The central role of consumer psychology in marketing

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You’ve probably heard of the four ‘P’s of marketing: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. Central to all of these marketing factors is a fifth P: Psychology.
As marketers, every decision we make is based on our prediction of consumer psychology, and by extension, human behaviour.

  • We create promotions we believe to be more appealing to consumers.
  • We create targeted ads to position our products in the path of our desired customers.
  • We innovate products in line with our customers’ wants and desires.

Consumer psychology is the key to turning the art of marketing into a science. Now, thanks to the large volume of freely available data online, it’s particularly easy to research and study consumer behaviour and choices to help explain and predict it.

Psychology doesn’t make assumptions

Ever been irritated by a targeted advert that’s clearly marketed to your age group and gender but just doesn’t relate to your life at all? This is a sign that the marketer has simply used demographics to segment their audience.
Consumer psychology is not about putting people in boxes and overanalyzing every step they make. It is a science that teaches you to be compassionate and appreciate people’s differences. It leaves gender, age, race and social situation aside and gives space for the personality to speak for itself.
This deep understanding of people can open many doors and offer you the ability to help people without them overtly asking you.
And isn’t that the baseline for every marketing activity? Offering a product or a service to the customers that you know they need, and presenting it in a way that will spark their interest.

Getting to know your customers

Marketing is about attracting, keeping, and satisfying customers. The role of marketing is to provide added value to consumers, so they are more likely to be engaged and loyal.
It’s relationship management between the brand and the individual.
As soon as we define marketing in this way it becomes immediately apparent how important it is to get to know your customers more profoundly than just their demographic or occupational profile.
Psychological profiling empowers brands to build long-lasting relationships with their customers by talking to them in their language, using their preferred communication style, and by relating to them based on their personality.
There’s no secret sauce. Get to know your customers to help build relationships. What could be simpler?

The problem with so much data

In 2020 alone we produced 2.5 quintillion data bytes. (Yes, “quintillion” is an actual number: 2 500 000 000 000 000 000). That included five hundred thousand new tweets per day.
The vast majority of data (up to 90%) is unstructured. Unstructured data includes text, photos, videos, basically anything that wouldn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
Even if marketers know of the incredible potential of data to inform their decisions, there is still the immense challenge of sorting the relevant information from the noise. Extracting useful insights from unstructured data can be a long and costly process.
With this in mind, marketers need to make two important decisions

  1. Which parameters do they want to measure?
  2. Choosing a tool to help them quickly and effectively extract the right insights from unstructured data.

Which parameters should you measure?

Parameters such as demographics, buying behaviour, activities and occupation only give a two-dimensional view of the customer and require a lot of additional analysis to be able to build a stable, long-term marketing strategy. For example, buying behaviour fluctuates and rapidly changes with trends. It’s not a solid foundation on which to base your marketing strategy.
However, tapping into the psychology of the consumer will help you get to the root of consumer actions. Psychological traits are a much more stable parameter and do not change drastically over time.
Imagine if you could peer into your target audience’s mind, if you were able to customize your strategy according to their preferences, if you could read between the lines and take actions even before an obvious change in behaviour occurs. With the help of the Symanto Insights Platform, you can do just that.

Extract the right insights with the Symanto Insights Platform

At Symanto we use Artificial Intelligence to automatically identify customers’ Personality Traits & Communication Styles from the text they produce on different online channels. Our technology analyses posts to read between the lines, and find out the motivation behind customer behaviour.
The Symanto Insights Platform is connected to over 75 online portals including review sites and social media channels, ready to generate insights from unstructured data. Or you can upload any unstructured text in the form of a spreadsheet or CSV file from, for example, your own CRM system.
Our platform is helping companies build insights-driven marketing strategies, cultivate customer relationships and grow business through an in-depth understanding of opinions, needs and personality traits of existing, new and targeted audiences.
If you´d like to know more about how the Symanto Insights Platform can help you to bond better with consumers, contact us or book a free personalised demonstration.