One of the seminal psychological insights of the 21st century began with a jar of jam—or rather, 24 of them—a total that would soon prove problematic.
Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a display table in a gourmet grocery store featuring two dozen jam varieties. If shoppers sampled their wares, they received a coupon for the eventual purchase of the product. Iyengar and Lepper repeated this exercise the next day, showcasing just six jam types instead. They sought to answer a simple question: Which strategy would produce more sales?
In fact, shoppers who saw just six jam flavors were roughly six times more likely to buy than those offered 24. Soon, the phenomenon of “choice paralysis” was enshrined in the doctrine of effective marketing: Offer consumers too many options, and they’ll become overwhelmed and unmotivated to buy anything at all.
What if Iyengar and Lepper had asked shoppers how many options they’d prefer to see instead of conducting their experiment? If they had, the shoppers might have said, “I’d like to see 24. More choices can’t hurt, can they?”
Why Customers Can’t Tell You What Matters
The discipline of psychology revolves around a humbling admission: Without extensive experimentation and analysis, we lack a clear understanding of our minds. No less than 95 percent of our thinking occurs at a subconscious level, driven by cognitive processes so subtle and swift we aren’t aware of them.
However, this fundamental human truth in marketing is just beginning to dawn on the field’s leading minds. Many professionals continue to seek the keys to persuasion from a dubious source: the feedback of current or prospective customers about their own decisions.
Ample research suggests consumers’ explanations for their thoughts and actions are incomplete and misleading at best. In more traditional methods where direct questions are expected, participants supply retroactive logic for impulsive choices. They give answers they sense are right, responding to priming in each question. They tell you they want to see all 24 jam flavors even though they don’t.
This powerful phenomenon doesn’t stem from dishonesty but rather disconnection. Try as we might, we can’t perceive the processes that genuinely drive our choices. That’s why marketers must turn to consumer psychology for these insights instead. Brands can only access, influence, and activate their customers’ real motives.
BJ Fogg, a visionary of behavioral design, describes three elements integral to a new choice or action – the result all marketers hope to achieve.
While each of these components is essential, they can only be understood in light of the learnings of social science. Below, we’ll share five key insights from our study of consumer psychology to help you motivate, enable, and trigger customer engagement with your brand.
Solve the Unstated Problem
Most products and services promise some explicit function: Detergent removes stains from clothing, plane tickets provide safe passage to your destination, and ground beef makes a good burger. But these literal requirements differ from the psychological needs brands can fulfill for their buyers if they’re observant enough to do so.
Consider one of the more emotionally involved spending choices a consumer can make: picking a getaway vacation. The problems and solutions related to this purchase might seem evident to a marketer. Get the traveler to a desired destination for a price they can accept, and you’re all set, right?
But the consumer’s true quest is quite different for the proprietors of The Body Holiday, a celebrated Caribbean resort. People seek getaway vacations as a respite from life’s most grating aspects to restore their health and well-being. This psychological need can’t be meaningfully fulfilled in a few days, no matter how beautiful the beaches. So, the resort focuses on imparting lasting well-being tools to its guests, from dietary advice to meditation guidance.
This cure for what truly ails the traveler could never have been achieved by relying on consumers’ stated concerns alone. If they had, BodyHoliday’s management might have fussed over several minor concerns—the details of drink packages or a discount for extended stays. But they would have missed their more fundamental service calling, rooted in their guests’ true psychological needs.
Example: In 1996, two companies launched in-home HIV test kits after investing heavily in their development. Both suffered anemic sales. In rushing their product to market, these companies had targeted a logistical problem: the inconvenience of going to a doctor to learn one’s status. But they ignored a more profound psychological need for comfort, support, and guidance in a potential crisis and failed accordingly.
Some Moments Matter More
Many brands adopt an unfocused approach to customer experience. They aim to improve every aspect of their business, often achieving only consistent mediocrity. Other companies are simply reactionary in their service acumen, scrambling to respond to all customer complaints without pausing to assess which are most meaningful.
Behavioral science suggests that a more targeted approach to specific moments in customers’ experiences would serve them better.
According to the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, our minds retain only limited, representative snapshots of any experience. These snapshots coincide with an experience’s most emotionally intense and final moments, a phenomenon Kahneman terms the “Peak-End Rule.” Upon reflection, we virtually disregard all other pieces of a memory and form judgments using these peak-end instances alone.
This psychological insight demands a shift in emphasis for marketers and customer experience managers. Don’t strive to make every piece of the brand experience good; rather, aim to make key junctures great.
Example: Administrators of the London Underground subway system identified a “peak” emotional experience among riders: the anxiety of waiting for one’s train. Standing on the platform, there was no way to know whether your train was 30 seconds or 30 minutes away and, thus, whether you’d be late to your destination. This uncertainty was far more unpleasant than the waiting itself.
As a result, Underground officials installed digital displays in each station, announcing the time until the next train arrived. Customer experience scores soared in the following months.
Break Down the Action-Intention Barrier
Most of us can admit our actions and intentions often differ: We cheat on our new diet or don’t quite get around to certain chores around the house. But sometimes, this disconnect occurs due to more mysterious aversions, many of which drive marketers crazy.
Why does an online shopper spend 30 minutes on your brand’s site and then leave without buying the items added to his cart? Why do product sales stagnate when customer research reveals their reviews are glowing?
Once you’ve captured a customer’s interest, eliminating these barriers is a top priority, whatever they may be. But in many cases, brands underestimate the power of even minor inconveniences to dampen purchase enthusiasm.
Behavioral economist Richard Thaler famously found requiring employees to select a 401(k) plan from several options was a significant impediment to enrollment. In 2000, virtually no retirement plans featured automatic enrollment, which Thaler suggested would solve this problem. Today, nearly 60 percent of them do.
Does some minor obstacle to purchasing motivation hamper your brand? If so, it could be having an outsized impact on your engagement and sales.
Example: In 1999, Amazon patented “1-click” buying, which allowed customers to complete a purchase without re-entering their credit card details and address. Some estimates suggest that relieving that minor hassle increased sales by 5 percent—worth $2.4 billion annually.
Emotional Identification Is Motivation
Many brands advance value propositions founded on comparative benefits: We’re cheaper, faster, or better than our competitors. While these statements may be compelling in a limited sense, they’re also unlikely to be distinctive (every company toots its own horn). Motivation will require emotional recognition of shared personal values rather than calculated ones for many buyers.
To accomplish this connection, marketers must understand their audiences’ private and social aspirations and position their products accordingly. This process often involves delving into deeply embedded personal values. When customers consider your brand, does it confirm or contradict their vision of who they are? Perhaps more importantly, does it resonate with who they’d like to be?
Apple’s seminal “Get a Mac” campaign explicitly demonstrates the power of emotional identification. These ads were unabashed: Would you rather be kind, calm, cool, and collected … or a flawed and fumbling fool? The campaign was so effective that Apple ran 66 iterations of the spot over three years.
Harnessing these motivating forces can seem intimidating, and many brands avoid them in favor of emphasizing narrower incentives, such as advantages in features or price. However, this marginal appeal alone won’t often result in the most valuable outcome a brand can pursue: loyalty.
Example: In its classic “Choosy Moms Choose Jif” campaign, the peanut butter brand transformed a commodity into an identity. Suddenly, generic competitors looked like a compromise that discriminating mothers wouldn’t make. While we understand this tactic as problematic today, similar strategies can be applied to more positive (and politically correct) customer ideals in the present.
From Principles to Practice: Applying These Insights
While these concepts are crucial to effective branding and customer influence, the path from observation to action is often complicated. As marketers come to terms with the limits of traditional research methodologies, they’ll need to utilize alternatives rooted in social science to produce meaningful insights. Business challenges are invariably human challenges, and human truth requires expertise to access.
For nearly two decades, the Brandtrust team of social scientists and strategists has sought to provide the world’s leading brands with the necessary conclusions to motivate their customers honestly. We do so through various innovative methodologies, uncovering the drivers of consumers’ subconscious calculations.
From intimate interviewing processes to experiments conducted on a larger scale, our work is founded on the best practices of scientific inquiry. As a result, we furnish actionable insights rather than questionable ones, guiding our clients’ efforts toward human truth for their brands and businesses.
To learn more about our research methods and strategic application to brands, explore our work with many of the world’s most respected brands.
