Marketing skills from an advertising master!

Due to the difference in consumer psychology, products must have features that can attract consumers to make purchases. However, the current brand homogeneity makes the differences between major brands not much. Therefore, we must give users a reason why we are superior to other similar products and learn to give users psychological hints so that they will choose us instead of others. Inspire and guide consumers' emotions to stand out in the fierce competition.

In the past two years, "brand-effect integration" has undoubtedly been one of the most hotly debated words. Brands, agents, media owners, and major authoritative media have been discussing and spreading it crazily.

The integration of product and effect is simple to explain. “Product” refers to the brand effect, and “effect” refers to the actual sales effect.

Why is everyone pursuing brand-effect integration? The reason is that brand is invisible and intangible, while selling products is the most direct way. Brands are valuable, but the selling price is higher. What people prefer is to make money while building a brand, rather than constantly spending money on building a brand.

However, everyone has a different understanding of brand-effect integration and their implementation is also different. This has led to more and more people tending to add differentiated selling points to impress users when doing marketing. Every company is trying every means to say that their products are good and have first-class effects... because they want to sell goods.

The competition is so fierce that everyone is trying their best to shout out the selling points.

At this time, it is crucial to gain user recognition and enter their consumer minds. If your product cannot enter the user's mind and he doesn't believe in you, then isn't all your work in vain?

The reason is very simple, one is sales thinking, the other is user thinking.

Your users and you have completely different attitudes and feelings towards the product. What they want to buy is not the product itself, but the sense of value that the product brings to them.

If all products of the same type can meet the needs of users, then in his eyes there is no difference between your product and other similar products. It is impossible for users to thoroughly study all products on the market, and there is no reason to believe that your product is definitely better than others.

What's more, even if he really compares the products, he may not be able to see any difference. After all, products nowadays are so homogeneous that the sellers themselves don't know where the differentiation lies.

Therefore, if you want to sell better, you must give users a reason why your product is superior to other similar products.

You have to know that there are more and more red ocean markets, there are always more products than demand, new products and substitutes appear one after another, and users' right to choose is infinitely magnified.

However, the user's mental space is limited. This is high-level competition. Once you enter the user's mind, you have the initiative in the competition.

At this time, we need to learn to give users psychological hints so that they choose us instead of others.

Psychologist Pavlov believes that suggestion is the simplest and most typical conditioned reflex of human beings. From the perspective of psychological mechanism, it is a hypothesis affirmed by subjective will, which may not be based on facts, but because its existence has been affirmed subjectively, people will psychologically strive to tend towards this content.

We are constantly receiving cues from the outside world in our lives. For example, the implications of marketing advertisements on consumer psychology.

Many brands like to use advertisements like “XXXXX for XX consecutive years”. This kind of data is most likely not recent data. For example, Qiqiang’s “No. 1 in national sales for four consecutive years” is actually the result of the four years from 1997 to 2000.

In many instant noodle advertisements, in order to show the chewiness of the noodles, rubber bands are often used as props for the noodles.

In many mobile phone advertisements, the photos are taken by professional SLRs and then displayed on the mobile phone, suggesting that your phone has powerful camera functions. Even many car brands will study the smell inside their own cars. The smell inside new cars of different brands has its own characteristics...

These are all psychological hints given to users through advertising.

What is known is that people trust their own psychological feelings more than facts. This is human nature and also a marketing gap.

Just as Ye Maozhong has always advocated: To do brand marketing, you must understand psychological cues and take the initiative to give psychological cues. A very prominent feature in marketing is: if you say it first, the effect of this suggestion belongs to you, and it is useless if the second person says it.

What impressed me most was probably an advertising case for Schlitz beer done by Hopkins, one of the modern advertising giants. The Schlitz beer advertisement is also one of Hopkins' proudest works.

Heineken beer was the best-selling beer in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was only ranked fifth at the beginning. Later, Hopkins' advertising strategy made it jump from fifth to first in a short period of time.

Here is the story, let me tell you:

At that time, Hopkins met the owner of Schlitz Beer on the train. He was promoting his beer everywhere, but the results were mediocre. Since taking the train was boring anyway, Hopkins asked the boss to tell him the selling point of Schlitz beer. After chatting for a while, the boss said: Our beer is the same as everyone else's, there is really no special selling point.

Hopkins said: It's impossible, any product will have its unique selling point, so he asked the boss to tell him their entire production process and technology. Listening to it, it really doesn't have many characteristics.

But Hopkins refused to believe it, and later visited the Schlitz beer factory. He saw how the workers cleaned the barrels and pipes every day, how the bottles were cleaned four times, and how the workers blew high-temperature pure oxygen into the bottles. The workers also took him to see a well drilled four thousand feet underground to obtain pure water.

Hopkins returned to the office in amazement and asked his boss, "Why didn't you tell people this? Why didn't you emphasize more than others that your beer was pure?

The boss said: "We brew beer in the same way as others. Good beer must go through these procedures." Hopkins replied: "But others have never talked about these things. If these are written down, they will definitely shock everyone."

So he finally came up with an advertising selling point: "Every bottle of Schlitz beer is blown with high-temperature pure oxygen before being filled to ensure a clear taste."

When the boss of Schlitz saw it, he immediately said: You are so funny, this advertisement is not good, it is ridiculous, all beers are produced in this way, this is the standard process of beer production. If I were to use this in an advertisement, people would laugh to death. This is not the characteristic of our beer at all.

Puskins said angrily: Let's make a bet. I will pay you and you go back to advertise. If you make money, you will pay me back. If you don't make money, I will give you the advertisement as a gift. Of course the boss of Xilizi agreed, and since he didn’t lose anything, he went back to advertising.

Then finally came the classic slogan: "Schlitz beer bottles are steam sterilized." Subsequently, within just a few months, the sales of Schlitz beer grew rapidly, and the company escaped from the brink of bankruptcy. It later became the best-selling beer in the United States at that time.

As you can see, almost all beer was steam sterilized at that time, but no one explained this standard process.

The most important thing is that people don’t know every step of the beer production process, only the manufacturers themselves know it.

“I went out and told the world about it,” Hopkins later said. “I didn’t say we were the only ones doing it, and I didn’t say other breweries weren’t doing it, but no one had said it before. After that ad, other breweries didn’t want to say it because it would look like they were trying to copy Schlitz.”

According to his book, consumers at the time reacted by saying, "This brewery is so responsible to us! The beer bottles have to undergo several steam sterilizations after being recycled. I don't even know whether other breweries wash them or not."

So you see, other beer brands must be unhappy because they also have such a process. But Xilizi was the first to use this for advertising and was the first to complete the psychological suggestion to consumers, so this effect belonged to it.

The well-known slogan of Robust, “27-layer filtration”, was actually borrowed from Hopkins.

The purification process of mineral water is actually very long, but users are not aware of it, so Robust promotes its water as being "purified through 27 levels". After giving users this psychological hint, Robust has formed a place in the user's mind and occupied a place in the user's mind.

In fact, most mineral waters at that time had this standard process flow, and Robust was the first to use the 27-level purification standard as a selling point.

Toothpaste is also a particularly good example.

Now brushing teeth has become an indispensable habit in our life, but do you know? When toothpaste first came out, it had no flavor.

Later, Hopkins, the founder of Pepsodent toothpaste, added citric acid, peppermint oil and other substances to the toothpaste ingredients, so that people would have a fresh scent after brushing their teeth and feel that their mouths have indeed become cleaner. So in the end, his toothpaste sold better and better.

Obviously, the psychological suggestion of "fresh taste in the mouth" has become Baisude's killer move to gain favor.

Finally, psychological suggestion is often used not only in marketing strategies, but also in copywriting, such as "children who learn piano will not become bad", "being beautiful is a capital, but spending money beautifully is a skill."

Here is an example for everyone - "Portraits of Readers" written by Li Xinpin when he was interviewing for the copywriting position of Eslite Bookstore:

Van Gogh reading Wheat Field,

Discover art hiding behind the sun to cool off.

Freud reads dreams,

Discover a secret passage directly into your subconscious mind.

Rodin reads the human body,

Discover the beautiful coastline that Columbus didn't discover

…

Between books and non-books,

We welcome all possible readers.

Van Gogh, Freud, and Rodin are all absolute peaks of literature and art. Li Xinpin cites them in the copy, which undoubtedly gives the brand a high-quality tone of literature and art. Isn't this a naked sensory hint that the brand gives to users?

The psychological implications a brand gives to others depend on who it stands with.

Well, in short, all work related to brand marketing requires the ability to give users psychological hints and seize a favorable competitive position.

However, psychological suggestion is only a reasonable marketing method and not a way to deceive users.

Remember: you can fool everyone at some time, or one person all the time, but you can never fool everyone all the time.

Author: Mumu Old Thief

Source: Mumu Laozei (ID: mumuseo)