How to penetrate the buyer's brain

Go shopping or shop

Today, shopping is the most common form of consumer leisure in most countries of the world. People decide to go shopping for a variety of reasons: to have fun and experience the excitement of buying a new thing; to enjoy visiting an expensive store, the look of beautiful shop windows, the sounds of music and crowd monitoring; in order to feel the pleasant warmth that the polite staff envelops customers with, it makes them feel important people. Here they find a cure for boredom and depression; people come here to meet with friends, take a walk, interrupt dull weekdays. Most of all they like the feeling of power and control that shopping gives. Although shopping is almost always pleasant, shopping, especially for men, is a heavy burden that they try to evade, devote as little time to it as possible and make as little effort as possible. The way some men buy can be compared to the spetsnaz team throwing - breaking into a mined building, grabbing a hostage and - rather, rather - getting out.

To make purchases is to buy what you need, but it does not necessarily mean that you want it. After all, who is truly committed to becoming the owner of dishwashing liquid, cat litter or diapers? These are just goods that people who have dirty dishes in the sink cannot live without, there is a cat or a small child in the house. Consumers shop to meet their needs. They go shopping to indulge their desires. The difference between the two types of motivation is obvious, although in fact we will see that this is not entirely true.

Turning needs into desire-needs

Once the desire is firmly rooted in the minds of the modern buyer, he can no longer concentrate on anything else. Desire turns into desire-need. As the professor of urban and population geography at the University of Saskatchewan Jim Pooler notes: “it can be argued that in the modern economy, almost all purchases, even those that seem redundant, reflect the real needs of customers, and that nothing less will satisfy them.” A teenager does not just want the most fashionable thing. Rather, he feels that he absolutely needs to have stylish clothes and accessories. An adult doesn’t just want this home theater. Rather, he needs him because all his friends have the same ... This is the essence of shopping in the modern economy, where almost everything, regardless of how redundant it is, is perceived not as desire, but as need. Desires-needs can result in such a strong emotional attraction that, as the story below shows, it must be satisfied, and no matter what the cost.

These shoes are made to be bought.

At nineteen, Katerina had an insatiable desire to buy shoes. All the closets in her bedroom were full of shoes - of all kinds, colors, styles and businesses. There were so many shoes that it almost ceased to fit in the house. Shoes, ballet shoes and boots, shoes with high and low heels, with open toe

with a closed nose, flip flops and boots with sharp and round toes, boots to the ankles and to the knee, boots and Cossacks - Katerina had it all, often several pairs of the same style and color. From the purchase of the hundredth pair of shoes, she received such a surge of emotions, as if she were the first. The fact that every purchase increased the already growing debts never turned her away from shopping and did not reduce the trembling of pleasure that engulfed her after acquiring a new pair. When Katerina discovered a new pair of shoes that caused her desperate desire-need, her heart rate jumped from 85 to 120 beats per second, the electrical conductivity of the leather flew up to heaven (this is an indicator of strong excitement), and the electrical vibrations in her brain passed from a relaxed state in excited. “She will definitely buy shoes,” I told a colleague when we watched a young woman change her condition on the way from a parked minibus to a store. My prediction came true - that’s exactly what she did.

It is important to understand that desire-needs are completely rigged, and not only through advertising, marketing and retail. This is facilitated by public relations firms, bloggers, members of online forums, radio and television, newspapers and social networks. Neuro-

marketing also plays a role here, as it helps make the product more desirable. In a typical experiment, various product variants — of different shapes, colors, and patterns — are shown on a computer screen to volunteers who are connected to a system that tracks their mental and physical reactions. Oculography helps to evaluate which moments are studied more closely, and which do not pay attention.

Using digital technology allows you to quickly and easily make changes to the virtual product, after which the experiment is carried out again. The color changes a little, the size increases or decreases, the shape is slightly redone. By analyzing the unconscious response of the participant. experiment, you can create a variant of the product that causes the most desire-need. The relationship between desires and needs can be illustrated in the diagram.

SCHEME !!

In the 1 quadrant - products or services that consumers currently do not want, which they do not need, and which they are unlikely to buy now. However, what is included in this quadrant varies depending on consumers and context. Things that one buyer does not need will seem very valuable to another, and garage or charity sales often show this. What does not seem to be of value in one context can be appreciated at another time or in other circumstances.

Products and services we have placed into the 2 quadrant, - this is what people usually do not want, but what they really need. For example, hardly anyone wants to go to the dentist or go to the hospital for surgery. However, they need to satisfy a secondary need - to remove a bad tooth or restore health.

In the 3 quadrant - all those products and services that, as you can convince consumers, they want, but they do not have a real need for them.

Finally, in the quadrant 4 desire-needs are placed, that is, those products and services that, having fallen into this category in the consumer brain, will sell themselves.

Movement according to the scheme: how to create desire-needs. Even the weak needs and desires that we placed in the 1 quadrant can be turned into desire-needs through marketing and advertising. This can be achieved by six methods.

Make customers work on their purchases

The American marketing guru Ernst Ditcher was one of the first to note that by making consumers work on their purchases, you can easily convince them that

they have a desire, a need for this product. In the 1930's, General Mills, which owned the Betty Crocker brand, turned to him to boost sales of her cake mixes. Ditcher advised companies to stop using egg powder in mixtures. Let the housewives themselves add the egg to the diluted dough. This trick worked perfectly and helped Betty Crocker become a commercially successful brand that millions of housewives began to trust. Giving consumers their role in making the cake — even if it was minimal — Ditcher instilled in women the feeling that the result depended on them, and so they began to appreciate it more.

In a discount store for fashionable clothes, buyers are forced to walk along the rows with hangers for a long time and independently seek out the most profitable purchases. In some shops, the buyer receives a discount only by bargaining. Letting him believe that he had fooled the seller by buying the selected item for a better price, the seller amuses his vanity and makes him want his purchase even more. Sometimes, in order for the sale to take place, the seller even encourages obvious dishonesty in the buyer. In his fascinating book Psychology of Influence, Robert Cialdini tells the story of two brothers who own a tailor shop in New York. Welcoming a new customer, one of the brothers pretends to be a little tight in his ear. When a customer asks how much a costume costs, a “deaf” seller yells to his brother, who at that moment is doing something at the other end of the store: “How much does this costume cost?”

The second brother names the price, for example, one hundred and ninety dollars. Pretending to not hear, the first brother again asks about the price. He gets the same answer: "I said one hundred and ninety." The “deaf” brother turns to the client: “He said: ninety dollars.” Chaldini writes that in most cases a satisfied customer paid 90 dollars and tried to leave the store before a “mistake” was discovered.

In our studies, we, connecting customers to the equipment and recording their reaction to situations in which they were either given a discount or offered to bargain, noted mental recovery and physical arousal, which reached a peak at the time of the transaction. Moreover, we found that consumers appreciated the purchase more than if they received it “effortlessly”. This is partly due to the so-called attribution error, which occurs when heated emotions are transferred from the situation that caused them to another object or person. For example, people who decide to ride a roller coaster on a first date or watch a movie of jockeys will feel that they are more attracted to each other, because they mistakenly attribute a surge of adrenaline caused by fear to the presence of another person. The same thing happens when the buyer receives a discount. The greater the excitement of victory, the greater the importance that we attach to the acquired thing.

Create shortage

Once, on a December afternoon, I watched two elegantly dressed middle-aged women who fought in the legendary Schwartz toy store on New York Fifth Avenue. What grabbed these well-groomed energetic women? The last Cabbage Patch doll from Xavier Roberts is a Christmas present, which no girl could do without in 1983. They both intended to buy it. When desire-demand is difficult, buyers are ready to shed blood, if only to realize it. Knowing this very well, manufacturers deliberately increase the tension by limiting supplies to stores. If the noise has risen on social networks, buyers write that the product is ending, and bloggers discuss the same thing - a queue will begin to gather at the door of the store, and people in it can quite aggressively find out who was the first and who gets the desired product .

Laboratory studies conducted by both my company and other scientists demonstrate that the shortage of goods, as well as the conclusion of the transaction, causes strong physical and mental arousal. The more people compete for a product, the more each of them wants to get it.

One cold January evening, I began to measure the mental and physical reactions of a group of young men who stood in line at a large London department store in anticipation of an annual sale that began at 7.30 the next morning. Their purpose? Buy one of a limited number of video boxes that will be sold for less than half the price. I not only measured their heart rate, leather electrical conductivity and brain waves, but also asked to fill out a questionnaire. All this allowed me to track the change in attitude to this console over time. Standing in line in the cold fueled their desire to get a prefix, which was becoming increasingly passionate. By the time the doors were about to open, the heart rate, blood pressure, psychological arousal, and brain activity of these people had increased markedly. When I asked what they experienced when leaving the store with a purchase in their hands, many described the feeling of a dizzying climb. They felt more alive than at any other moment in their lives. “When I approached the counter, my heart jumped out of my chest,” one of them told me. - I was completely captured by a pleasant excitement. I was breathing deeply. Hands are sweating. Then I saw the box. She seemed to beckon me to her! ”

These physical changes and the tremendous value these gamers attributed to satisfying their desire-need can be at least partially explained by the theory of cognitive dissonance. Developed by the American psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, it has become one of the most influential and studied theories in social

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psychology. Cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort that we experience when we try to simultaneously maintain two conflicting beliefs.

At the end of the 1950's, Elliot Aronson of Stanford University and Judson Mills of the US Army Leadership Research Unit conducted a study called “The Effect of Tough Initiation on Group Location.” They persuaded the 63 female volunteer to attend one of two initiation ceremonies - hard or soft - to join the discussion group. In harsh conditions, volunteers were required to read aloud curses denoting sexual intercourse, and frank descriptions of sexual contact, taken from modern novels. This was a very difficult task, given that in 1950's the words describing sexual contact were even more taboo than today. Under mild conditions, study participants had to pronounce words that were less confusing, such as a virgin, petting, and a prostitute. The third - control - group was not supposed to read anything aloud, it was allowed to join the discussion group just like that. Scientists found that women who went through a tough act of initiation considered the discussion group more worthwhile and attractive than the representatives of the other two groups. They felt a deeper belonging to the group and appreciated their membership more.

Strategy “That's not all” (EEW)

Although this sales technology originated many decades before neuromarketing, it still gives psychologists and neurobiologists a lot of research opportunities. The EEE strategy is of two kinds. First, the seller makes the product more attractive to the buyer, reducing its price. For example, a can of coffee, which is usually sold for 5 dollars, is offered for 3,80.

To experimentally test the effectiveness of price reductions, Carry Pollock of the University of Arkansas and her colleagues decided to arrange the sale of chocolates on campus. Scientists were sitting at a table on which boxes of chocolates of different sizes were laid out. Students who were interested in price were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group, the control, the seller - in fact one of the researchers - said that a small box costs 1 dollar, and a large one - 5. For the second

The original price for the group was 1,25 dollars for a small box and 6,25 for a large one. At this point, a colleague corrected the seller, recalling that in fact the boxes cost 1 and 5 dollars. When it turned out that the price was lower - even just by 25 cents, sales were higher, in this group chocolate was bought not by 45, but by 76%.

The second method of EEE is to offer something from above, that is, to give an opportunity to save even more seriously. A London tailor advertises shirts that typically cost between 70 and 80 pounds for just 20 pounds. But that's not all! As a reader of the magazine in which the ad is placed, I may require an additional 15% discount. But that is not all! If I have time to buy a shirt before a certain date, I will receive a silk tie as a gift.

EEV is a fairly widespread and, as studies show, effective methodology for transforming an optional product into an item that cannot be dispensed with. Buying one - the second for free, three for the price of two, or a pen for free, a free lunch that some insurance companies offer - these are just a few of its examples.

Encourage the mood for the game

Busy people are willing to buy more. That is why we spend so much money on meaningless souvenirs on vacation, when we examine a tourist attraction, visit an ancient castle or theme park. In the book “Household goods”, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco writes that the houses at Disneyland “inspire us with a sense of… belonging to a fantastic past that lives in our imagination”. However, he notes that inside we find "a disguised supermarket where we obsessively buy, believing that this is also a game."

Desire-need in order to distract

Airports are increasingly turning from the buildings you fly from to the buildings where you go shopping. These hypermarkets with moving walks take advantage of the fact that, unlike ordinary consumers, passengers can’t get away from what surrounds them. In addition, people here are often bored or need to be distracted, they are nervous and seek solace. As a result, they spend time and money on connecting to the Internet and shopping. Often they buy some form of friendship, not a product. Here the same desire-need arises for human contact, as well as for what is for sale.

Create a sense of inferiority

About 4 of thousands of commercial messages are addressed to the modern consumer every day, and many of them speak of this or that personal inferiority. We are warned that we are too fat or bald, too pimple or wrinkled, that we risk becoming poor parents, unsuccessful lovers, ungrateful guests. Our personal relationships can be ruined by the smell of our bodies, dandruff, too dry or too oily leather, indigestion, heartburn, or insufficiently white teeth. In other words, everything because of which we do not reach the ideal, can strike us a blow if we do not buy a promoted product or service. Jonah Sahs, co-founder and creative director of New York's Free Range Studios, stresses: Since the advent of modern marketing, professional publishers have relied on the "inferiority method." Tell people that the world is dangerous, that they don’t have what they need, that they don’t fit into something. Then offer a magic remedy - your product.

Although sales through inferiority still work, many believe that this method violates the microclimate of mutual support and trust that social networks create. Because of this, people reject ads that create anxiety and rely more on recommendations from family, friends, and even strangers. Jona Sahs believes that marketing the future is “a message that gives the audience new powers, makes her a hero, reminds how great her potential is.”

In the store, people find a cure for boredom and depression; people come here to meet with friends, take a walk, interrupt dull weekdays. Most of all, a person likes the feeling of power and control that shopping gives.

Desires-needs are “imposed” on the consumer through advertising, marketing and retail. This is facilitated by bloggers, participants in online forums, radio and television, newspapers and social networks.

Manufacturers deliberately increase tension by limiting supplies to stores. If the noise has risen on social networks, buyers write that the product is ending, and bloggers are discussing the same thing - a line will begin to gather at the door of the store.

Tell people that the world is dangerous, that they don’t have what they need, that they don’t fit into something. Then offer a magic remedy - your product.