even asking for one additional piece of information, or one more click of the mouse to complete an order can mean they simply opt-out.
But UX design is also becoming a familiar aspect in lots of other areas of customer interaction. If we are to take seriously the mantra that we need to make any experience of our brand, business or product as enjoyable and pain free as possible for the customer then it’s not surprising that the user experience is fast becoming of key importance at every customer touch-point.
All our communications need to help consumers understand what the next step is – what we need them to do next.
Confusion is public enemy number one in relation to marketing – and it’s also the number one brand killer.
If customers feel we are doing all we can to make their lives as stress free as possible - form our website design to how we deal with a customer complaint or how easy it is to book a consultation - the collective experience should to be designed around the customers needs.
To often in business our processes are created for our own ease and therefore the customers are asked to jump through hoops. Just this week trying to make an online purchase I was asked to enter my details at 3 separate points in the ordering process.
2. Nature
Human nature and environmental nature.
This opens up a lot of areas of discussion about nurture vs. nature etc. (which we can’t go into here or we’d need to write a small book - and there are lots of those around if you are seriously interested). Suffice to say that most psychologists now seem to recognise that the nature or nature debate is not so much an ‘either/or’ but a ‘plus/and’ relationship.
What is important is that these aspects play important roles in motivating consumers to take action.
For our purposes, and to help to clarify, we prefer to use the word ‘values’ when thinking about nature.
If the actions you are asked to take and the road you are asking you to walk do not align with your values (nature) then you feel uncomfortable - resistance or rejection will swiftly follow. Such a ‘disconnect’ is very hard to recover from.
Again just think of your own personal experience. If you've ever been in the company of someone who mad you feel uncomfortable - you are likely to do all you can to avoid having to deal with them again. That one experience will colour how you perceive and respond to them.
3. Compulsion
The compulsion to act can be a big factor in human behavioural psychology. We’ve probably all made an impulse buy at some point: an additional ‘sweet treat’ at the supermarket checkouts, that item of clothing that is now stuck at the back of the closet and never been worn, or that pastry when all we went in for was a coffee!
But these are the downsides to compulsive behaviour. For the sake of this piece, we simply want to underline that compulsion/impulse can be our friend when it comes to getting people to engage with us.
It’s the method used by most charity telethons. If you simply do this NOW you can help X to do Y.
Making it easy for customers to take action and to act on their impulses will always improve results. Giving them a reason to act now will also generally help that immediate response.
4. Habit
Like it or not, we are all creatures of habit. Most habitual nature is subconscious so we rarely even notice or acknowledge it but it plays a any role in how and when we make decisions or take action.
There are 2 aspects to habit for us to consider. 1. The habits of your company and how you do business and, 2. The habits of the customer.
What are the habits of a good company? One of the biggest is consistency – showing up regularly (in the places your customers ‘hang-out and so they get used to seeing you there).
So understanding your customers habits and behaviour is crucial here!
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Delivering consistently is a habit that we should all aim to grow. If a company meets or exceeds the customers’ expectations repeatedly, then you create a brand-bond, and that customer slowly shifts to become a loyal customer – and better still an evangelical advocate or a ‘fan’.
Habits can be formed relatively easily according to experts. This is why marketers create customer avatars and ideal customer identities. Knowing the customer – their buying habits, their industry habits etc. all make it easier to identify ways to connect with them, speak their language, to be seen ‘where they go’.
Repetition and consistency are critical to developing trust in your brand, and your marketing message and we gain a good reputation by developing the habit of delivering above and beyond our customers expectations.
5. Reason
Reason, as used by Aristotle, is not so much the old left-brain, right-brain discussion. In his usage Aristotle uses reason as the very process of thinking, the rational over the irrational.
Some liken this to Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, building from basic needs (food, water, rest etc.), through psychological needs (friendship, accomplishment, prestige), to self-fulfilment needs (personal development, creative activities, spirituality).
I prefer to also link this Maslow's model to the MacLeans’s Triune Brain Theory. Which states that there are 3 areas of the brain (that often get called different terms but the most accessible are)
2. Commonly referred to as the Emotional brain (the Limbic system or Mammalian brain) affects empathy, feelings, memory and habits.
3. The Rational (or Logical brain, Human Brian, the Neocortex, or the thinking brain) – which as the name suggest is related to more considered or reasoned aspects of our existence (Language, learning, abstract thought, consciousness, imagination).
Marketing and branding tend to concentrate on the last 2, the Emotional Brain and the Rational Brian.
A great deal of research has shown that decisions are made in the Emotional brain. Gut decisions, driven by feelings – and only THEN, after we’ve actually made our decision, do we look for logic and facts to back up our decision. It’s a kind of confirmation bias loop used to validate the choices we’ve made.
If you want to get a better ROI on your marketing and branding activities then stop concentrating on telling people all the facts and reasons why they should use you/your product and start connecting with them in a more emotional way. Appeal to their emotional, decision making brain first – and then deliver the facts to underpin their choices.
6. Passion
Passion is firmly seated in emotional brain, obviously. If we can discover and prompt the emotional trigger for each customer – it will motivate them to take action?
Passion, or emotional engagement, is often a key aspect any brand manager is trying to create.
Strong emotions such as passion are like marmite. Some will be strongly ‘for you’ and others might be strongly against. And that’s not a problem. Honestly.
Love or hate is always better than lukewarm, indifference. If the audience has no strong feelings about you then they are never likely to ‘buy what you sell’. Many companies are fearful of taking too strong a position for fear of alienating people - but the facts are that creating a brand that will people love (or hate) pays dividends.
‘Love’ connections, will be passionate. And research has shown that they will spend more . They will be loyal, they will be brand advocates. They are ‘your tribe’, ‘your family’ and the tribe/family bond is very, VERY resilient.
7. Desire
Again this is an emotional term. Creating desire is about understanding the target audience’s wants and needs. What drives them.
Desire is about feelings – wanting a certain lifestyle, a personal benefit, a status, or other intangible (and often subconscious) goal.
Market research and customer feedback will help you to position your offering in ‘the desire zone’.
A Rolex does the exact same basic job as an unbranded watch - it tells you the time. A BMW or a Bentley does the same basic job as a Citroen 2CV, getting you from A to B. So, we are dealing with questions of perceived value and status not simply function.
What, and why, people want what they want is the question we have to ask ourselves first? Then ask, how can we position our service/product to fulfil that desire?
It is worth stressing here that this has to be an authentic positioning too! Being inauthentic is a very quick way to damage your brand – but that is a whole other post for another time.
The Big Lesson for Marketers & Brand Managers
The big take away is that to be really successful you need to understand human behaviour and motivation.?Consumer behaviour is governed by our basic human needs and actions, which hasn’t really changed since Aristotle wrote his 7 laws of human motivation.
Delivery pathways might change. Society might alter the way we like to do things (who in the 1960s could have foreseen the rise of on-line selling and the dominance of a company called Amazon?) but our basic psychological needs remain unchanged.
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1 年Great post Andy!