Using neuromarketing & customer psychology to improve selling processes
In a former blog post, we explained how neuromarketing and customer psychology can improve product design and packaging. But once your product has been designed and is ready to be sold, how to promote it and sell it efficiently? To this end, neuromarketing and customer psychology bring efficient evidence-based solutions.
1) SEGMENTING CUSTOMERS BASED ON THEIR PSYCHOLOGY
In order to promote products on a large scale, marketing segments based on customers’ psychology is a powerful and revolutionary technique. Psychological segments deconstruct traditional segments, like age, gender, socioeconomic status, salary or living area.
Traditional segments are less accurate than psychological segments to initiate marketing or selling actions Click To Tweet
Let’s imagine each traditional segment contains a cluster of persons who fit into it. Some segments will merge with one another and define personas: for instance Clare, 38yo, married, 2 kids, living in a suburban area, a qualified worker in a public company. Research in social psychology shows that psychological dimensions like openness to experience, extraversion or need for cognition, blend traditional segments. That means that these aforementioned psychological dimensions gather people from distinct traditional segments.
For what consequence? Traditional segments are less accurate than psychological segments to initiate marketing or selling actions. It’s useless to communicate with every 30 or 40-year-old in the same way. Age and other traditional segments are not the most relevant and efficient segments to tailor a message to your target. Personality is by far more useful.
For instance, one scientific study has shown that mobile application sales could increase by up to 79% when their promotional message was tailored to the target’s personality (see our former post here for a more detailed description). These findings led ANALYTICA to create a marketing innovation called PsychoSegments (see video with English subtitles below).
2) APPLYING PSYCHOLOGICAL PRICES
Psychological prices are one of the most popular customer psychology techniques. Psychological prices consist of setting prices at a given threshold above which products are perceived to be too expensive. We all know the principle of prices ending with nine: a pair of trousers will be perceived as less expensive when priced at £49.99 than if it was sold at £50. Beware though! Nine-ending prices cannot be applied to every product or service. We explained why in a former post here.
3) ENCOURAGING PURCHASE DECISIONS
How to efficiently promote and sell a product? And most of all, how to encourage customers to purchase a product over another? This turns out to be rather simple, mainly because our decisions are predictable! Our brain perceives, analyses information and adjusts our behaviour in a predictable way. This is what we call ‘decision rules’.
it is rather easy to predict customers’ choice for a given product when the conditions favouring this choice are met Click To Tweet
Once these rules are known and understood, it is rather easy for an expert to predict customers’ choice for a given product when the conditions favouring this choice are met. Marketers then need to recreate these conditions to encourage selling the highest-margin products, for instance. Choice environments can consist of a commercial offer, where pricing and offer structure influence customers’ choices.
A very concrete example is CogniMenu, a new generation menu-engineering tool developed by ANALYTICA. CogniMenu improves the selling efficiency of restaurants’ menus. The organisation of the menu, its structure and its pricing are all optimised following customer psychology principles. The ultimate goal is to encourage customers to pick highest-margin meals. This directly translates into an increase in average spending and in restaurants’ profits.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A former academic and behavioural sciences expert, Dr Morgan David is the founder and director of ANALYTICA, a consultancy agency based in the UK and in France. ANALYTICA uses the way our brain works to design better products and better services in the realm of neuromarketing, webmarketing, customer experience, sales strategy and pricing tactics. ANALYTICA created CogniSales, a neuromarketing sales service, CogniMenu, the first new-generation menu engineering service, Predicta Sports, a science-based talent identification tool for predictive recruitment in sports, and the neuromarketing service applied to packaging CogniPackaging.
