What are some interesting psychological marketing tactics? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Nidhi Singh, Leads Digital Marketing Team at Pristine, on Quora:
My husband and I recently visited Bangalore, our friends took us to a restaurant for lunch. This restaurant had beautiful interiors, music, and dim lighting, the arrangement of furniture and ambiance was giving a feel of luxury dining. The staff was polite, professional and friendly.
We ordered food, the food was not just good, it was awesome! Every single dish and drink were made to delight the taste buds, and the critic inside me was flabbergasted by the delicious taste.
We finished our lunch and the bill arrived, I expected to receive an extravagant bill, but to my surprise, the bill was hardly close to what I expected, there was no luxury tax and no over priced dishes. Before even seeing the price I was sold to pay more for their offering.
I associated dim light, soft music, polite people, wood finish to an expensive place. This is what brands want, they want consumers to get influenced by their marketing.
We all live by many such mental anchors, we associate special meanings to words, people and places before we even speak to someone we derive meaning from their looks, language, and accent, these meanings further makes us trust, attract or ripple people and places.
And marketers use these anchors really well.
Anchors evoke thoughts and emotions, a curvy bottle reminds us of a Coca-Cola bottle. An answer from an influencer on Quora will always get high upvotes irrespective of the quality because we all have anchors, these anchors stimulate emotions, an influencer has written it, it has to be good.
There is a reason why brands invest an unfathomable amount of money in marketing. Through marketing, brands create these anchors.
Coca-Cola, for example, is designed to sell happiness.
Coca-Cola features a series of life moments in its advertisements, a guest visiting home, a first date, hanging out with friends, having a break up and patch up over a drink, having a cold drink after a hot tiring day, these ads do not blabber about 10 reasons to buy coke, instead they make you high on emotions.
All of these advertisements make us feel happy, Coca-Cola has very beautifully hooked our anchors to their leverage. These brands know that we act through our anchors, coke has established an anchor of happiness.
Over a period of time, when "Coca-Cola = happiness" communication runs through, again and again, and our mind establishes an anchor, next time when you encounter the smell or the sight of the Coca-Cola bottle, your mind may activate this anchor, this will take you to a resourceful state where you would want to experience happiness and the means of achieving this happiness would be through a bottle of Coca-Cola.
This is how our mind interprets thing by associating one thing with another like, in the beginning, I expressed, how I associated stated restaurant's ambiance with an expensive place and that is how we associate coca-cola with happiness.
Coca-Cola's ability to successfully use human psychology to its benefit is what makes it a successful brand.
You would never admit that you bought it because of advertisement, but the reality is we all just do.
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