One thing every marketing director has to understand is that no matter what he does he always is dealing with individual persons. Once you get involved with analytics the first problem is to start thinking that since you can track behavior as a group of users, all of them are the same. It is very important to learn that in the marketing and business, you assume that a market has similar needs and desires, and that they want to fill them with great intensity. But they are not after the same exact thing. We all want only what we want.
All of us have desires. Either is a real need: a car, a house, a cell phone, a lottery ticket, friends, love, hosting, bananas and others, or it can be an abstract desire: I want to know the secret because it is “secret.” For example: a TV show says: “in a few seconds we are going to show you the biggest secret of all times, just after the break!” and instantly they create in the viewers the abstract desire of completion. You want to know what it is. What for? It doesn’t matter. You just want to know.
The abstract desires can be created at any given moment by digital marketing in all sorts of different ways. You can create these desires by creating inconclusive statements to marketing phrases: for example: “This product comes loaded with all your favorite features! What features are they talking about? Your favorite ones, of course! How do they know my favorite features? By in-conclusive statements you transform the perception of the customer, because no matter what your copy says the brain has to process it and agree or disagree.
For example: Right now you can agree or disagree with this article, but by reading it you are changing your perspective because you ask yourself if you agree or not.
You can direct the attention of your online users by the way you transform their emotions. For example if I say:
* Think for a second about the smell of the ocean, the warm sand and the breeze, feel the sun burning your skin little by little, think about that bad feeling… The feeling of staying too long out in the sun without sunscreen. Yeah, your shoulders hurt to the touch, your face feels scorched….
If you read the last paragraph you don’t only read it and keep going but you actually set yourself in the picture because most of us has experienced that and it is painful.
You can use online copy to create sensations that will move the understanding of your audience in many ways. Some will make them more likely to buy, some will not. That’s the psychology of marketing.
If you go in a sweater store in the middle of the summer and it is 105 degrees F. out, and the store has this huge carpet with long hair and you happen to realize that the A/C is broken inside you probably won’t buy – in fact, you probably will run out of there.
Same situation, the hottest day ever, you look up and you see a beach bar selling bear for half price, the bear is a perfect, refreshing 33 degrees – just when it is starting to ice, you can feel the little pieces of ice – yes, it is very probable that you’d buy (if you like beer.)
That is why Costco sells grass seed in grass growing season. And they sell sweaters in the winter.
Statement number one in Marketing: Life is about value. You, as everyone else, is fighting to be, to become. Things give us pleasure because they allow us to get closer to becoming or being. We buy food, cars, houses, pens, magic cards, plastic bags, ice, cheese, stationary bikes. Get it? Just to: become. The value of everything is determined by the ability to give that one power. Why do people buy gifts? To become precious in the mind of the loved ones. Why do people hate to stand to change the channel on the TV (and that is why we have remotes) while the same people purchase treadmills to run for 30 minutes? Why do people in the winter use their furnace system to heat the house but inside they have a refrigerator that cools the food and inside the refrigerator they have a drawer that keeps things from getting too cold? Yes, we want to become, the only problem is that we don’t know what.
We jump with joy when Lowes Home Improvement gives us a card that saves us 5% on our purchase of $15 ($0.75) but on the way out, we see a $3 chocolate bar and we can’t say no. We are not marketing to rational beings. We are complex creatures with desires that sometimes only make sense to ourselves.
If you want to market products successfully, find that one characteristic that makes people become, and share it with as many people as you can.
