Marketing to Wants vs. Shoulds

Roger Dooley has an excellent post about marketing “wants” vs. “shoulds”.

Everyone is familiar with the want vs. should conflict. Do you order the loaded cheese fries as your side dish, or the steamed broccoli? You want the greasy fries, but you know you should order the broccoli. Do you cut the grass (should) or watch football (want)?

Roger references a research paper that explores the different ways of selling wants vs. shoulds. With respect to online marketing, it had the following advice:

The authors comment that online sellers and catalog merchants should be sure to take delivery time into account when promoting their merchandise - consumers are likely to order more want items if they are available for immediate delivery. On the other hand, they caution that customers will spend less overall the further in advance of delivery the order is placed.

Understand whether your product is a want or a should, and set it up for the proper buying behavior to maximize your sales.

Marketing and The Satisfaction of Desires

You’ve heard time and time again that you have to sell benefits and not features, but on some of your projects, you have probably still failed at selling them well. Often times, the problem is that you are selling surface benefits, when you should tap into the deeper benefits - being successful, luring the opposite sex, feeling safe and secure. Mindhacks has an excellent post about the father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays.

Bernays pretty much invented the idea that you can sell products, not by making their practical advantages known, but by associating them with the satisfaction of desires - to be sexy, successful, a good husband or wife, the need to feel safe, well-regarded and so on.

Every time you see razors sold as babe magnets, or perfume sold as booty dust, that’s Bernays’ ideas at work.

He also invented the idea that marketing was more than just adverts. It could also be presented as ‘education’ that had no direct connection with a product but made people more receptive to other marketing.

You aren’t selling a product, you are selling a deep need, satisfaction, and success. Remember that, and you will be a much better marketer.

How Brands Get Wired Into the Brain

Humans display similar behavior to Pavlov’s dogs, much more than we think. Brains can learn to associate irrelevant stimuli with certain brands and/or rewards.

A person’s liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack.

It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov’s dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain – the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain – as having an important role in this learning.

How does this help you market online? It stresses the importance of delivering a quality to product to your customers if you want them to be repeat purchasers. One bad experience, and they may not be so likely to buy from you the next time.

Neuromarketing and Branding

Entrepreneur magazine has a good article about the brain of the entrepreneur. A particularly interesting passage looks at the customer brain.

No brain research has spurred as much business interest as the studies of marketing and brains. The hope is that we’ll learn to market in ways far more effective than anything anyone has come up with yet. Early results are promising.

A couple of studies did MRIs on people exposed to celebrity faces and brand images. One found Coca-Cola’s logo triggered impulses in the midbrain, an area that sits between the primitive hindbrain and the more developed forebrain. A Pepsi logo didn’t have the same effect. The study suggests a brand’s image can drive behavior in a way that neither instinct nor conscious thought controls.

There are also some excellent points, so I encourage you to go check out the whole thing.