In 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

3 Ways to Optimize Product Pricing with Psychology

Have you ever wondered how companies and retailers set their prices? If you’ve ever taken an economics class, your go-to answer is probably something about supply-and-demand, right? While these laws certainly have a large influence over pricing, another realm of study does as well: psychology. In this blog post, I'll introduce how to optimize product pricing with Psychology with three case studies.   

Psych4Marketers: 3 Techniques to Better Understand Consumer Behavior

The realm of marketing is, at the most basic level, about figuring people out. Doing so certainly involves understanding and analyzing individual differences between consumers (a topic we have focused on before), but marketing and advertising has deep roots in capitalizing on some predictable facets of consumer behavior. Here, we will look at three of these “tried and true” techniques from the perspective of psychology to better understand the rationale behind them.