Marketing to human behavior can be elusive for many business owners, particularly small businesses. I’ve encountered hundreds of businesses that want to market, have the tools and resources to do so, and have no idea what steps to take to make a strategy a reality. Marketing strategy constantly evolves to make things feel even more compounding (or is it? More on that later).
For many business owners, navigating the best approach to human behavior and marketing can feel like a quest for a mythical silver bullet. The marketplace has undergone a seismic shift in the past five years, with the advent of TikTok, AI-generated content, and disruptive demographic and supply-line changes. This rapid evolution underscores the need for businesses to stay informed and adapt. But how should a company go to market? Which platform offers the best return on investment? What is a healthy marketing budget? Which efforts are truly worth it?
Despite the influx of change, marketing human behavior and your overall marketing strategy can be divided into two frameworks: who you communicate to and how you communicate.
While company leaders often focus on channel tactics to create a marketing plan (I’ve seen this far too many times), a true marketing strategy is a framework through which all tactics flow. It isn’t enough for leaders to focus on search engine results, social media engagement, or billboard creativity, but rather the holistic strategy about why and how a business goes to market.
So, let’s dive into creating a marketing strategy framework.
The Human Element of Marketing Human Behavior
When determining a marketing strategy, most businesses focus on the what: what their business does, what benefits their product delivers, and what channels provide the most optimal return on investments.
But is this the path to ultimate success?
I think you know where I’m going with this.
In pursuing effective marketing, it’s crucial to look beyond the tangible aspects—the products, the services, the metrics. These are important, but they’re only part of the equation. The real key to success lies in understanding the ‘why ‘-why do people buy what you do? This deeper understanding of consumer behavior can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
– Simon Sinek.
In Simon Sinek’s 2009 Ted Talk, he focused on the Golden Circle, which effectively describes how the best leaders inspire action.
Since then, Sinek’s conceptualization of business psychology has been consistently institutionalized into the modern canon of business thinking.
However, purchasing psychology runs so much deeper.
A Framework for Human Needs
In 1943, Abraham Maslow wrote “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review. Since then, Maslow’s work has been extensively discussed in the fields of humanistic psychology and human behavior.
From this groundbreaking work, Maslow defined motivational theory in psychology as comprising a five-tiered model based on human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs operates as a progressive model where each level of need builds upon the previous one, creating a structured pathway for human motivation. The framework begins with the most fundamental needs, which must be satisfied before individuals can attend to higher-level needs. As each level of need is fulfilled, individuals are motivated to pursue the next set of needs, moving from basic requirements to more complex and abstract aspirations:
- Physiological Needs:
- These are the basic physical requirements for human survival, such as air, water, food, shelter, clothing, and sleep. They are the foundation of the hierarchy, as all other needs become secondary until these physiological needs are met.
- Safety Needs:
- Once physiological needs are satisfied, safety and security become prominent. This includes personal security, financial security, health and well-being, and safety against accidents and illness.
- Love and Belongingness Needs:
- After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, social needs emerge. These involve emotionally based relationships such as friendships, intimacy, and family. Humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among social groups.
- Esteem Needs:
- Esteem needs are the fourth level in Maslow’s hierarchy. These include self-esteem, respect from others, status, recognition, and achievement. Fulfilling these needs leads to feelings of self-confidence and self-worth.
- Self-Actualization Needs:
- At the top of the hierarchy is self-actualization, realizing an individual’s potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth, and peak experiences. This is the desire to become everything one is capable of becoming.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has a profound impact. While some critics argue that human motivation is more complex and less linear than the hierarchy suggests (which I also agree with), Maslow’s framework remains a foundational and influential tool in psychology for understanding and addressing the multifaceted nature of human needs and motivations.
Despite Maslow’s influence, there are numerous tools business owners can use to map their customer’s emotional state (but more on that later).
Tribalism and Customer Demographics
At the heart of every demographic group is the concept of tribalism. Tribalism is a social phenomenon in which individuals feel a strong loyalty and attachment to a group or community with which they identify. This group could be based on shared interests, values, beliefs, or cultural background. Tribalism plays a significant role in consumer behavior as it influences what products and brands individuals associate with. Key demographics can change from one business to the next, whether key demographics include income, location, age, or personal interests.
The use of demographics in marketing can be traced back to the early 20th century. George Gallup significantly advanced the field by integrating demographic data into market research. In 1935, George Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, which later became the Gallup Organization.
Since its integration in the early 20th century, basic demographic information has been a staple in business strategy. Demographic information has often been used to craft marketing personas, a basic understanding of a buyer’s culture. Demographics are often used to determine whether buyers are qualified by their income, how they interpret messaging based on their cultural background, and how they interact with a product based on their location.
The Pros of Using Demographics in Marketing Strategy
Targeted Messaging: From its earliest inception, demographics have been used primarily to craft and articulate marketing messages. Targeted messaging increases the relevance of marketing campaigns by addressing the unique needs and preferences of different demographic groups. It also helps efficiently allocate marketing resources by focusing on the most promising segments.
Marketing Segmentation: In addition to articulating messages, basic demographic information allows for segmenting messages based on different user groups. By utilizing marketing segmentation, business owners and marketers can facilitate the identification of trends and patterns within specific demographic segments and better align products and services with customer expectations and needs.
While demographic information continues to be useful as a starting point for marketing strategy, it doesn’t always present the most optimal foundation. George Gallup’s first integration of demographic information into business strategy is nearing 100 years old.
So the question remains: Is an almost 100-year-old framework the most optimal tool for today’s strategy?
What are the pitfalls of using demographic information to articulate marketing strategy?
The Cons of Using Demographics in Marketing Strategy
Stereotyping and Overgeneralization: Cultural changes have happened rapidly since the internet’s inception. Even more so, cultures within cultures have developed in a way that demographic information cannot articulate. Utilizing demographic information creates the risk of making assumptions or stereotyping, leading to inaccurate or ineffective marketing messages.
Lack of Complexity: Over-reliance on demographics can lead to a narrow focus, missing out on other important factors such as psychographics, behavior, and individual preferences. Demographic characteristics can change over time, making it necessary to continuously update and refine marketing strategies.
So, what are we to do to better understand our audience?
How Customers Think
At the heart of every purchase decision is a human with unique motivations, desires, and needs. Businesses that excel take the time to delve deep into their customers’ psyches. They seek to understand what their customers are buying and why they are buying it. This insight goes beyond demographics and purchase history—it taps into the emotional and psychological triggers that drive consumer behavior.
Previously, I mentioned Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle principle. In his TED Talk and book Start with Why, he discusses how individuals make decisions not based on reason or logic but emotion.
The amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex play crucial roles in decision-making. The amygdala is responsible for your fight-or-flight response. The medial prefrontal cortex is central to cognitive processing, emotion regulation, and social behaviors. Finally, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the brain’s frontal lobe binds together networks that aid emotional processing, memory, and decision-making.
In short, the brain’s emotional processing runs on overdrive when making decisions.
From a marketing strategy perspective, this understanding means that a product or service’s benefits and features don’t serve as the main function of decision-making.
It’s emotion.
Whether a business is looking to gain followers at the top of the marketing funnel or convert leads to sales, it’s essential for companies to thoroughly understand their customers’ emotional states at every stage of the buying journey.
Let me repeat that: companies must thoroughly understand their customers’ emotional states at every stage of the buying journey.
Marketing Human Behavior Frameworks for Emotional Mapping
As I stated earlier, Maslow’s theory has had arguably the largest impact on social behavior and motivation. However, despite Maslow’s long-standing theory, there are many other frameworks business owners can use to establish their motivations for their customers.
Let’s get into the frameworks.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping has had many contributors over the years and is not attributed to one individual. However, it had its first iteration in 1985 in the Harvard Business Review regarding a service blueprint by G. Lynn Shostack.
The customer journey mapping framework tracks the stages a customer goes through when interacting with a company, service, or product. From the initial awareness to post-purchase, each stage evokes different emotions that business owners need to understand and address.
- Awareness: Recognizing a need or problem.
- Consideration: Researching and comparing solutions.
- Purchase: Deciding to buy.
- Retention: Post-purchase satisfaction and loyalty.
- Advocacy: Recommending the brand to others.
For decades, the customer journey map has been used to establish marketing strategies based on each stage of the buying journey. Despite its wide usage, one of the largest pitfalls of customer journey mapping is its linear nature. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, individuals rarely move through the stages in a linear path; therefore, creating a strategy based on these principles is slightly imperfect.
Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion
On a slightly deeper understanding of human emotion, Robert Plutchik, in his 1980 book Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis, posited that emotions operate more like a wheel than a linear approach.
Plutchark’s Wheel of Emotion represents emotions in a wheeled framework where there are eight primary emotions:
- Joy
- Trust
- Fear
- Surprise
- Sadness
- Disgust
- Anger
- Anticipation.
Each of these emotions is paired with emotions into opposites: joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation. As an individual experiences each of these primary emotions, they vary in intensity, which are then represented in milder forms ranging from low intensity up to high intensity. To add even more complexity to this understanding, each emotion is combined to establish common behaviors such as love, optimism, and awe.
I love this framework because we begin to understand that emotions have layers and complexities. As marketers and business owners, we must understand that our customers are complex individuals with unique backgrounds, emotional understandings, and expectations.
However, this framework doesn’t have its faults. Despite its usage, Plutchik’s theory has been criticized for lacking empirical support, emotional subjectivity, and dimensionality.
While not the end all be all, it is an interesting framework.
Let’s move on to a more dynamic framework.
Fogg Behavior Model
The Fogg Behavior Model (FBM) is a framework developed by Dr. BJ Fogg, a behavioral scientist at Stanford University, in 2009. In 2020, he published Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, popularizing the model further.
The model aims to explain the process behind behavior change and how behaviors can be influenced and designed. The FBM proposed that three elements must converge simultaneously for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Prompt (sometimes referred to as a Trigger).
Motivations for behavior include:
- Seeking pleasure.
- Avoiding pain.
- Anticipating positive outcomes.
- Avoiding adverse outcomes.
- Seeking social exceptional.
- Avoiding social consequences.
The ability for behavior includes:
- The time cost of the behavior.
- The financial cost of the behavior.
- The physical effort required.
- The mental effort required.
- The social acceptability of the behavior.
- How the behavior fits into the individual’s routine.
Finally, prompts and/or triggers are the cues or signals that initiate the behavior. Triggers can take various forms, such as notifications, reminders, or environmental cues.
The most crucial aspect of this model comes from the prompt needing to occur at the right time when both motivation and ability are sufficient.
For the small business owners in the back, motivations and abilities must align simultaneously for customers to take action.
This framework means that no matter how clever or impressive your marketing is, if your audience isn’t ready for your product or service, they won’t buy.
Like Plitchik’s Wheel of Emotion, the Fogg Behavioral Model isn’t without criticisms. While a relatively new framework, this behavioral model still requires further research and empirical data to support its claims.
I’m sure you’re seeing a trend with the criticisms.
Let’s move on.
AIDA Model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
Now that we’ve discussed a more recent framework, let’s get in our DeLorean and head to 1898, where E. St. Elmo Lewis explained the AIDA model for advertising and sales.
The AIDA model breaks down a purchase decision into four categories:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Actions
While seemingly simple, the AIDA model is a consistently used framework. I would argue that most marketers and small business owners subconsciously use this framework in almost every marketing decision. There’s immense beauty in its simplicity.
However, because of its simplicity is also where its critiques lie.
The Silver Bullet of Marketing Human Behavior
The human behavioral frameworks listed above are a small fraction of the tools available to us marketers and small business owners. As they say, we’re only scratching the surface.
But what is the framework for understanding human behavior?
I’m sure you can guess. There isn’t one.
For as long as I’ve been in marketing, there’s always been someone to sell you the perfect landing page, ad strategy, and, yes, even marketing human behavior framework.
But the truth is that humans are incredibly complicated. We are fickle. We change our minds. We also contradict ourselves.
However, the key to developing a marketing strategy for any business is to capture the two things from the outset.
Your marketing strategy should encapsulate who you’re marketing to and how you communicate.
Each business will operate from a different framework to discover those two things. Some companies just starting out don’t need to fully understand every detail of the buyer’s journey. Other businesses scaling at a large scale need to operate from a highly detailed understanding of not only their customers but also what their customers are feeling at every interaction with their business.
At the beginning of the article I mentioned that marketing human behavior and marketing strategy seems to be constantly evolving, however I hope that you gather that based on how old some of our models of behavior are, marketing strategy isn’t changing. The truth is, marketing strategy appeals to our natural emotions, which is a timeless effort. Where things truly change is our marketing tactics, but let’s save that for a different day…
Regardless of your business’s stage, there’s a marketing strategy framework for you; you just need to adopt the right one and stick to it.
If you or your business want to enhance your marketing strategy, I’d love to hear from you. Click here to set up a quick introductory discussion where, together, we can examine where you are in your marketing strategy and where you need to go.