A marketing colleague who has just opened an independent consultancy for SME's in the Western Cape has written this interesting opinion piece on the psychology of marketing. It considers human behaviour as a means to understanding the rationale and motivation behind the actions in order to create a product or service with a message that will add value and ultimately enrich.
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“We help you to help yourself” – the mantra of the psychologist. A means through which human beings are able to solve their own problems and manage the challenges they face. To come out the other side better off for having interacted with them.

"In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
- Carl Rogers (A founder of Humanistic Psychology).

Relationships as platforms that benefit people
If marketing is about building meaningful relationships between brands and people and if meaningful relationships are those through which human beings are able to grow and benefit, then the underlying foundation of all good marketing is genuine care for humans and a desire to understand them better so that we can build strong relationships that benefit them.

To do so, every single marketer needs to start by understanding human behaviour better. How can we help human beings, if we don’t spend time getting to know them? As marketers we are real people with real fears, needs, desires and aspirations. How much time do you spend analysing your own behaviour? Next time you are at a store shelf, consider where your eye travels. Why did you pick the red tissue box over the blue? Why did you start shopping up the left side of the store and not the right? Why did you choose a basket and not a trolley? Why did you pick that store? Remember, however, that your own perspective is not the only one and it is for this reason that we must seek out the views of others, either formally through established researched methods or informally through less structured means.  

Winston Churchill once said, "Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must first believe.” Become more self aware, it’s the start of understanding human behaviour.
To begin understanding how humans are motivated, we can borrow a few of Sigmund Freud’s learning’s and his psychoanalytic approach. Beneath every need or behavior, are motivators that are seated in our subconscious minds. To begin to understand what these motivators are, we need to ask the question “Why?”. 

Why do people buy stain remover and is it as simple as their need to remove stains? Or could it be that they are motivated by the need to feel confident, wearing clothes that look good so they can feel good? Or possibly they are motivated by time and the need to spend less of it cleaning and more of it living?

As marketers, if we look at human behaviour with a “Why?” lens we begin to understand the underlying motives for behaviour, enabling us to connect with human beings on a much deeper, more subconscious level. It is because of a real understanding of what motivates their customers, that many small companies have become successful in spite of having no marketing experience or formal marketing efforts. There is very often a passionate founder who understands and believes in an inherent human truth and has been marketing to this subconscious need all along, albeit with less sophisticated tools. It is by asking “Why” that we gain the insights with which to build a sound strategy for our brand.

If we scratch a little at the surface of human motivators, we discover a set of even deeper forces at play – the values and beliefs that exist in every human being. It is these values and beliefs that influence how we think and are expressed through our everyday behaviour.  It is on this premise that the model of Spiral Dynamics was built as it examines how human beliefs and values act as filters through which people think and are indirectly expressed in the way they behave (and consume). As marketers we need to understand and identify these thinking filters in order to know why people behave the way they do.

An individual’s ethical standpoint and belief in their own personal ability to make a difference will likely influence their adoption of “Green” practices and whether they lead the trend or follow it.

Marketing to the mind – the early days:
In the days of Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s American nephew), the discovery of the workings of the subconscious mind was put to somewhat exploitative use to manipulate consumers into thinking they needed something they didn’t so that big American corporates could sell more products and services. Bernays did this very successfully in the early 1900’s and many have described him as the “godfather” of advertising and public relations. One better known example was his ability to significantly increase the number of American female smokers by positioning cigarettes as “torches of freedom”, cigarettes began to represent female empowerment and every woman wanted one! Trouble is, he thought that marketers could control consumers by tapping into their subconscious desires and manipulating these to the benefit of the big business. He has been quoted as saying: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Fortunately things have changed in the past 100 years and the pace of this change rapidly increasing as consumers take control and start to co-create brands through more reciprocal and interactive relationships – we are seeing the next phase in the evolution of marketing emerge:

Informing -> Controlling -> persuading 
-> supporting (platforms that benefit)

Good marketing today is not about manipulating. Good marketing will leave consumers and brands better off for having connected with one another. Brands that support consumers by enabling them to improve themselves and their lives because of their interaction with the brand are those that will build long term, meaningful relationships with their consumers. These brands become active platforms, because it is through the brand that people benefit.

As modern day marketers, we do not exist to convince consumers they need stuff they don’t. Today we need to connect by understanding people better, to really care about them and to add true value to their lives.  

As marketers, we are serving people. Ask yourself - what is your personal marketing mantra and are you adding true value to peoples’ lives?  

Written by Colleen Funkey, director, Funkey Brands