How companies used psychology to make compelling and successful marketing campaigns

What keeps every marketer awake at night is how to take a marketing campaign from good to amazing. Knowing some key principles of psychology is important because the essence of marketing is to understand customers’ needs and wants. In the Psychology for digital behaviour change workshop 2016, Brian Cugelman shared his research on how companies use psychology to make compelling marketing campaigns.

Photo credit: AlterSpark Corp. Canada

Curiosity and Reward

Curiosity and anticipation of reward is one of the critical levers that marketers to motivate customers. The following 30-minute video is one great example. The video featuring unwrapping surprise eggs generated 40 million+ views on YouTube.

Photo credit: Disneyland

Self-Efficacy

Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as one's belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. Helping potential customers to develop a sense of self-efficacy is the important motivation behind their decisions.

Home Depot created its YouTube channel and has provided various guides for home improvement products and DIY projects from to-do to done.

Social Proof

Social proof, simply put, means people tend to follow the crowd.

Photo credit: Kraft Foods

Kraft used social proof and run a phenomenal marketing campaign themed “it’s changed, but it hasn’t.” Justin Bariso, founder Insight, wrote an article about how Kraft used psychology to make its mac and cheese go viral.

Persuasion

Persuasion applies only when we understand what our customers truly need and want.

John Boykin used selling cat food as an example and pointed out three mistakes we need to avoid if we don’t work directly with the end user in his video:

1. Put the owner first
2. To imagine the cat are like “us” - the cat food manufacturers
3. The owner can compel cat to do what he/she wants

Trust

Trust is one of the major objectives that companies want to build with their customers.

We are talking about the sharing economy quite often these days. People share content for emotional reasons, most likely, not for economic reasons. However, many marketing campaigns are created for direct selling purposes. This is one of the reasons why we see expensive marketing campaigns like paid search, display ads and print ads suffer from proving real ROIs, although they may generate traffic and viral effects.

When we are busy dealing with numerous emerging marketing technologies, it’s worth reviewing those important principles of psychology that will help marketers attract, convince, and convert more prospective customers with our marketing campaigns.