How to do advertising and marketing? Don't be too rational!

In our daily lives, seemingly rational consumption behaviors are actually mostly emotional and impulsive consumption. Especially when you try to buy a brand product for the first time, you may just want to "give it a try". If the product experience is not too bad, you may continue to buy and use it.

In other words, most brand consumption habits are more or less derived from impulse and adventure.

System 1 vs. System 2

Regarding the rationality and sensibility of decision-making, an explanation was given in a popular science bestseller written by Daniel Kahneman two years ago, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (you can read this book if you have time, it is very interesting). Kahneman divides people's thinking models into two types: System 1 and System 2.

Simply put, System 1 makes decisions through sensibility and experience, while System 2 makes decisions through rationality and thinking analysis. Most decisions in life are made through System 1, because its decision-making speed is fast enough and its efficiency is high enough, but its disadvantage is that its accuracy is not high; only a few things are made through System 2, because although it is highly accurate, its decision-making speed is too slow.

For example, we think red peaches are delicious because we infer from experience that red represents ripeness and therefore naturally delicious. The entire decision-making loop is very short, so short that you would think it is an instinctive reaction. However, if you were given a quadratic equation with two variables right now, you would not be able to use System 1 to find a shortcut to decision-making and could only get the result through reasoning and calculation using System 2.

Buying a house is also based on impulse buying

We often exaggerate the role of rational decision-making. In fact, consumer behavior is driven by strong instinct and emotion.

Many years ago, due to work reasons, I communicated with some real estate industry workers. What surprised me at the time was that even for major family decisions such as buying a house, there was still a lot of impulse buying.

Logically speaking, a property in a provincial capital city is worth at least millions. If there is a housing loan, that will be for decades to come. Even for the rich, it is something that requires careful calculation and rational decision-making. But in fact, many people make a commitment directly when they come to the sales office to view the property for the first time, and many of them are first-time home buyers.

For young people who are buying a property for the first time, many of them are actually impulse buyers. For this group of people, whether the model house is beautifully decorated, whether the facade of the property looks good, whether the promotional materials have texture, and even whether the decoration of the sales office is high-end and whether the name of the property sounds good will greatly influence their decision-making behavior.

For first-time home buyers (first home improvement) and second-time home buyers (non-first home improvement), they will pay more attention to factors such as the location of the property, the quality of the apartment, and the surrounding facilities. Because it is not their first home purchase, they will be more rational when making the next decision.

For most marketing personnel, it is difficult to change the comparison parameters of users' rational decision-making, such as various hard indicators and performance of products. What we need to do is not to convince people with reason, but to move them with emotion.

No logic, no empathy

Rational decisions can only be made when users compare multiple brands. However, since there is no single variable between any two brand products, completely rational decisions do not exist.

The role of advertising is to communicate and persuade. The trick is that if your product does not have overwhelming product highlights or performance advantages, then the main method of advertising should be to find resonance, and its logic should be secondary.

I have always held the view that excellent advertisements or copywriting cannot, in fact, withstand logical scrutiny. An excellent advertising creative person must learn to break free from the constraints of logic and be a little imaginative. Because an important creative method is analogy, but if you look at it purely rationally, the only thing that can truly be compared to a product is the product itself, then your advertisement becomes an instruction manual.

Let’s see how Mao Zedong persuaded the workers to join the movement in his lectures. He said that the Chinese character “工” (worker) has an upper horizontal stroke representing heaven, a lower horizontal stroke representing earth, and a vertical stroke in the middle, which connects heaven and earth… Although I have not studied the evolution of this Chinese character, it is obvious that this is divine logic. Later, he said that the two characters “工” (worker) stacked together form the character “天” (sky), implying that when workers unite, they are stronger than heaven… Although this is not logically rigorous, it is very likely to gain emotional recognition from the audience, and is an excellent persuasive promotion technique.

Let’s take a look at the so-called universal formula for advertising slogans: “XXX, choose XXX”. This is a formula that you can directly use to fool your boss if you don’t know how to write advertising slogans, but it is actually very effective and suitable for brand placement.

For example, the well-known slogans such as "Give away Melatonin as a gift" and "Drink Wanglaoji if you are afraid of getting a sore throat" can reduce the difficulty of logical thinking for users and effectively highlight the benefits of the product, but they do not tell users why. If we carefully examine the advertisements we are exposed to every day (although almost no one does this), we will find that almost all of them are "brainless".

The rise of the reverse advertising

Advertisements seek empathy rather than logic, as can be seen from the popular reversal ads in recent years. In this type of weird/brain-opening advertising, rational communication and persuasion no longer exist.

This type of advertising usually only needs to be consistent with the brand values ​​and user groups, and even the products are weakly related to the advertising content. The most extreme example is that the content of a TVC seems to have nothing to do with the brand's product on the surface, but the style is changed at the end and the product is forcibly implanted. The collage effect of such a large range of elements is memorable. Not to mention the conversion effect, the dissemination, topicality and user advertising consumption time are usually better.

For example, the snail noodle advertisement with a surprising reversal that went viral online a few days ago (you haven’t seen it yet? Then go search for it to catch up). In the nearly six-minute commercial, the first five minutes or so were spent talking about a few examples of misunderstandings, deducing that “some misunderstandings cannot be resolved unless you understand them”, and then in the last 10 seconds it began to reverse the story with “you’ll only know how delicious snail noodles are after you understand them”, catching people off guard.

The creative advertising content model with a twist can be said to be extreme. We have seen its prototype in TV commercials in Thailand and other Southeast Asian regions for a long time. Like some purely design-based and purely graphic advertisements, the surprising reversal uses emotions and content to attract users’ attention to the brand and lead to consumption conversion. Although it has always been accompanied by controversy over its effectiveness, it has become a widely accepted form of advertising content.

User-oriented

The advertising content downplays logical deduction and strengthens the empathy between the brand and users, which can be seen as a "user-oriented" approach.

If the brand compares the rational indicators of user decision-making, it is actually displaying the product parameters, which is saying "what do I have"; and if the brand talks about the emotional indicators of user decision-making, it is actually showing the satisfaction of user needs, which is actually saying "what do you want".

This "user-oriented" approach serves as a guide both in advertising slogans and product details pages. For example, "afraid of getting angry" is a much better word than "effectively reducing fire". They seem to have similar meanings, but if we fill in the omitted parts of these two phrases, we will find the difference in user thinking.

“Afraid of getting angry” can actually be fully explained as “(you) are afraid of getting angry”, while “effectively reducing angry” can actually be fully explained as “(this brand’s products can) effectively reduce angry”. The former is based on the user’s perspective, while the latter is based on the brand itself.

Conclusion

This does not mean that all advertising persuasion techniques should be "illogical", but that rational judgment is not as critical as you think in consumer decisions (especially first-time consumer behavior). If you don’t believe it, you can recall your own consumer behavior. It’s just like watching a TV series, even though many of the plots have logical flaws, many people still enjoy watching it. From this perspective, advertising is actually an art of communication.

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID:chuanboticao)