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Consumer Behavior

AI Driven Customer Acquisition - Ai4 2023

MotiveMetrics' Chief Science Officer, Kyle Thomas, joined the AI4 panel on AI Driven Customer Acquisition, Aug 8, 2023 at MGM in Las Vegas. The full panel discussion is available HERE, but our favorite highlights are shown below.

Kyle opened the panel by sharing how the company started during his PhD research in Experimental Psychology at Harvard University. Initially, MotiveMetrics analyzed text from Social Media to develop customer profiles, understand consumer motivations and inform marketing communications. Today, in Paid Search advertising MotiveMetrics' focus is to conquer the "last mile problem" presented by Generative AI systems.

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MotiveMetrics "Most Promising AI Solution Provider of 2022"

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CIO Review, the Navigator for Enterprise Solutions, recognized MotiveMetrics as the "Most Promising AI Solution Provider of 2022" in recognition of its software innovations leveraging AI for Search Intent Based Content Creation.  In fact, MotiveMetrics has been leveraging AI for understanding consumer behavior and developing motivational messaging tailored to target audiences since it was founded in 2015, long before ChatGPT became the rage in Q4 2022.  

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Why Personal Values are the Key to a Great Marketing Campaign

valuesIn 1997, Steve Jobs explained one of the most important principles of marketing in six words: “To me marketing is about Values.” He goes on to describe how some of the most iconic and successful brands resonate with customer’s personal values. This is a principle worth expanding upon.

We all live by a set of values that are important (or unimportant) to us. Some people value having fun and seeking adventure (Hedonism). Some value having influence and control over subordinates (Power). Still, others value helping people and making the world a better place (Benevolence). Values are beliefs and goals that transcend specific situations to motivate behavior. Understanding what consumers value is important because, much like personality traits and other individual differences, values have demonstrated powerful predictive ability in a number of customer experience and marketing operations. Values have also been shown to predict a variety of specific purchasing behaviors from choosing a new pair of sunglasses to purchasing environmentally friendly or organic products.

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Why marketers advertise to consumers who can’t afford their product

jaguarsuperbowl

Advertising dollars are spent to reach potential consumers and inform them about a product, and perhaps the single largest American venue to do this is the Super Bowl. Companies that buy ad time during the Super Bowl have the potential to extend the reach of their ad if it makes a splash and gets talked about in the follow-up news cycle, so it’s no wonder so many companies are willing to pay top dollar for Super Bowl ads. However, it would seem this money would only be well spent if the Super Bowl audience included a large proportion of potential consumers for a given product; otherwise, how would such a massive expense pay off?

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How the Weather Impacts Your Work Habits and Buying Behavior


We all know the weather outside can tremendously impact our daily outlook on life, but what role does it play in our buying behavior and work habits? We associate sunshine with happiness and stormy weather with bad moods and misfortune. Indeed, there is no dearth of research supporting the fact that the forecast can significantly influence individuals’ mood and temperament. For example, increased sunshine is associated with better moods and an increased willingness to help others, and there is a mood disorder -- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) -- characterized by depressive symptoms brought on by the winter months. It’s pretty much common sense in today’s day and age that nice weather makes us happy, but can it actually affect our daily behavior? The answer, it turns out, is yes, and researchers are working to figure out exactly how and why.

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Psych4Marketers: Emotions and Advertising

Psych4Marketers: Emotions and Advertising

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the impact of emotions on shopping behavior. More specifically, I discussed how an individual’s current emotional state can influence their perception of advertising and other marketing tools. However, emotions are not just something consumers bring to the table; advertisements themselves frequently elicit emotional responses, which the ad creators hope will increase the viewer’s desire to purchase whatever is being advertised. Indeed, there are several “go-to” methods -- appeals to certain emotions -- that are regularly employed. But as the field of consumer behavior advances, more is becoming revealed about the particular limits of these favorite methods. In this post I will unpack three of these methods, explain when and why they are potentially useful and discuss their ultimate limits.

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The Psychology of Music: Why Music Plays a Big Role in What You Buy

The Psychology of Music: Why Music Plays a Big Role in What You Buy

Research suggests there seems to be three qualities of music that can influence buying behavior in a retail environment: tempo, volume and genre. The individual effects we will see in each of these can be explained by Mehrabian and Russell’s model of pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD). At its most basic level, this model posits that an environment can alter an individual’s mood and therefore behavior by altering levels of pleasure, arousal and/or dominance through different channels. We will use this framework to explain how music impacts buying behavior in a store environment.

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What is Priming? A Psychological Look at Priming & Consumer Behavior

What is Priming? A Psychological Look at Priming & Consumer Behavior

As you’ve probably realized, various tenets of psychology are crucial to effective marketing. After all, psychology is about understanding human behavior and marketing is about applying that knowledge. There are many factors that influence this behavior, and while at least part of the human decision-making process is conscious, many of these factors influence behavior at a nonconscious level. As we have discussed previously on this blog, personality traits can serve as nonconscious motivations of behavior. In this post, I will introduce the psychological concept of priming, which can also have not-so-subtle influences on human behavior.

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