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AI has undeniably changed how brands understand their customers and interact with them. Today's AI understands consumer motivations more deeply than what is typed into a search box. Gone are the days when all you had to do was embrace the established definitions of search intent. Now to compete successfully in the Paid Search channel you must embrace the role of AI, customize your ad copy to specific customer motivations, and do it at scale.
Psychology provides marketers with a tremendous amount of research and knowledge about effectively engaging customers. In fact, a lot of commonly used marketing techniques are deeply rooted in psychological functions (e.g. social proof, scarcity, anchor pricing etc.) In order to use these techniques most effectively, it’s critical to understand the psychological differences between target audiences. Psychological traits, enduring patterns of behavior, provide the context needed to understand how techniques like scarcity marketing would impact engagement for a particular audience.
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?
In order for any scientific instrument to provide measurements that can be trusted, it must be both reliable and valid. These psychometrics are crucial for the interpretability and the generalizability of the constructs being measured.
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.
Section I: General Chronology and Driving Forces of Personality
The history of personality psychology dates as far back as Ancient Greece. Indeed, philosophers since the 4th Century BCE have been trying to define exactly what it is that makes us us. In 370 BCE, Hippocrates proposed two pillars of temperament: hot/cold and moist/dry, resulting in four humors or combinations of these qualities. The hot and dry combination was referred to as yellow bile, cold and dry as black bile, hot and wet was blood and cold and wet was phlegm. Though much of the work that arose from this theory of the Four Humors was medicinal in nature, it was also hypothesized a patient's personality could be influenced by humoral imbalances.
Throughout high school we all paid our dues and learned the basics. These basic classes, (whether it be American History or Biology) provided a foundation for our future education that ultimately would help us chose a career path. During my time in high school, math and science came easy to me, and I spent my free time working in labs doing research to better understand how to apply what I was learning, and decided to major in Evolutionary Biology (with an emphasis on Psychology) in college. Though I am grateful for my education and various lab experiences, I eventually realized the world of academia and research is not necessarily for me. As I now transition from academia to the business world, I am realizing that much of what I’ve learned from biology and evolutionary psychology -- two fields that people might view as unrelated to business and marketing -- is anything but unrelated. Many of the topics in these academic fields can provide new perspectives in the workplace when trying to solve real world problems. Evolutionary psychologists may not be the first people you’d expect to provide insight into the world of marketing, but I’ve extrapolated three ideas from my coursework in this area that I’ve found extremely valuable in daily marketing routines.
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.