The Future Of Marketing Is Behavioral Psychology

Today’s world is more filled with advertising and methods to steal your attention than ever before. As our days have become cluttered by ads on social media directly targeting us from our past behavior, we are reflexively forced to withdraw our attention from any and all possible distractions. We are still often caught in clickbait traps, but we are fast learning how to avoid them. The average person now sees several hundred ads every day. This number jumps to more than a thousand for an average city dweller and has steadily risen over the last several decades as the variety of advertising delivery mechanisms have expanded. The upward trend of how much advertising you face doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon. The result of today’s advertising onslaught is that marketers and the companies they work for need to be much more effective communicating their message to stay relevant and profitable. Brands must resonate more closely with their audience’s core needs and wants in order to be effective. Relying on listing features and competing on ad spends no longer works and is a recipe for failure. How can you cut through the clutter and make an impact? How do you create the strongest brand identity and sell your goods in a crowded market? To successfully influence customer behavior, it’s best to understand that behavior at a deeper level. You need a clear and candid understanding of how people arrive at their decisions at the foundational level. Each product and service serves slightly different wants and needs, but if you are interested in selling, the best place to begin with is the mental roadmap that leads to decisions. The best way to understand this roadmap and persuade your customers is by learning how and when to apply behavioral psychology. What is behavioral psychology? Behavioral psychology is the formal study of how people act in the real world given limitations in their and our ability to interpret it. By performing research experiments designed to test our decision making processes, researchers have learned how the human brain interprets incredibly complex surroundings by creating and using efficient intellectual shortcuts that reduce mental workload. This feat of learning new processes and reducing the involved mental workload enables us to continually adapt to complex environments without disregarding our core instinctual goals. It has been invaluable to our survival and advancement as a species, but you should be aware of how these efficient shortcuts can lead to irrational and faulty conclusions. Understanding the shortcomings and limitations of the human mind’s ability to process information will help you to successfully influence behavior and protect yourself from outside influence at the same time. To see a tiny glimpse of how our perceptual limitations can affect decision making, take a look at the image below. We see the green cylinder casts a shadow over a black and white grid, but something isn’t quite right about how we interpret the image. We see squares A and B as different colors, but in reality they are exactly the same. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and test it yourself. Seeing the cylinder’s shadow prompts our brain to make an assumption about our environment that in this case isn’t true. That causes us to interpret square A and B as different colors. Even more interesting than our mistake is that knowing the truth does nothing to change correct our perception of the colors. This involuntary reflexive response is the defining aspect of the most powerful behavioral psychology techniques. The example I have chosen above is visual to make it simpler for us to see our mistake, but our flaws in interpretation are not limited to what we see. Instead, our flaws are extensive and significant in a variety of contexts. Understanding these flaws in reflexive decision making and the contexts in which to apply them will help you win more business. Now that I’ve introduced you to behavioral psychology, I would like to leave you with some great starting points to begin your intellectual journey into the subject. Some of the best research in behavioral psychology is being done at Oculus and for virtual reality. Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus studies how the brain uses intellectual shortcuts to make more convincing experiences in virtual reality. Abrash’sWhat is Real? keynote presentation at last year’s F8 conference introduced thousands of people to audio and video illusions that produce reflexive responses we can’t control. Abrash’s team at Facebook & Oculus performs serious research into the limitations of our senses and understanding when our brains fill in informational gaps to compensate. One of most authoritative books on behavioral psychology is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In 2002, Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on prospect theory. In the book, Daniel provides a summary of some of his best work and describes how the human mind develops the mental framework of interactions with the outside world. Daniel calls these systems, simply, System 1 and System 2. When we use System 1, our brain performs automatically on developed processes. While using System 2, our brain actively tries to automate mentally challenging processes. Lastly, one of my personal favorites is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an enjoyable and anecdotal look at risk, decision making, and behavioral psychology through the lens of a former bond trader and mathematician. Nassim writes colorfully through his own experiences and provides a simple illustrative framework of ideas that is character driven instead of academic. The book was selected by Fortune as one of their 75 “Smartest Books of All Time”. I leave you with a quote from Robert Cialdini, who is considered the father of persuasion: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys — even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat — so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response” *A word of forewarning: just as fields like economics are sensationalized through books using flawed intellectual frameworks such as Freakonomics, so too is behavioral psychology sensationalized through fun, but misleading books like Predictably Irrational. Christian loves to help startups and small-businesses win more customers. If you would like to win more customers, you might reach out to him to do so.