Pyschoanalysis in Marketing

[chatterfox]

I have read an interesting article about combining marketing and psychology to attract the buying decisions of consumers. Daryl Travis’ book review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink discusses how people unconsciously make decisions faster than the “blink” of their eye. The book represents liberally how marketers could use an alternative kind marketing tactic, which may greatly help them understand fully the buying nature of their consumers.

So what then Blink offers? According to Gladwell, decision-making happens through rapid cognition known as “thin-slicing”, or the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. We unconsciously evaluate, recognize and edit a situation before we could actually think about it. All these happen so fast, for about several hundred milliseconds before we could even act and way before we could even blink!

Understanding the workings of the mind leaves us to conclude that our regular thinking and the way we actually think when we buy are two different things. So surveys or focus groups do not really gives us actual proof of how consumers perceive a certain product.

But of course, considering psychoanalysis in marketing is not easy. Considering this study as part of marketing research is very difficult. There are many things to be noted. The brain could not actually do a “think blink mode”. The blink mode happens involuntarily as triggered by our feelings. Our emotions play a very important key to unlocking the memories stored in our brain. It is these emotions that should be taken into consideration by marketers. The study reveals that human emotions contribute most in the buying decisions and this fact has been neglected by most marketers.

So what are all these information leave us? Well, psychoanalysis confirms us that our buying decisions are not based from facts but from emotions. How products are made should be based from how people feel. In fact, the products’ initial point for consumers to actually buy them revolves in trust. And trust is a kind of emotion. Consumers cannot analyze trust with simply their thinking, it is their emotions that trigger their buying decisions. Just as Travis said, “As marketers, we must have our own blink moments and embrace the reality that branding is about “brain surgery” and psychology. Because how your customers feel about your brand isn’t a casual question. It is the crucial question.”


***excerpt taken from my blog: We Buy Based From Our Experience: Analyzing the Mind to Influence Consumer’s Decisions