Can’t push the product? You should understand the 4 social motivations of user behavior

When people generally do a needs theory analysis, they will first apply the famous Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory. Maslow divided human needs into five levels: physiological, safety, belonging and love, respect, and self-actualization needs.

However, Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory is only suitable for analyzing broad product needs. It cannot give us much inspiration and directional guidance on some activity details. Here I would like to introduce the concept of social motivation.

From the perspective of social psychology and biology, all human behaviors need to be driven by social motivation. When we do product promotion and brand marketing , whether an activity can impress the target consumers and whether a sentence can resonate with users and be forwarded depends on whether what you present gives users the motivation to take action.

From the perspective of type, social motivation is theoretically divided into five basic types: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, achievement motivation and affiliation motivation, aggression motivation, altruistic motivation, and social praise motivation . Among them, the aggressive motivation is a negative motivation, and scholars have quite different opinions on this motivation. It is only applicable in game -related product settings, so we will not discuss it here.

Let me break down the four types of social motivations for you one by one:

1. Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation

1) Intrinsic motivation

Keywords : psychological rewards, personal growth

Intrinsic motivation is the motivation of the body's internal needs. Individuals are interested in the activity itself and get satisfaction, compensation or rewards from the activity, which is the driving force of individual behavior. Intrinsic motivation allows users to actively participate in your marketing design.

This type of motivation-driven marketing activity is more related to personal skills. The paid knowledge courses that are very popular nowadays activate the intrinsic motivation of workplace practitioners to learn and grow.

For example, NetEase’s Xijing Class some time ago, NetEase’s brand promotion has always been known among Internet companies for its unique ideas, fun and boldness. When target users (mainly brands and operators ) see relevant information, it can activate their internal growth motivation and trigger user purchase conversions .

There are also the Python learning courses that were popular some time ago and the blockchain courses that are now all over the screen, which all hit your inner motivation.

Let’s go a little deeper and ask what exactly does intrinsic motivation hit? It’s actually growth anxiety!

This can be further divided into three categories: career growth anxiety, life growth anxiety, and self-growth anxiety.

1. Career growth anxiety

Career growth anxiety is the main pain point for white-collar workers. Everyone wants to get promoted, get a raise, and do an excellent job. The following product promotions are particularly suitable to target this pain point.

a) Professional skill resources: The fundamental reason for career growth is the lack of skills, and skill learning can directly solve this type of problem; for example, courses such as PPT tutorials and PS tutorials, and free materials, have always been a long-lasting popular activity.

b) Tool products: If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. By linking the user’s career growth with the productivity tools you provide, the user will be motivated to buy.

For example, you are promoting computer products. Your entry point could be why others can finish what you do in a day in an hour? It’s not because of the difference in efficiency and ability, but because of the different productivity tools used. Other computers may freeze for half a day, but your computer has a high configuration and runs very smoothly.

2. Anxiety about life and growth

Everyone wants their life to become better, and all you need to do is find the connection between your product and improving the quality of life. This direction is suitable for the following product promotions:

a) Various daily necessities: The essence of daily necessities is to improve life efficiency or quality. In daily chemicals, home appliances and other products, we often see promotions that focus on the anxiety of personal growth.

For example, if you make a laundry detergent product, you can wash clothes most cleanly with my laundry detergent, but using other laundry detergents may not necessarily make them clean even after washing several times. Then your emotional entry point is that our brand of laundry detergent makes your life worry-free, and you don't have to waste time washing clothes or worrying about clothes getting dirty.

b) Knowledge of life skills: Growth in quality of life also includes the improvement of personal life skills, such as early childhood education and pregnancy courses, home storage courses, etc.

3. Self-growth anxiety

In addition to career and life growth, people also need self-growth to improve individual happiness. For example, various weight loss and fitness courses, early morning check-in activities, book clubs, etc.

2) Extrinsic motivation

Keywords: welfare, prizes

Extrinsic motivation refers to the behavior of users that is driven by external forces. Of course, brands cannot force users to buy at gunpoint, so the biggest external motivation is benefits, cash back and other practices.

External motivation is suitable for attracting new users, such as the recent WeChat Wallet Wechat Loan activity where you can invite friends and both parties can get 5 yuan in cash. In fact, users may not have a need for loans at this stage, but the prizes stimulate users’ external motivation, leading to a forwarding of the activity level.

2. Achievement Motivation and Affiliation Motivation

1) Achievement Motivation

Keywords: level, competition

Achievement motivation refers to people's desire to engage in meaningful and challenging activities, achieve success in these activities and surpass others.

This achievement system is most obvious in product design and operational activity design, and usually has the following application forms:

Rankings : Compare achievements intuitively through score rankings; for example, sharing rankings in distribution activities, check-in rankings in check-in activities, etc.

Chaos University APP Weekly Learning Ranking

Achievement Badges: What kind of "title" or "badge" can be obtained by completing certain behaviors.

Get the APP medal list

Level system: Killing monsters and upgrading is a common setting in games. In fact, many products have similar settings, which stipulate that you can get corresponding levels or rewards by completing certain actions.

New World Reading Club APP upgrades reward system

Let's talk a little bit about what you need to pay attention to when setting up the achievement system:

1. Flow experience

In the field of gaming, there is a term called "flow" experience, which means that the game makes you unable to stop, and you are always just one step away from completing the game and upgrading, which is addictive.

The principle of flow experience in games

The same is true for our achievement system. We start with the easy and then move on to the difficult. The initial achievements are easy to achieve, giving users confidence and interest to continue experiencing. Then the difficulty increases, but is not unattainable.

Being too easy or too difficult will cause users to give up, just like playing a game. The moment you complete a level may be the moment you feel that the game is boring. You need to create the feeling that you are just about to reach your goal.

2. Fast-paced feedback delivery

The rhythm of the achievement system needs to be controlled. In principle, the faster an achievement is achieved, the better, because the faster it is, the more positive feedback you give to users, and the more it encourages users to use it. However, the difficulty of the achievement must also be considered.

For example, the ranking system is updated in real time and refreshed quickly. The "one-hit maximum level" feature in some web games means that the user's sense of accomplishment is instantly disrupted.

2) Affiliative Motivation

Keywords: interaction, group

Affiliative motivation is the motivation for a person to interact with the group. Simply put, the individual is afraid of being alone, wants to play with the group, and hopes to get communication and cooperation from others.

For example, the barrage design we often see can be attributed to the affinity motivation. Barrage was first popular among the ACG community, because the ACG user circle is relatively concentrated and belongs to a niche culture in society, and there is a desire for communication and interaction within the group. The form of barrage gradually emerged. The main function of barrage is not the commentator's comments on the video, but the mutual communication between small circles.

Video Barrage

Many of today's mini-games and mini-programs have the functions of inviting friends and opening rooms. In addition to the fission of spreading and promoting, this can also stimulate users' affinity motivation.

3. Altruistic Motives

Keywords: public welfare, spontaneous

Altruistic motivation refers to the inherent strength of an individual to act without regard to personal gain. This is the case with most of the charity and sharing activities we see.

For example, the “Children’s Gallery” that dominated the screen in the second half of last year essentially used activity copy and images to stimulate users’ altruistic motives, and paintings by autistic children could be purchased for one yuan. At the same time, a sense of social participation is added to the event, which eventually becomes a screen-sweeping event.

Tencent Charity " One Yuan for Painting" Campaign

4. Social Praise Motivation

Keywords: herd pressure, social currency

Many of people's behaviors are intended to please others, gain praise from others, and enhance their sense of self-worth through the praise of others. In the process of communication and promotion, we often see many forwarding behaviors in the circle of friends like this. There are two cases:

1. Group pressure

Seeing many people forwarding the same information will put social pressure on users, causing them to forward related information as well. This is also the herd effect.

This situation is especially the case within small vertical circles, because small circles are more of an acquaintance area, and it is precisely because of the consistency of values ​​that strong bonds are formed, so most people's forwarding participation will force others to participate. This also tells us that it is best to make strong investments when doing vertical brand promotion.

The herd effect leads to screen swiping

2. Social Currency

If we observe carefully, we will find that there are always people in the circle of friends who post the latest information, share the most interesting event information, and always make interesting comments on some popular events. These population portraits can be segmented in many ways, but their motivation is all social praise.

People form their personal brand image through forwarding and share the latest information and activities often to gain social praise for being "knowledgeable", while those who make independent comments often do so to gain social praise for being "ideas-based".

Of course, a good product promotion/operation activity does not simply stimulate a certain social motivation of the user, but rather a combination of factors. As long as you are familiar with and apply these four basic types of social motivation, you can also make your product more popular.

The author of this article @郑卓然 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games