The Ultimate Psychology Approach in Marketing

Marketing is a strategy used to drive potential customers into buying. This strategy works hand in hand with psychology to stimulate buying sensation in customers. It involves researching into the targeted audience’s culture, personalities, genders, and cosmetics perspectives when designing a marketing strategy.

Summarized by Hayden Voon, Managing Director of White Forest Suites.

Book: Webs of Influence

Author: Natalie Nahai

This book teaches psychological methods when designing online contents such as social contents, websites, online videos etc. It gives a valuable overview of the effectiveness of psychological elements when applied to different types of people.

The book first talks about ways to categorise people based on their cultures, personalities and genders. It then advances to explain ways to persuade the targeted audience using different methods. And finally, it wraps up the book by sharing methods on selling passively using the psychology methods applied into marketing.

Ever wondered why Mcdonald’s food menu is different in every country?

For example, Mcdonald’s sells egg tarts in China, Samurai pork burger is sold in Thailand and nasi lemak is sold in Malaysia. Instead of selling special products in different countries, why wouldn’t Mcdonald’s sell the same and standard menus all around the world? The concept used is “Glocalisation” which stands for global localisation. This is because every country has its own unique culture and targeting the right audience with the specific culture can increase sales. Most of the big brands you can mention have grasps the idea of glocalisation ranging from Coca-cola, KFC, Mcdonald’s and so on. To succeed, you need to develop a culture- specific, evidence-based set of guidelines as part of your design and marketing strategy. Culturally appropriate design can increase customer trust, satisfaction and loyalty.

Hofstede Cultural Dimensions

Professor Hofstede has developed a concept of 6 Dimension in cultural characteristics:

Picture retrieved from: https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-cultures-people-hofstede-dimensions/

There are several characteristics to define power distance. High power distance countries normally have huge divides in people’s incomes and are politically centralised. Taking into account the factors mentioned, Malaysia is a high PDI nation. High PDI nation’s people has such characteristics in common, they value authority, experts, certifications and official stamp logos. Therefore, to target such an audience, make sure to put enough certifications, expert reviews and official stamp logos in your website or social media to show authority in order to build confidence.

Malaysia is a nation cultured with collectivism. As opposed to individualism, collectivism is a culture where people value relationships and prefer groups. To build a good website for Malaysians, make sure to display contents that emphasize groups. For example, use photos showing a group of people instead of one individual, use more of the word “we, us, our” in terms of language to design the contents.

Masculinity is a culture where men are placed on a higher position than women, for example, India. One must know the demography of the nation in order to determine whether a more masculinity contents or a more feminine contents to be used. Masculine cultures prefer competitions, enjoy good challenge and value recognition. The heroic cultures pursue achievement and measure success in terms of material rewards. Therefore, create more challenging contents when targeting a masculine culture. On the other hand, feminine culture values cooperation.

Uncertainty avoidance (UAI) is a concept used to determine a culture how uncomfortable they are when there is uncertainty. High UAI cultures tend to avoid uncertainty, therefore this category of audience is more disciplined and conservative. So they prefer websites or contents that are more formal. On the other hand, low UAI cultures pursue excitement and humour.

In China, the people tend to be long term oriented. This means that the people value persistence and constant hard work. They believe long term hardwork is the only way to success. While in Malaysia, our culture tends to be short term oriented. The people value more in working smart and expect quick results. Therefore, to build a website that is more effective in catching Malaysians eyes is to provide instant downloads, put a 5 star review rating so that they can evaluate the quality of the product or services provided quickly, and provide more stats in selling a specific product or services because this kind of culture expects evidence to quickly justify their buying decisions.

Lastly, when creating content to target your audience, it is important to know whether your audience are indulged or restrained. Indulge audiences tend to be happier and are more open. So if you are creating content, humours, sexual, and vulgarity are proven effective to target such an audience.

Designing Your Website

Once you have identified your specific audience’s behaviour and culture, you need to make sure that your website or social content have fluency. Fluency means how effective your persuasive messages can be conducted. In order to achieve success on your website or social media, there are 3 areas of fluency that one must achieve. They are perceptual fluency, linguistic fluency and conceptual fluency. Perceptual fluency is visual satisfaction. How clear is your website? Are the contents in your website structured in a way that it is comfortable to surf and simple enough to understand? Next is linguistic fluency which means understandable language. In order to achieve maximum linguistic fluency, use words that is easy and simple to understand yet it shows standards. Conceptual fluency is how the website is structured and whether the overall website is showing clearly what it has to offer?

Having achieved your mark of fluency in your website or content, you then have to design the content in depth on how to sell. It is like building a car, you have to create the body structure of the car, a good engine and now it’s the time to fine tune the performance and cosmetics perspective of the car. There are numerous ideas offered by this book and one of them is the fair exchange idea. In order to request something from your customer i.e a sale, a Facebook like, a word of mouth endorsement and etc, you must first give something valuable to your customer in advance. There are no free meals in this world, without giving something in exchange your prospects will not be interested enough to make a buy action. The phrase “something valuable” is not something that is expensive or difficult to acquire. A mere product sample, Facebook video sharing life tips or a feature of the prospect’s face on your social media is valuable.

Next, when you are selling your products or services to a prospect make sure to mirror them as well. This means try to be similar to them. From the psychology perspective, people tend to trust more towards people that are similar to themselves i.e their body gestures, attire, attitude, speech and so on.

Therefore, you have learned some tips to better your sales action and lastly it comes to pricing. This is an especially important area to utilize psychology into marketing your product and selling it. The general rule is, sell your product/services without letting your prospects feel they are in pain losing money to buy your product/services. There comes the invention of charming prices – “number 9”. The reason why many products/services’ prices end with 9 i.e Uniqlo t-shirt for RM19.90, Zara shirt RM 129.00 and etc, is because from the psychology perspective of people, RM19.90 feels cheaper than RM20.00 by looking into the first digits of the price although the difference is only RM0.10. Therefore, for low and mid-range prices, use charming prices to incept your prospects mind that is cheaper as compared to rounded prices. Speaking of high range prices, it works the opposite. Luxury items do not use charming prices because they do not want their prospects to think their items are cheaper. Therefore, they tend to end with a nice, rounded figure of “0”. For example, all of the rolex watches end with 0, i.e a Rolex Submarine is priced RM 38,000.00 instead of RM37,999.00. Being said, that includes other luxury brands such as LV, Dior, Mercedes Benz and every other luxury brands you can think of.

Conclusion

In conclusion, psychology is used to generally categorise people, it is NOT a fixed idea that all the people with similar features have the same characteristics and same mindset. Therefore, the best way to apply psychology into business typically online marketing is always to do a split test and perform “trial and error” for the optimum results.