Do you make a good first impression? Your brand identity is the key to targeting the right customers with a more effective marketing strategy.
Developing a respectable brand is a crucial step to successful marketing. When choosing the best ways to present and promote your business, it all goes back to brand identity. Your brand identity helps potential customers remember and connect with you.
Is there a science behind selling or buyer psychology?
What is a Brand Identity?
Your brand identity is a personification of your company. It provides the character that others (preferably your best customers) can identify with. This helps you connect with your intended audience and build brand awareness. When narrowing down your brand identity, choose an image that is familiar, unique, and useful to customers.
This will help them remember you better.
The Science Behind Buyer Psychology
Leading companies understand the importance of buyer psychology — it’s science!
Why are emotions, familiarity, and the crowd mentality important when selling? When it comes to branding and buyer psychology there’s nothing logical about it.
Decoy Effect – When it comes to pricing, adding a decoy could just win you the upsell. In fact, it was found in a study conducted by TED Talk host Dan Ariely that out of 100 MIT students two price points are not as effective as three. How can this be?
When offered three options: Online subscription at $59, Print subscription at $125, and Online and print subscription at $125, students were more likely to consider the higher price point as an option. However, when only two price options were presented (for $59 and $125), students were more likely to choose the $59 option without hesitation.
Priming – Researchers Naomi Mandel and Eric J. Johnson conducted a study on “priming” and found that before being shown a pair of vehicles, customers that were primed for money focused on the price of the car, while customers that were primed for safety were concerned about the safety specifics of the car.
Reciprocity –If someone does something for you, you want to do something for them. This is the concept of “reciprocity” introduced in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. The example used in this study for the case of eating at a restaurant. When you receive a dinner mint, the tip is more likely to increase by 3.3 percent, but when you receive more than one dinner mint, this price increases by up to 20 percent!
Social Proof – People are more likely to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of the crowd, particularly those of the groups they belong within. In one experiment on the subject, the study found that when a group of people all presented an incorrect answer, more than half, or 37 participants out of 50 answered incorrectly to match the majority.
Because of this, the act of sharing a good review or content about a product becomes much more influential to your ability to generate leads. The more brand fans, the easier it will be to sell your products and services.
Emotions as a Means of Persuasion
You may wonder, what exactly is the purpose of branding? For business professionals, it’s important to understand that emotions play a much greater role than logic in buyer decisions. Some of these cited cases above show definite examples of how we are all conditioned to think and react to certain images and ideas.
It’s when you find a way to connect with customers on a personal level, using your brand to inspire positive emotions and memories, that you can begin building customer loyalty.
Success with branding is as simple as adopting a brand identity that reaches the right customers. Read more with our Digital Marketing Spotlight – BNTC Case Study, and learn how marketing and branding have the ability to grow your business into an industry leader.
SOURCES:
Marketing Psychology: 10 Revealing Principles of Human Behavior
