As a marketer, if you don’t use messaging to activate your consumer’s goals — especially their higher-order, non-conscious goals — you can’t empathize with their hearts’ desires.
Your brand will feel hollow, your solutions duller and you won’t connect emotionally with them. So, brands spend a lot of time and money asking consumers what they want.
Here’s the problem: Most of the time, people aren’t truly aware of their goals, nor how those goals direct all of their daily behaviors. They’re simply moving toward that goal, oftentimes non-consciously making decisions and buying products to help get them get closer.
Therefore, one of the most important jobs that marketers have is to understand and activate their customers’ higher-order goals, as well as help them reach those goals.
Here is a hard truth: The vast majority of your customers don’t care about your brand. They just don’t. They DO care, however, about how your brand will help them reach their higher-order goals. If you help them reach those goals, they will continue to buy from and praise you. It’s as simple as that.
Before that can happen, though, marketers must be aware of consumers’ true desires by identifying their higher-order, category goals. Here are eight strategies that you can use to discover your customers’ non-conscious, highly emotional goals.
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1. Projective-based techniques
In psychology, we use this term to mean “projecting outside oneself.”
People who don’t think only of themselves are better able to tap into their own non-conscious, higher-order behavior drivers.
Projective techniques help people climb from functional goals to higher-order ones.
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2. Storytelling
When people tell stories, they often reveal the important things that are non-consciously influencing them. Rather than asking people why it’s important for them to purchase cereal, ask about the first time that they ate Cheerios.
Stories help people more easily access their higher-order goals and emotions without overthinking them. Over-thinking is often the kiss of death for good insight.
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3. Image sorting
Ask people to sort through different images and place them into categories that make sense to them. Then, talk through why they put images into one category versus another. The ways people categorize things tell you what is most important or unimportant to them. If they struggle with this exercise, give them a helping hand.
For example, I might tell a given consumer to categorize all of their images into piles that make them similar, or how you’d like to feel after using a particular brand.
When those images are all sorted into piles, talk to the customers about the piles they made and why they were organized in this fashion. This space is where the richest insights are.
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4. Collage-building
You can use collage-building to uncover deep human truths. Here’s how.
Using only a few disparate pictures, ask people to use any images to build an overall picture or story that explains how they feel when they reach their ultimate goals in your category.
When people build collages and talk about the collective picture in detail, they may use words such as “secure” or “innovative.” A consumer’s collage, and the story that they tell with it, will help you get a clearer picture of what matters to them and how those desires relate to your brand.
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5. Third-party role-playing
Role-playing helps people bypass personal, oftentimes unknown biases that keep their deepest thoughts trapped inside their own heads. Therefore, we often ask people to pretend to be some other being, such as an alien who’s trying to make sense of humans making breakfast.
People will see things in their behaviors that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
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6. Personification
This is where we say, “Hey, if this brand were a superhero, what would their traits be? What type of superhero would it be? Why?”
We might hear things like, “This brand would be Captain America.”
Why? “Captain America is strong and fast,” they might say. And if they did, you’d be getting the clear message that people associate the brand with speed and strength.
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7. Deprivation
Ever hear of absence making the heart grow fonder? Well, there is real truth to this, particularly when trying to determine the real significance of your brand in people’s lives.
Therefore, we often ask, “What would you do if you didn’t have this brand of cereal? What would you eat? Would you choose not to eat cereal at all? Would you not eat breakfast at all?” And if we’re in a particularly challenging brand study, we have research participants stop using our clients’ brand for a few days before reporting back to us.
You’d be surprised how replaceable and unimportant your brand can be in the bigger scheme of life.
Deprivation can help you understand the broader context of how a product like cereal fits into people’s lives. When you understand that broader context, human goals become more visible.
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8. High-level questioning
Use these questions in combination with the aforementioned storytelling technique to understand your consumers’ life objectives, as well as how your product fits (or doesn’t fit) within those goals:
- Were other people’s interests or preferences involved in that final decision?
- How did the product make you feel when you bought and used it?
- How does the product fit into the broader goals that you’re trying to accomplish?
- What were you using before this product?
- How is this product better?
- How do you currently use it? Show me, if you can, but be specific. (Get them to use your product. Identify the steps of their usage.)
Take this information and summarize the higher-order goals that customers associate with your category and brand. With this, you have the first element needed to drive emotional engagement with your brand.
Will Leach, the author, is the founder of TriggerPoint, a leading behavioral research and design consultancy specializing in using behavioral economics and decision design to drive consumer decision making. You can find more information in his book, Marketing to Mindstates.
This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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