Our minds are one of, if not the most complex things we know of. We create stories, analogies and metaphors to make sense of things and actions all around us to try and comprehend our world with that very mind we do not fully understand. But it is understood enough that companies know how to sell you products. Your business needs to tell a story so the customer can fit you into a category in their minds. Using what we have understood about the human mind, we’ll explore techniques to create within your customers, a narrative, an emotional link and a dependence on your company or service.
People have built-in experiences that we all go through. We are born, we age, then we die. We can draw on this to create our company’s story. Here’s an example of a company’s mission statement that draws on birth: Birthed from the minds of our founders, Fakeola Technologies has grown into the most responsible and equitable microchip company that the world has ever known. The narrative we are creating here taps into the universally experienced birth and maturation of an animal, making the company’s story seem related to life itself.
Emotions are great selling tools when written down, but paired with auditory and visual stimulus, we can amplify that response and create a connection. Healthcare and companies in the medical field are best at it. If you have ever watched an ad for a hospital, you may have noticed that it will often take you on an emotional roller coaster. Marketers start the ad by slowing things down with some soft sad music and showing people who are suffering. Then they start to raise their emotions up with some images of people starting to get better. Pair these scenes with uplifting music and the narrator explaining how great the hospital is. After getting to the peak of joy, it is slowed back down to the emotion at the beginning and we would ask for a donation with a logo and information on screen.
Companies want their customers to return. For the most part, business owners will make their products really great so people enjoy them enough to come back again. However, the best case scenario is to make your product impossible to live without. To do this, we can conjure images of things we truly can’t live without such as water, air, safety etc. As an example, we could associate a product like a child tracking application with safety. We know that live tracking our children’s whereabouts is unnecessary, but we can tap into a parent’s need for safety to sell our product. We can have a slogan like “bringing your family safety and peace of mind”. This way, living without our product seems dangerous, because who wouldn’t want safety and peace of mind?
Now that we are well-versed in some areas of the human mind to advertise to, we are equipped to find angles to market our product more efficiently and penetrate the minds of our customers more deeply. It may seem like manipulation at first, but just remember that these practices are so prevalent in society that we don’t notice them. They only seem nefarious when we see behind the scenes. So if you are a consumer, you are better equipped to decide if you need a product or not, but if you are trying to sell things, you have an advantage over the competition.
