Understanding 【Marketing Insights】

【Insight】, this word appears too frequently and can be found everywhere.

Product managers are often told: "You must have insight into user needs! Don't set false needs!"; Brand managers are often told: "You must have insight into the audience's emotions and resonate with them!"; AEs are often told: "You must have insight into the client's true intentions!" and so on.

Insight is that everyone can say something, but it always feels like everyone has a different definition of insight.

But there is no doubt that we all do not deny the importance of insights, nor do we deny that marketing requires good insights. Well, today, I will share my understanding of [marketing insights] and talk about what marketing insights are. What's the use? What are you all seeing?

The following are personal opinions only and are for reference only.

1. What are marketing insights and why are they useful?

Let’s talk about [insight] first. There are many different explanations for insight on the Internet. I don’t think you need to get hung up on it. Simply put, insight means: "seeing through the essence of people, things, or discovering the truth behind phenomena."

It is not something created out of thin air, nor is it an over-interpretation of the viewpoint. It is simply discovered through continuous observation and exploration.

Back to marketing, the essence of marketing is communication, which must include the following four communication elements:

1. To whom: Who is the target audience for marketing? (Object of communication)
2. What to say: What is the core message being conveyed? (Spreading information)
3. How to say it: What method should be used to communicate? (Transmission method)
4. Where to say it: Which media to choose to communicate? (Communication channels)

Marketing insights are designed to help you better understand your audience, answer the questions of “what to say, how to say it, and where to say it”, and help you develop communication strategies to make communication more effective. Therefore, marketing insight is an essential step before doing marketing. As the saying goes: if the insight is good, the effect is inevitable.

2. Marketing insights, what are you looking into?

As mentioned before, marketing insights help answer the questions of “what to say, how to say it, and where to say it” in marketing. If we look at each element one by one, what insights do we need to gain?

1. Answering "what to say": that is, answering what information is conveyed in marketing activities to achieve marketing goals, which requires insight into [behavioral motivation];
2. Answering "how to say it": that is, answering what kind of content and events can be output to efficiently convey information, which requires insight into [audience emotions];
3. Answering "where to say it" means choosing the communication channels and media that can accurately reach the audience, which requires insight into [catalyst habits].

To sum up, I believe the core of marketing insight is to understand [behavioral motivations], [audience emotions] and [catalyst habits]. I will talk about these three points.

1. Insight into [behavioral motivation]: What information can make users take action?

The ultimate goal of marketing is to get users to take action (download/register/purchase/share...), so the first step is to know what information we convey to make users take action.

And this step is to gain insight into: Why do users want to take action?

Many people’s first answer is: “There is a demand.” That’s right, there must be a demand behind the behavior. We have all heard that “consumers want faster carriages, but their real demand is to reach their destination faster.”

But many times, the demand is superficial. There is a key word behind the demand: [motivation].

There must be a motivation behind the demand, and the motivation is what we really need to understand. Motivation is a bait, which is the driving force and idea for people to take action. It will guide users to generate needs and then perform certain actions.

To make it easier to understand, here are a few examples:

• The copywriting of "Children who learn piano will not become bad" has a good insight into the motivation. Letting children learn piano is just a superficial demand of parents. Not wanting children to become bad is the deeper motivation of parents.
• Many courses also use this point in their promotions: learn XXX for 399 yuan (the apparent demand is to learn a skill), and don’t lose to your peers (the real motivation is to compare with your peers);
• When buying things, many people will bargain (wanting to get a cheaper price is just a superficial demand), but most of the time they don’t really care about the 10 yuan, but want to make sure that they are not losing money (the real motivation is to make sure that they are not losing money).

Therefore, the first step of insight is to find out what motivations can be given to users so that they will take actions as we expect.

The "social currency" we have been talking about (finding topics for conversation; expressing ideas; helping others; displaying image; social comparison) actually belongs to the category of motivation. Providing social currency is to give users motivation for behavior.

Going on, there are many kinds of motivations, and there are also many categories. I don’t think it’s necessary to get hung up on them or memorize them by rote. I think you only need to know these three points:

1. Motivation can be divided into "intrinsic motivation" (interest, sense of achievement, etc.) and "extrinsic motivation" (external benefits, rewards, etc.);
2. There are two major directions of motivation: pursuit (pursuit of fame and fortune, pursuit of cost-effectiveness, etc.) and avoidance (avoidance of falling behind, avoidance of becoming ugly, etc.);
3. Motivation can be strong or weak. Generally speaking, "intrinsic motivation" is stronger than "extrinsic motivation" (as the saying goes, "interest is the best teacher"), and "avoidance" is stronger than "pursuit" (the unhappiness of losing 100 yuan is greater than the happiness of picking up 100 yuan).

When planning a marketing plan, we can follow these three points to explore what motivations should be given to users. Let's use an example to better understand:

The marketing campaign of "Taobao Helps Farmers" actually gives consumers several motivations:

• Helping others: The core is public welfare, "helping farmers with love, so that fruits and vegetables do not rot in the fields";
• Pursuit of cost-effectiveness: Buy good agricultural products at prices lower than the market price. At the same time, the label of charity also weakens the perception of being greedy for cheapness.

2. Insight into [audience emotions]: How to communicate with users more efficiently?

After understanding the motivations of the behavior and clarifying the core message to be delivered, we need to move to the next stage, that is, how to deliver this information and how to package it so that the audience can better receive, understand and accept it.

As human beings, we all have seven emotions and six desires. Emotions are innate.

We often hear people say, "Don't fall into the trap of emotions", "Impulse is the devil", "Controlling emotions is the beginning of controlling destiny", etc. These golden sentences all convey a common message: emotions are powerful.

When communicating with users, emotions are actually a powerful weapon. As mentioned earlier, “there is a motivation behind every behavior.”

Let's complete the sentence: "Emotions induce motivation, motivation leads to action", "guilt-based learning", "impulsive consumption", "revenge weight loss" are words that are familiar to everyone and have all been experienced to some extent. If you think back, you will find that there are more or less strong emotions behind these.

To this end, when we try to awaken the audience's motivation, we also need to understand which emotions can effectively awaken motivation.

For example: When we want to awaken the audience's motivation for self-growth and encourage them to sign up for a course, anxiety is a very effective emotion; when we want to awaken the audience's motivation to help others and encourage them to donate to charity, sympathy and compassion is an effective emotion.

When it comes to capturing emotions, performance-based advertising and new media headlines are extremely skilled!

• "Your classmates are all worth hundreds of millions, but you are still grabbing red envelopes in WeChat groups"
• Don’t let your future self hate your present self
• "Can you write an article of 100,000+ words in your entire life?" 》

"Groups are always driven by emotions. The more intense the emotions, the more likely they are to be welcomed by the group. Groups tend to pay more attention to emotions and the way they are expressed, rather than the evidence, facts or logic behind them. Driven and contagious by intense emotions, groups are very sensitive and tend to take practical actions as quickly as possible." - "The Crowd"

Individuals are affected by emotions, and groups are even more so. We can see the power of emotions everywhere on Weibo's hot search list and in screen-sweeping cases. Therefore, when planning and operating marketing projects, it is very important to understand the audience's emotions and induce their emotions through content.

Of course, there are many kinds of emotions, and there are many ways to classify them. Broadly speaking, they can be divided into positive emotions and negative emotions. More detailed categories include joy, anger, worry, thinking, sadness, fear, and surprise. There are even 27 ways to subdivide emotions.

But many times, emotions are complex (that's why there is a mixture of love and hate) and they evolve dynamically (otherwise how can love turn into hate), so there is no need to worry about the classification of emotions and which emotion is the most effective.

Theoretically, any emotion can induce behavior as long as it is extreme enough (if you win the first prize at the annual meeting, you might post it on your Moments; if you won nothing at the annual meeting, you might also post it on your Moments. It’s nothing more than one showing off and the other crying miserably).

When we try to induce emotions in our audience through content, there are three tips:

1. It should be based on the audience’s existing cognition: When Jack Ma said that he regretted founding Alibaba the most, you would think it was a joke because you don’t have this cognition and cannot empathize with him. Perception is more important than fact. If it is not based on the audience’s existing cognition, it actually adds a step of education and persuasion, and the effect will be greatly reduced.
2. Conflict and contrast are often effective: This point is actually a cliché. "I can't afford medical treatment with a monthly income of 5,000" and "I can still afford medical treatment with a monthly income of 50,000". Obviously, the latter is more likely to induce emotions.
3. A sense of immersion can touch people's hearts more: A sense of immersion is actually empathy, which can better make the audience feel emotional, which is the so-called resonance and empathy.

Still give some examples:

• "Three Minutes" on iPhoneX (it is common to think that families should reunite during the Spring Festival, but the protagonist only has three minutes to reunite, which is a conflict. The train platform and the scenes of returning home can give people a good sense of immersion);
• "Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System" (The life of the riders is not easy, and seeing them speeding through traffic every day is consistent with cognition and makes people feel involved, but the system and being forced are in conflict).

There are many more examples: the warmth between father and son, and grandfather and grandson in "What's Peppa Pig?"; the workplace memories evoked by "Tmall: White Shirt"; the anger of "The United States Bans TikTok", etc. The shadow of awakening emotions can be seen in these cases.

3. Insight into [Catalyst Habits]: How to accurately reach the target audience?

The last point is relatively easy to understand, so I won’t elaborate on it. The simple understanding is to understand the target audience: what media are they exposed to? What content do you watch on different media? What time do you watch it?

1. What media does the audience come into contact with: The channels should be where the users are. People who like to play mobile games may read TapTap; women who love beauty may read Xiaohongshu;
2. What content is viewed through media: Users have characteristics, and media also have characteristics. Go to Weibo to read gossip and current events; go to Xiaohongshu to read recommendations; go to Bilibili to read ACG and popular science knowledge;
3. Different media usage time: You may browse Taobao before going to bed, watch TV series on Tencent Video on weekends, and browse TikTok and Weibo during lunch break;

Conclusion

Marketing insight is an essential step before marketing. It helps marketers understand the target audience and output communication strategies. The core of marketing is:

1. Answering "what to say": that is, answering what information is conveyed in marketing activities to achieve marketing goals, which requires insight into [behavioral motivation];
2. Answering "how to say it": that is, answering what kind of content and events can be output to efficiently convey information, which requires insight into [audience emotions];
3. Answering "where to say it" means choosing the communication channels and media that can accurately reach the audience, which requires insight into [catalyst habits].

The above is my personal opinion, thank you for your time and for reference only.

Author: Wen Weixin

Source: Wen Weixin