More on the Psychology of Marketing

Marketing and psychology are closely connected. Psychology is the systematic study of human behavior. It is the study of understanding why people think and act the way they do.

Great marketers and great brand managers study human behavior and aim to understand why people think and act the way they do, in the marketplace.

Brands have no exterior meaning in and of themselves. When a store closes, the products sit alone upon their shelves. It is within our minds that brands live. The creation of a brand is the creation of a memory. It relies upon, it requires, the consumer for its co-creation.

And if the creation of memory is a process that begins with a spark of pure, unmediated stimulation, an experience, and an encounter between subject and object before those two identities are claimed, then the brand/memory must be present to the subject before awareness of it becomes present.

The brand must pre-date the memory. As the subject makes the encounter of the object aware of herself, the brand travels along with the memory as data, as verification that the encounter happened. The brand thus becomes something the subject relies upon to make sense of her world; it becomes a landmark on the emotional landscape; it is used to define her experience. She begins to think of herself as the kind of woman who would encounter this brand.

Gad Romann
CEO & Founder, Brandwidth Global

When half the equation is about the consumer, it is safe to say that half the power lies in the consumer. In a world where so much of the power rests with the consumer, deep insights about the consumer mean the difference between success and failure.

If a brand is a promise to the consumer, then understanding consumer psychology is your key to creating strong, long-lasting, and meaningful promises. It is the key to being an exceptional marketer and an exceptional brand manager.

How can you create compelling content if you don’t know why it would be compelling to your audience in the first place? How can you personalize content to reach the right people if you don’t know what type of content they would like, and why they would like it?

Steve Jobs legendarily said: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This is the same man who introduced the world to consumer electronics which pioneered entire new product categories – examples of which are the iPod and the iPad.

Nearly every principle of psychology has an application in marketing. The idea of 'imprinting' for example, is huge. The idea that the first brand in a new category will 'imprint' itself in human minds as the original, the authentic, and as the “real” thing, is major factor for the success of many brands that we all see and use today; Kleenex and tissue, Hertz and car rental, Heinz and ketchup, or Starbucks and coffee shops.

At Brand Marketing Psychology, we will elaborate on the idea of ‘imprinting’ and many, many more psychology principles and how they can be used to grow your brand.

For now, just know that the study of marketing, begins with the study of psychology.

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