The person behind the persona
And yes, you made the right guess (I couldn’t resist the rhyme). I want to dedicate this post to neuromarketing. In other words (and to make it sound less fancy) this is about the field of marketing which endeavours to approach the consumer as a person, discover their thoughts and feelings, the associations they unconsciously make when deciding which product they are going to buy and why they prefer this brand to the other- in fact why they absolutely love it and they hate the rest.
For quite some time now, information accumulation and analysis has played a major role in developing marketing and advertising strategies. Marketers learnt how to turn the volume of their intuition down and rely more on findings from gallups and focus groups. However, it often turned out that carefully planned brand & product positioning and meticulously designed ad campaigns that took into consideration all these findings (and thus expected to result in a huge success) failed to appeal to people. But why?
Personally, when I hear the words consumer/customer, I think of someone looking to buy something in order to fulfil a need they have. This someone is most likely to be making decisions based in pure logic, which involves assessment of their needs, calculations of the amount of money they can afford to spend and comparisons of a variety of features between different products/ brands so as to finally make the right choice. When we start using these words in a discussion, we unconsciously put our marketing hat on and as the discussion progresses the hat gradually turns into a cover-all. This is where the problem lies.
When you go into a shop to buy something or just to look around, you don’t consider yourself a consumer. You are a person, you have thoughts and memories and feelings. And several brands trigger them in a positive way whereas several others do exactly the opposite. Not everything is pure logic and mere needs. However, if someone asks you in front of others which product/ brand you prefer and why, you are inclined to choose the one that offers the best value for money and makes you sound more practical and conscious as a shopper. You wouldn’t want others to think you are a marketing/advertising victim or a superficial person who just buys the more expensive product because it has a really cool packaging, others consider it to be premium and you know they ‘ll notice your choice or just because it reminds you of your mother who always liked expensive stuff and that makes you feel happy and accomplished. This is why focus groups and gallups often fail: they are allowed to see the persona each one of us unconsciously creates to come across as more rational and savvy, but can’t penetrate into the deeper reasons behind our brand/ product choices.
Of course, I am not saying we should give up on market research and data analysis (big data guys would never speak to me again and I couldn’t live with that) - we just need to find a way to do it better, more efficiently. And yes, marketers should continue appealing to our rational self as well- but touching on emotions, memories and thoughts will still remain fundamental for the creation of powerful brands and campaigns.
