The next step: behavioural marketing that converts
The extraordinary Brexit and US election results surprised many worldwide. The commonly held belief was that people would vote based on who they were. But the reality was they voted, or not, according to their mind-set or how they felt. Traditional demographic or attitudinal forecasting failed, and no one really understood which stimuli would drive the final decision.
Cesar Montes
The same is true of marketing. Shopping decisions are driven by behaviour drawn from a tapestry of past experiences, current certainties or uncertainties, and, future expectations and hopes.
As marketers we need to understand that we are dealing with people – not consumers, not shoppers – simply people who want to fulfill a need – and whose purchases are driven by a set of behaviours.
Fragmentation now defines our business as we deal with a multitude of touchpoints to market, with more SKUs than ever sold through multiple routes. At the end of the day, fragmentation has become a synonym of a mess.
Rather than simplify, the marketing community has built fictitious walls between different approaches and disciplines, splitting digital from traditional; ATL from BTL; off-store from in-store marketing.
To inspire purchase we need to return to the basic principles of marketing. We need to understand how people behave when they make their decisions.
Some brands are already thinking this way. For instance, Unilever recently disclosed that it is changing the way it monitors shoppers to focus on their behaviour.
But what stimulates purchase behaviour, and how can brands and retailers best tap in?
Four stimuli of behaviour
Based on studies from multiple behavioural fields, there are four stimuli that explain (and teach us how to influence) fundamental human behaviour.
Reason: The conscious steps people take while fulfilling a need.
For example, promotions have a rational impact on choice, and, brands that make it to the shopping list are more likely to be bought.
Context: The influences that surround and impact a person while shopping.
For instance, a mirror placed behind a product nudges people to pick it up, and, the majority of people choose a mid-size drink regardless of quantity.
Culture: The trends that impact decision-making.
We all know that socially responsible brands are more likely to be chosen. And that young people will tend to avoid retail space with no mobile connection.
Emotion: The associations that influence people.
It’s commonplace to hear the young say they avoid certain brands because they were the brands of an older generation, and, that shoppers in general choose brands they associate with their idols.
What does this mean for marketers?
To turn brand equity into action, we must understand behaviour at every step of the purchase decision journey, particularly at what we call pivotal moments, the moments of greatest impact. In behavioural marketing, creative ideas should not only be inspired by people’s behaviour, they should change behaviour too.
Take car purchase, where the pivotal moment is the test drive, where reason and emotion converge. Imagine anticipating that moment and offering to take a highly rational potential buyer to the test drive – in a competitive car brand. Maserati in Germany did just this. On Googling ‘test drive’ for German car brands, up popped Maserati offering to take the potential customer to the showroom for their test drive – in a Maserati! An opportunity to experience the Italian brand which, until that moment, was certainly on their list of choices. The campaign, anchored in human behaviour understanding, delivered an increase of 150 percent in Maserati test drives, and importantly, a 10 percent conversion in sales.
I believe that as marketers our job is to influence behaviour with win-win results for brands and people alike. At Geometry we call this “inspiring people to buy well”. A powerful example from Dubai saw Unilever’s Lifebuoy run a campaign to demonstrate how the health soap develops products to protect people from germs. We created a world-first innovation which applied a thin layer of Lifebuoy sanitiser liquid to shopping trolley handles – killing 99.9 percent of germs with a simple swipe. The brands’ hygiene benefits were made clear to over 10,000 people a day, resulting in a 53 percent uplift in sales. This simple idea impacted emotionally and contextually, and, both brand and shopper won.
Unilever is not alone in successfully grounding strategies in understanding the emotions, cultural context and reasons for purchase that drive the same person to shop differently. Future facing marketing will start from understanding people’s behaviour and end by changing it for the better. It’s the next step.
Cesar Montes is chief strategy officer for EMEA and global chief intelligence officer at Geometry Global.