7 Rules of Marketing that Get Results

by Temel Aksoy

  In this three-factor behavioral model, Fogg argues that triggers are where the focus should be. Marketers are always able to design proper triggers, even if they’re largely unable to influence the other two factors.

  For example, people don’t become members of websites that require them to fill out a long form. These websites can’t succeed in gaining members because, no matter how hard individuals try (motivation), even if they have the skills required to fill out the forms (ability), the triggers enabling them to take action haven’t been properly designed.

  It’s possible to control people’s behavior not only in online shopping but in any area of life by creating proper triggers. Marketing is essentially the science of designing the architecture of human behavior.

  EMOTIONS

  7.

   The Seven Characteristics of Emotions

  Marketing is about designing the architecture of human behavior. Doing so requires an understanding of human needs. One of the biggest factors affecting our needs is emotions.

  Because of advances in psychology and neuroscience, we know more about human emotions today than ever before. These are the seven most important characteristics of human emotions:

  Emotions are primary. A reason as simple as liking or not liking something is the real cause behind the decisions most people make. Most of the time, a simple emotion, such as like–dislike, is behind the decisions that people think they’ve made based on logic. Emotions are the initial factor in most human decisions. Therefore, emotions are primary; logic only comes into play later, when people seek to justify their decisions. (See Arjun Chaudhuri.)

  Emotions are universal. Emotional reactions are the common language of humanity. In the 1970s, American psychologist Paul Ekman studied forty-three mimics in human facial expressions and proved that basic emotions are shared by all cultures.

  Ekman’s research showed, for example, that no society on the planet is unable to express happiness or anger with a facial expression. As US colonel Christopher P. Hughes describes in his book War on Two Fronts, in the last Iraq war, he and his soldiers were delivering humanitarian aid to a region, when they were surrounded by Iraqi soldiers. The soldiers pointed their weapons at the Americans, ready to fire. The commander wanted to clear up the misunderstanding. In a situation in which there was no common language, Hughes quickly thought about what to do, turned to his soldiers and ordered them to “Kneel and smile!” The Iraqis then lowered their weapons.

  Because emotions are universal, global brands are able to design their advertisements by taking into account basic emotions and using them successfully in various countries. The feelings of joy and amazement inspired by Disney characters are the same in every culture, from Papua New Guinea to Canada.

  Emotions are inevitable. According to marketing professor Arjun Chaudhuri, stimulus, whether internal or external, evokes human emotions. This happens automatically. People can’t stop the emotions that occur as a result of stimuli. It’s impossible not to feel emotions such as anger or joy in response to certain stimuli. A person may try not to express one of these emotions outwardly, but they can’t prevent the emotion from occurring. It’s impossible to prevent the six basic emotions described by Paul Ekman, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

  Anyone who wants to engage in effective communication must appeal to basic human emotions.

  Emotions are irreversible and long-lasting. Once a person has understood a situation emotionally, they maintain the feelings associated with the situation even after time has passed. It’s possible to correct the ideas of a person who has misunderstood an issue using different logic and a different explanation. However, it’s impossible to erase the feelings of a person who has been hurt, grieved or elated and pleased.

  Emotions can’t be easily expressed in language. Logic can be explained verbally. For example, a scientist can present research conclusions in a TED Talk, or a mathematician can show the answer to a logic problem using a proof. Emotions can’t always be as easily explained with words. However, it’s possible to communicate complex emotions that can’t be put into words using a photograph, music, a gesture or a facial expression.

  Emotions are about the individual. How a person feels about an object or brand is about their own identity in relationship to the object. For instance, as photographer Willem Wernsen says, “Looking at photos is always a subjective activity. An image can inspire any number of emotions in the photographer—feelings of a moment, a conversation, or a memory, to name just a few. However, this doesn’t concern the viewer. For him or her, the photo is just a picture on the wall or an image on the screen. That’s just how it is; it inspires you or it doesn’t.”

  Emotions remain even after their cause is gone. What a person feels under specific conditions remains intact even after the conditions have changed. A person may forget the subject of a movie, but they don’t forget the emotions evoked by the movie. (See Arjun Chaudhuri for details.) This is because our emotions function independently from our rational understanding of what created them.

  Any persuasive communication that doesn’t convey emotion is a language largely incomprehensible to humans. The best example of this is the advice we give to our children; for example, “Don’t touch a hot stove.” They pretend to listen, but often they don’t hear what we tell them because the advice doesn’t tell a story. The same is true in political campaigns: addressing the best interests of voters by using pure logic and reason is ineffective.

  In marketing communication as well, the same mechanism holds true. Appealing to consumers with purely rational propositions is actually like speaking a foreign language. Brands that appeal only to reason are not understood by consumers, and they won’t remember or buy that brand. This is why we encourage brands to use emotional language (images, music, humor and stories) to attract the attention of listeners/viewers.

  8.

   Emotions Have Logic Too

  The book entitled Discourse on the Method, written by Descartes from 1618 to 1637, is recognized as the advent of the Age of Enlightenment. In this work, Descartes explains how scientific truths can be reached using human reason.

  Thanks to the reforms that scientists implemented following the path that Descartes outlined, humanity was rescued from paradigms based on superstitious beliefs. All of the privileges that we enjoy today as humans can be traced back to the scientific revolutions and advances that began with the Age of Enlightenment. If Mozart were alive today, he wouldn’t have died at the age of 35 from the illness he came down with in 1791. He would have lived much longer and been able to compose much more than the 400 works he crammed into his short lifespan.

  However, although the Age of Enlightenment did a great service to humanity, it also introduced its own dogma. It elevated reason, claiming that man was a rational creature, and imposed the idea of an indisputable “single truth” while depicting emotions as a weakness. In the words of German sociologist Max Weber, the Age of Reason put humanity into “an iron cage.”

  The Age of Enlightenment said, “humans are rational” (not emotional), which neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes as Descartes’ biggest mistake.

  I had been advised early in life that sound decisions came from a cool head. . . . I had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned separate neural systems for reason and emotion. . . . But now I had before my eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual violation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally advantageous. (See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error.)

 
The truth is, human minds are neither pure emotion nor pure logic. Emotions and reason are complementary sides of a single whole. One is not superior to the other.

  Of course, science advances because of logic and reason, but this doesn’t mean that human emotions are unnecessary or untrustworthy; people reason even when they’re emotional. They can also benefit from emotion when making a logical decision. As psychologist-authors Richard and Bernice Lazarus say in their book Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions, “There is a logic to human emotion.” The balance between reason and passion tempers people’s actions. It allows them to make realistic, constructive decisions that satisfy both need and want.

  9.

   Human Memory Does Not Record Anything without Emotion

  Wise marketers know that emotion is part of every event we live. Human memory records what we experience along with the accompanying emotions: how we feel. The reason that people can never forget certain memories is because of the intense emotions they experienced at the time. On the other hand, people are unable to remember certain facts in spite of exerting much effort because the information isn’t associated with any emotional memory.

  The stronger the emotions are, the more the learning and memory is reinforced. French marketing consultant Clotaire Rapaille describes how French villagers in the Middle Ages would take their boys to the four corners of the property boundaries and give them a good beating at each one when they turned eighteen years old. By beating their children at each corner, French villagers ensured that their children would remember the boundaries for the rest of their lives and thus protect the lands that were their families’ only assets.

  Similarly, people who survive an earthquake will never be able to forget what they experienced at that time, even many years later. The memory persists because of the intense fear that they experienced. Emotions make experiences memorable. Memories that aren’t accompanied by emotion will be erased from human memory. People remember their first kiss no matter how old they are. The reason that the first kiss is saved in human memory is because of the intense emotion associated with it. The basis of all human memory, good or bad, is emotional.

  Studies have shown that human memory doesn’t work like an electronic recording device. People retain most memories not as they occurred objectively but as they were shaped by emotion. Human memory processes what it experiences, converting and storing it based on its own needs and expectations. However, this information also changes after it’s stored. Over time, people bend, twist and shape the truths they’ve experienced. People’s memories change with the passing of time; our episodic memories get coded and recoded every time we revisit them.

  Finally, human memory records in a context every event it experiences and every person it meets. Emotions—especially, very strong emotions like love or fear—shape how people remember events or even other people. They may record the doctor in the hospital in his white coat but have a difficult time remembering him in a different setting wearing civilian clothes.

  Marketers must have an excellent understanding of the fragile nature of human memory. To ensure that people remember the brands that they market (both when they need a product and when they’re shopping), marketers must have a thorough understanding of how people remember and recall information.

  DECISION-MAKING

  10.

   People Think in Metaphors

  Marketers need to understand how desires, emotions and memories affect purchase decisions. Thinking is another crucial part of this process. To change how people think about a product or brand, marketers must understand the language in which they think.

  Human reason is programmed to understand the concrete, not the abstract. When describing the weather in a particular place, there is a big difference between saying, “The weather there is very hot and humid,” and saying, “Your shirt sticks to your body, and you’re a fish out of water when you take a breath.” The first description is abstract, whereas the second one is a metaphor.

  The fact that humans have difficulty understanding scientific or technical issues is because the language used to describe them is abstract, not because the issues are difficult or complex. The more abstract the language, the more difficult it is to understand.

  Metaphors are what put flesh and bone on human ideas. People make their ideas concrete by using metaphors such as “I turned to ice,” “My heart was on fire,” “That three-ring circus of a stock market climbed and fell unpredictably,” or “This company has turned into a prison.”

  In a study that my company ReMark, Research for Marketing, did in 2004 on housewives, one of the women said, “When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a big zero.” No other description could have expressed how worthless this person felt about herself. No sociologist could have described her thoughts so succinctly. Using a powerful metaphor and a single sentence, the woman described feelings and emotions that might take pages to spell out.

  Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers, have shown that in every culture and every society people think in similar ways and use similar metaphors to express themselves. In a study that Dupont did about nylon hose, women were given magazines and asked to choose photographs that expressed their emotions and thoughts related to the product. Most of the photographs the women chose, as expected, consisted of objects wrapped in stretch nylon. However, two women chose photographs of a long vase with flowers and ice cream that had fallen out of the cone. The woman who chose the photograph with the vase and flowers said, “I feel elegant, tall and thin in sheer pantyhose.” The woman who chose the photograph of ice cream that had fallen on the ground described how a hose with runs in it made her feel ashamed and inept.

  The Zaltmans and their team interviewed thousands of people in more than thirty countries and discovered seven basic metaphors used by people to make their ideas concrete:

  Balance One of the most important metaphors that people use physically, socially, economically and psychologically is balance. When someone experiences any social, physical or emotional imbalance, they try to restore balance as soon as possible. Resting after exertion, dieting after eating too much and saving after a spending spree are reflections of the desire to restore balance. The balance metaphor is widely used in the health, wellness, banking and insurance sectors.

  The balance metaphor expresses concretely the feeling we all have of wanting fairness. Some brands activate this feeling of fairness with brand promises such as “Everyone deserves to live well.” There is almost no country in which the balance (justice) metaphor isn’t used in politics.

  Transformation This metaphor describes the transition from one situation to another. People’s bodies, emotions, thoughts, beliefs and social relationships are in a constant state of flux. Fairy tales all describe the process of transformation, whether it’s the frog that turns into a prince or Cinderella turning into a princess. In most movies, the hero undergoes a transformation. The character at the beginning of the movie becomes a different person by the end of the movie. The hero is no longer the person she (he) was at the beginning. She (he) has matured. Many brands express transformation with before-and-after stories.

  Educational institutions, universities, weight loss centers, beauty salons and hair stylists all promise transformation.

  Journey Human life is a journey. No transformation (see above) can take place without embarking on a voyage of some kind. One must take a journey if one is to change. This journey is not only physical but also spiritual. Gerald Zaltman conducted an experiment in which he asked managers if they would prefer to write a story on a “smooth piece of paper” or a “wrinkled piece of paper.” Almost all of the managers said they would prefer to write a story on a wrinkled piece of paper. A wrinkled piece of paper is the result of experience and a journey. A wrinkled piece of paper began its journey as a smooth piece of pap
er.

  All novels and movies are the story of a hero’s journey. Most people view their own lives this way. According to some, the journey of life is “climbing a steep slope,” while others look at it as “letting the current take them away.” In marketing communication, brands can adapt the metaphor of a journey to almost any situation. People can use a brand to go on an adventure, escape the daily grind or be taken away.

  Container A container is a powerful metaphor that everyone uses. The first container a human enters is the womb and the last one is the grave.

  Every person views their own body as a type of container. This container carries the person’s soul and spirit. When we see someone get really angry at something, we might say, “he was pouring out vitriol,” which is an allusion to the container metaphor. The most powerful metaphorical containers in human life are family and the society in which we live. Places can also become associated with the container metaphor. Workplaces, hospitals and schools are containers that people enter or from which they are discharged.

  The container metaphor describing unforgiveness as drinking poison and expecting the other person to die is frequently used in discussions of emotional health; one is absorbing a toxic feeling into one’s container, the body and mind. Politicians compare their countries to a container when they talk about internal affairs and foreign affairs. The container metaphor, including the idea of inside/outside, is one that’s used in almost every sector.