Knowing our target audience is critical for effective marketing, as we all know. We also know that every potential customer goes through a shopping journey in order to obtain a desired product or service. But how do we apply market psychology in these scenarios where the customer goes through different stages of their purchasing journey? We will look at some examples of how psychology can be used in marketing in this article.

First phase: Recruitment of customers

Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs, formerly known as the theory of motivation, defines and organizes human needs that, when met, allow us to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life.

The basic principle of marketing, or the existence of the product at all, is informative about the needs that the product or service meets. What issue does your product address? Refer to the emotions and motivators associated with these marketing requirements.

Vocational training, for example, provides the consumer with the opportunity to improve their job performance, thereby increasing the consumer’s value in the labor market and improving his/her self-esteem. Our need to feel important is directly addressed by education. If the education is also accompanied by a money-back guarantee, this is an irresistible concept.

Second phase: Decision

According to the Foot-in-the-Door Technique, it is easier to get a positive response after a yes response in the future.

If you can persuade the person to listen to you for a while in exchange for advice, a free product trial, or a free e-book, there is a good chance he will eventually become a customer. Always remember to give something before asking for something.

You can also provide a risk-free trial period. The fact that we do not have to commit to anything satisfies our need for security: because we do not commit to anything, there is no risk that something will definitely change.

In their study ‘Compliance without Pressure: The Foot in the Door Technique,’ Freedman and Fraser tested this hypothesis.

Participants were confronted with two different requests.

Answer a series of short questions via phone about the consumer products they use, followed three days later by;

Allow five workers to conduct a two-hour, in-person survey of the consumer products they use in their homes

The study found that compliance with a small request did indeed make compliance with a big request much more likely.

‘Participants who were first asked to answer questions via phone were 135% more likely to agree to a home visit.’

These findings have been confirmed by numerous follow-up studies. Because The Foot in the Door Technique helps increase compliance, it has become a highly popular technique in the field of sales and marketing.

Third phase: Purchase

In the purchase phase of the purchase journey, you can invest in making the purchase easy and user-friendly by helping the customer complete their purchase process as smoothly as possible. Check that the user interface does not include any surprises, such as a constant wait for the page to load, a product disappearing from the shopping cart, or exorbitant delivery costs.

On the contrary, the purchase should be made easier; for example, you could send an e-mail with a link to easily renew the previous order. Lensway, please accept my greetings: I’ve been a customer for many years.

People have a strong desire to belong. During this stage, one can refer to this need through customer stories and communities related to the service or product, which becomes part of the user experience.

Fourth phase: Retain the customer

It is difficult to give away a service or product after you have made it as simple as possible to test it and it has become a part of the user’s daily life. This is based on a psychological phenomenon known as “loss aversion.” You don’t want to get rid of something you own. It has been studied in psychology and the theory even proves that we prefer not to get rid of five euros than to get five euros extra. When you have to give something away, disappointment is crucial.

This method has long been used by cloud services. Dropbox, for example, initially provided users with a large amount of free storage space, and once the space was depleted, the service became chargeable.

Experiences and community can also be used to keep customers happy. For example, in the community, we can gamify interaction by collecting points and exchanging experiences. Nordnet’s Shareville, for example, is a social investment network for mutual funds where investors can follow each other’s investment portfolios and successes, as well as ask questions and share investment information. Users can learn the secrets of successful investments and demonstrate their success to others.

Summary

Your work will be ineffective if you do not understand what influences people and their purchasing decisions. Psychology can teach us a lot about marketing. You can use these lessons to influence consumer behavior and sell more if you use them wisely and ethically.

We will continue to discuss the effects of psychology on marketing in the future, so stay tuned.