When advertising makes a difference, psychology is behind it: Are advertising psychologists the secret seducers? Can psychologically strategic and creative approaches be combined in advertising design? What can advertising psychology do, and what are its limits?
The current challenge in marketing is clear: The attention that can be achieved as an advertiser is becoming increasingly scarce, and products are becoming increasingly interchangeable. And ultimately, when you boil it down to its essence, marketing practice is about one thing: positioning and reinforcing images in the minds of consumers. It is obvious that psychology is the adequate discipline for this.
When Vince Packard published his classic "The Secret Seducers" in 1957, it triggered a veritable hype . In particular, the hook, James Vicary's "Eat Popcorn - Drink Coca-Cola" study described in the book, sparked heated debate among a broad swath of the population.
In it, it was claimed that in a cinema screening, the messages "Eat popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" were inserted in such a way that they could only be perceived subconsciously. The results would have then shown that sales of popcorn and Coca-Cola increased rapidly during the break.
This gave rise to great hope among advertisers - and great concern about subliminal influence among consumers: How do I protect myself from manipulation? Can advertising really make me buy products I don't need? Vicary himself has long since admitted that his study results were a fake, and follow-up studies have all failed to confirm his claims.
Marketing for people
So if it's not secretly manipulating consumers, what is it about advertising psychology that makes it valuable to entrepreneurs and marketing departments?
In marketing practice, expertise in methodology is most valued, so advertising psychologists are most likely to be found in the field of market research.
However, this leaves a great deal of potential untapped: Psychology makes valuable contributions to all areas of consumer behavior. By knowing the phenomena from consumer psychology, some of which come to quite surprising results, behavior can be better predicted and in the best case even consciously controlled.
Actually, it's obvious: every marketing activity is aimed at people.
Psychology is the science that deals with the experience and behavior of people. Every marketing decision benefits from knowledge about the consumer. So why aren't there more psychologists in advertising?
Certainly, it is also due to the unclear picture of what possibilities advertising psychology has to contribute to the solution of tasks and challenges in everyday marketing.
In marketing practice, the product is placed at the center of all considerations from the very beginning: In strategic planning, marketing deals with the quality of the product, its functions, advantages over the competition, pricing, proper distribution, and so on.
In addition, there is also the concept of the target group, which must also be taken into account during planning
However, the target group is not an anonymous mass that can be described by income strata and age clusters, but a collection of people - people with different characters, different experiences, wishes, dreams and life situations.
Man & Product
What constitutes the psychological approach in marketing and advertising work is that people are placed at the center of strategic considerations right from the start and are put in relation to the product: What can the product do - and is that relevant to the consumer at all?
What is the consumer looking for - and how could the product fulfill it? What motives does the consumer have - and how can the communication for the product refer to them?
"No matter how high the quality of products, no matter how reasonable their prices, no matter how good their distribution, no matter how refined their economic calculations, they can only succeed in attracting the attention of consumers, in making them interesting.
be experienced as desirable, useful and satisfying, they are successful," writes psychologist Helene Karmasin in her book Products as Messages.
What are specific tasks for which psychology can be useful with its insights? If we assume the classic tasks of marketing departments, products or offers must be developed and successfully launched on the market, and then successfully communicated.
In product development, there are numerous questions and concepts from advertising psychology for which there are consistently practicable approaches and findings:
Psychological target group analysis
Psychological target group analysis is the crucial basis for finding the right positioning:
The possibilities of psychologically based creation are a vast field of their own. When planning communication design, it is again true that people are at the center of considerations: What influences do advertising measures, product design and product presentation have on decision-making behavior? Only by understanding consumers can communication measures be managed effectively and in a targeted manner.
Psychologically based creation
Results from numerous studies offer not only analysis tools here, but also
also concrete instructions that help "package" the content in a way that is relevant to the consumer. Psychologically based creation can be explained and justified. Of course, the spark of a "Big Idea" has to be there first. In the next step, however, this Big Idea then has to pass through the "relevance filter":
Many of the aspects mentioned here are already taken into account in professional marketing with the help of a wide variety of instruments, different consultants or partners are called in for individual areas, others are covered internally: questions in product development and communication planning are answered with the help of classic market research, and work with so-called "neuromarketing" is currently also fashionable.
In a serious discussion, however, one can never avoid psychology, since market research results and new findings from neurology can hardly be translated into usable knowledge without recourse to psychology.
The series "Advertising Psychology" by Floortje Schilling will be continued in the next issues.