What is Marketing Psychology?

Introduction

To be able to really make your marketing efforts fruitful, the key factor to it is to:

1. Properly understand your target audience and their behavior.
2. To know why they behave, the way they do.

This is when using psychology in marketing comes into the picture.

Before we dive deep into the psychology part, first let us understand what marketing is.

According to Wikipedia “Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. In 2017, The New York Times described it as “the art of telling stories so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce”.

If you carefully look at the above definition of marketing, especially on how the New York Times has described it. It would not be wrong if I said that marketing is when companies influence their target audience to buy their stuff.

I believe that you being a marketer do not influence people, you influence their minds.

So, how does their mind really work and what are the triggers that immensely influence their mind where the target audience ends up buying their product.

When I say that your mind is being tricked to buy a product, I don’t want you to take it in a negative way.

It is completely normal and natural that a human mind is always influenced by a lot of factors, even in his everyday life to make any decisions.

So, keeping in mind this behavior of the human brain you being a marketer can make the best use of it and leverage it for your advantage.

So in this article on Market psychology, you will better understand the relationship between psychology and marketing and can implement it in your marketing campaigns.

“ It is just a clever marketing strategy”.

DIVE DEEP IN MARKETING PSYCHOLOGY

Marketing psychology focuses on understanding consumer behavior. Understanding consumer needs, their pain points, how they feel, and on what basis do they make their decisions

Do you realize when you have gone shopping or seen any advertisements there are few ads that you liked and clicked on it while totally could not relate to some ads and disliked them? I am sure all of us have experienced this.

This experience is mostly driven by marketing psychology and how you feel when you look at a particular advertisement is where your emotion is triggered

Human faces a lot of emotions and most of them are triggered by their needs and wants.

Needs and wants are the core of humans existence and businesses monetize on them.

To understand this better you have to thoroughly understand the very famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory is a must to understand when you are studying marketing or psychology.

Maslow has divided this into 5 stages.

1. Physiological needs
2. Safety needs
3. Love and belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self-actualization

Let me explain to you each stage in-depth now.

STAGE 1: Physiological needs

This stage is the most basic requirement for every human existing. These are the needs that every person requires for survival. If these needs are not met then the human will not be able to function properly.

For e.g. air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction

Unless these basic needs of a human being are not fulfilled he would never think of needs in the upper stages.

STAGE 2: Safety needs

Once the physiological needs of a human being are met. He feels the requirement for safety. In stage 2 he is looking to keep his existence safe and secure in this case it will be both physical and emotional security. To Ensure these he looks for securities like employment, social welfare, health, etc.

STAGE 3: Love and Belonging

The third level of Maslow’s theory is Love and Belonging. Human is a social animal and once the needs of the first two stages are fulfilled he feels the requirement for social acceptance. This is the stage when they start to think of family, friendships, intimacy, they are highly motivated by the feeling of belongingness.

Stage 4: Esteem

Once all the person feels he is socially accepted then he moves on to the next stage where mostly he looks into satisfying his ego. In this stage, he seeks for Value and respect. This stage is divided into two parts part 1: is where the person looks for respect, position, value from others, and part 2: is a higher level when he seeks all these from himself.

Stage 5: Self-Actualization

This is the last stage of Maslow’s theory. In all the other stages a human requires to fulfill his needs but this is the stage when reached a person does not look to fulfill his needs. This is the stage when a person stops wanting things and enters the stage of self-growth. He makes sure that he is getting the feeling of fulfillment by making the best use of his abilities.

Conclusion :

So coming back to marketing psychology. How is this theory help you in marketing is.

1. Narrow down your target audience.
2. Note down which is the need of a person is your product/service fulfilling.
3. Which stage is your audience falling under?
4. Trigger that emotion in your marketing campaigns.

Comment down below if your opinions on this and tell me if you found it interesting :)

See you there :)