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Psychology in Marketing: Definition and Tactics

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Why do we buy some products spontaneously while others leave us pondering for days? What makes one brand irresistible and another almost invisible? The answers lie deep within our psyche – and this is where  marketing psychology  comes in. Understanding how people think, feel, and decide allows us to use targeted tactics to capture their attention and persuade them.

In this article, I will show you which  psychological principles  shape marketing and how you can use them for your success.

Psychological factors play a major role in a purchase decision

Whether it’s psychology in influencer marketing, advertising psychology in TV commercials, or the deliberate use of colors in online marketing:  marketing psychology plays a role in every everyday situation  in which we are confronted with advertising messages from companies.

This also means that cdn caching strategy every conscious  purchasing decision  you and I make is influenced by various  psychological factors  such as motivation, perception, and personal attitudes. According to the University of Potsdam, we make a total of 35,000 (!) decisions per day.

You’ll be most successful in influencing people’s purchasing decisions if you  pay attention to what appeals to your target audience  . So, before you delve into the various marketing tactics in detail, you should first familiarize yourself with the  basics of psychology  :

  • How do people think?
  • What motivates them to act?
  • What makes them curious?

If you take these things into account in your marketing   campaigns, good advertising quickly becomes brilliant marketing  – because then the right target audience will consume your content, identify with it, ultimately convert into buyers, and develop deep customer relationships.

Learn how to apply psychological principles to your marketing.

Fill out the form to download the free e-book Introduction to Marketing Psychology.

  • Basic principles of psychology
  • Psychological effects
  • Psychology in Marketing
  • Practical examples
Download now for free

 

Psychology and Marketing: 12 Important Principles for Successful Advertising

For once, it’s time to say “enough of the practice, on to the theory” and not the other way around: In the following, I will show you how you can use the most important psychological principles in marketing in a targeted manner.

1) Priming or facilitation

Do you know the game where one person has to say a word and the next person spontaneously answers with a new word?

This is roughly how priming works.  You are exposed to one stimulus, and this determines how you react to another stimulus  . As an example, Psychology Today cites a test with two groups. Both were given the word “yellow” to read. One group was then given the word “sky,” while the other group was given the word “banana.” Because people make a semantic association between fruit and its color, the “yellow banana” group recognized the word “banana” faster than the “yellow sky” group recognized the word “sky.”

But what does this have to do with marketing? Quite a lot! With subtle  priming techniques  , you can ensure that website visitors recognize key information about your brand. This can even  influence  review business human purchasing behavior.

This has also been tested. In a study conducted by Naomi Mandel and Eric J. Johnson, researchers changed the background design of a website to see how it  influenced consumers’ decisions  . Participants were asked to choose between two products in a category—for example, Toyota vs. Lexus.

According to Psychology Today, visitors with the “money” stimulus (the website background was green, like dollar bills and decorated with coins) spent  more time on the price information  than those with the “security” stimulus. The same was true for the “comfort” group. These participants spent more time on the comfort information than those with the “money” stimulus