If you don’t even understand the 10 principles of psychology, you are really not qualified to talk about marketing

With the rise of digital marketing , marketers must have more professional skills in building brands, analyzing needs, creating demand and targeting customers. Mastering some psychological principles can help us gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ thoughts and behavior patterns, and enhance our perception and predictive abilities.

With the rise of digital marketing, marketers must have more professional skills in building brands, analyzing needs, creating demand and targeting customers. Among them, the two key ones are data mining capabilities and perception and prediction capabilities. The former requires a scientific mind, while the latter requires an artistic way of thinking. As people become more affluent, they value the emotional value of products more. Mastering some psychological principles can help us gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ thoughts and behavior patterns, and enhance our perception and predictive abilities.

1. Priming

The meaning of this principle is that when you are exposed to a stimulus, the implicit memory effect produced will affect your response to the next stimulus. For example, if the word nurse is shuffled and followed by doctor, it can be recognized more quickly than bread (because there is a direct connection between doctor and nurse). This principle was first proposed by psychologists Meyer and Schvaneveldt in the early 1970s. Since then, many psychologists have verified it, and some have come to the conclusion that "our consciousness is influenced by external stimuli to a far greater extent than we imagine."

In marketing activities, proper application of this principle can effectively enhance marketing effects. For example, on your product page, you can make people who browse the page stay longer and have a deeper impression of the brand. Psychologists Naomi Mandel and Eric J. Johnson designed relevant experiments, and the results proved that changes in web page backgrounds will ultimately affect consumers' choice of products. In the experiment, people were asked to choose products in the same product category (for example, Toyota or Lexus). When the background of the web page was green (the color of the US dollar) and covered with images of coins, people spent more time on price information; when the background of the web page gave people a comfortable feeling, people spent more time reading information about the comfort of the car . So when you use priming in marketing, you need to focus on the details—the result could be either getting consumers to buy the highest-priced product or not buy it at all.

2. Reciprocity

This is one of Robert Cialdini 's "Six Principles of Persuasion". In his classic work "Influence", he pointed out that the principle of reciprocity is very simple - if someone helps you, you will naturally want to give back to the other person. The book gives an interesting example. When you finish your meal, does the waiter give you a piece of gum when he gives you the bill? Without gum, you tip based on how you feel about the quality of service; with a piece of gum, your tip goes up 3.3 percentage points (as a percentage of the meal cost). What if it's two pieces of gum? The tip percentage will rise to an incredible 20%.

Two pieces of gum can have such a big effect. It may be difficult to reproduce in today's era of extremely advanced information dissemination; however, this principle can still be widely used in marketing. Your gift doesn't have to be expensive; it could be a branded T-shirt, an e-book with unique content, your expertise on a difficult problem, or even a handwritten note. You just have to remember to give something free first before you hope to get something in return.

3. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

When you hear about a product, do you find that it always appears in your field of vision? Either in advertisements or in stores, you will find that your friends are also using this product. This is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and its hyperbole is that “once discovered, it is everywhere.” According to psychologist PS Mag, this phenomenon is the product of two thinking processes: when you hear something new (or a new concept, a new word, etc.), one thinking process is that selective memory begins to work, making you subconsciously pay attention to such things, and as a result, "it" will often come into your eyes; the other thinking process is that every time you see or hear "it", the "confirmation bias" in your brain will make you feel again and again that "it" is indeed everywhere.

This principle plays an important role in brand cultivation and product sales, which allows us to speculate that the advertising industry will never disappear. Regarding the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, a Zhihu user wrote down an interesting passage: One day he and his colleagues took a taxi to Cuiwei Department Store in Beijing for dinner. Two days later, while flipping through The Love Story of Monk Tang, the two words "Cuiwei" made him read carefully a poem that he had not noticed before: "Even if we are destined to meet, we may not meet, so don't be heartless to Cuiwei. Once you fall into the world of ten calamities, you still remember that the peach blossoms have not returned."

4. Social influence

People will imitate the actions of those who are similar to them or who they trust (this is also one of Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion). Most people in the marketing field are familiar with this principle, but due to its importance, we still list it as one of the top ten marketing psychology principles.

5. Decoy effect

You often see this principle applied in the pricing schemes of some products—marketers intentionally include a price to induce you to choose the most expensive price. Through Dan Airley's famous TED talk, "Are we in control of our own decisions?" many people learned about an interesting and effective pricing strategy from The Economist magazine. The Economist advertised its annual subscription to the magazine like this:

— Electronic version: $59

— Paper version: $125

— Electronic version + paper version: $125

This seems a little weird, right? The prices of the paper version and the “electronic version + paper version” are surprisingly the same. Why does The Economist offer such pricing?

Dan, like many people, wanted to know the reason for the price; Dan asked several of his acquaintances at The Economist, but no one told him the real reason. So he decided to conduct an experiment on 100 students at MIT to find the answer himself. When he gave students an advertisement with three prices to choose from, they all chose the combination price of "electronic version + paper version"; and when he deleted the seemingly "useless" second price ($125 for the paper version), the students tended to choose the lowest price for the electronic version order - that is, the second price was not really "useless", it would make the third price look very cost-effective, thus inducing people to choose this combination price. You can undoubtedly apply this principle in marketing as well.

6. Scarcity

You’ve no doubt experienced this principle (it’s one of the six principles of persuasion). The most common situation is when you are booking a flight, if the webpage shows "only 3 tickets left", most of the time you will act quickly. Although this principle has been widely used, an interesting experiment is worth reviewing. As early as 1975, three psychologists, Worchel, Lee and Adewole, designed an experiment to ask people to evaluate the taste of chocolate chip cookies at the beginning of their study on scarcity: one group of people was given a jar containing 10 cookies, while the other group was given a jar containing only two cookies; the latter group gave the cookies a score twice as high as the former group - even though the cookies were exactly the same. This experiment vividly demonstrates how scarcity affects our judgment.

7. Anchoring

Have you ever thought that it’s hard for you to not buy from your favorite clothing brands or clothing stores when they’re on sale? This is basically all about the anchoring effect - the initial information we get often influences the final decision. When a pair of jeans from a certain brand you like originally costs $50, but they are discounted to $35, you will definitely be tempted. The initial $50 acts as an "anchor." Therefore, when you promote a product, always remember to write the original price next to the discounted price.

8. Verbatim effect

What this means is that for certain text content, people will not remember it word for word, but remember the general idea. According to Chartbeat, when people click on a web page, on average half of them spend less than 15 seconds on it - that is, people don't read the text on the page carefully and find it difficult to remember specific details. So how do you deal with this? The solution is to spend more time polishing the title while ensuring the quality of the text content, so that the title can be easy to spread and easy to search. That way, when people want more information on a topic, they might remember a great article of yours they read a while ago and search for it on Google .

9. Classification Effect

When it comes to short-term memory, the brain's capacity is very limited. In reality, most people can only remember seven things at a time (plus or minus two, depending on the situation). Based on this characteristic of the brain, people will group similar information into one category when temporarily memorizing it. For example, when you need to shop for a lot of things, most people will classify the items they want to buy into different categories (such as dairy products, meat, etc.). So, when you’re designing marketing copy , you can also use this principle to strengthen people’s memory of the content, such as grouping similar content together.

10. Loss Aversion

The principle is essentially what it sounds like: once you have something, you really don't want to lose it. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman conducted such an experiment. He gathered a group of people, some of whom were given a cup, some were given a bag of chocolate, and some were given nothing. Then, these people were asked to choose between two options: those who had a cup or chocolate could choose to exchange it for chocolate or cup; those who had nothing could choose to have a cup or chocolate. The result was that among those who had nothing, about half chose the cup (the other half chose chocolate); and among those who were given cups, 86% did not choose to exchange them for chocolate and still kept the cups - in terms of probability, about 50% of the people should have taken the cups in the end. "Loss aversion" makes people reluctant to lose the cup they already own.

In today’s digital age, where free models reign supreme, this principle takes on even greater significance. For example, you can add a feature to a free software and allow users to use it for a limited time; after the trial period expires, some free customers will become paying users because they do not want to lose this feature.

Regarding the above ten marketing psychology principles, some people may say that if consumers are also familiar with these "tricks", will they be able to see through the strategies that marketers have painstakingly come up with? One answer is that some people become immune to this to some degree, but for most of us, these psychological principles still apply because we cannot deny some of our deepest desires and needs. Just like the well-known story of the frog carrying a scorpion across the river and both of them finally died in the river: when the frog used up its last bit of strength in the water, it asked the scorpion, why did you sting me anyway? The Scorpion's answer is “I can't help it, it's in my nature”. Nature is so difficult to change.

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This article was written by @Harvard Business Review and was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!