How to Read the Mind of Your Market Without a Psychology Degree

When independently building an enterprise, understanding the thought pattern of those you market towards is one of your top tasks to complete. Ideally, you’ve already established a decent understanding of the individuals who you’re going to be marketing toward, however it’s not exactly easy. When a psychology degree is mentioned as a manner of getting up to a good level of mind analysis for marketing, it isn’t a joke. With that said, just a simple overview of the way people behave and most importantly think can set you on the right path to knowing the mind of your market better and increasing the effectiveness of your advertising.

Appreciate The Animal

Greenhorn entrepreneurs, especially ones that are operating on absolute independence, tend to give their consumers too much credit when it comes to the way they think. The reliance on their money to be successful turns customers into quasi-gods we feel the urge to please. In doing so, we tend to think every customer who considers our brand has the thought process of a Consumer Reports tester. The result is that we spend far too much time trying to get people to focus on the very cerebral aspects of choosing our products and services. An example would be an internet marketing firm spending their time designing a website and churning out social media touch points that focus entirely on the ways in which search optimization works and so on. All the while they forget the basics for why people would consult such a service in the first place.

Never forget what drives the overwhelming majority of human decision making: primal needs. At the end of the day, people are almost exclusively preoccupied with making sure basic needs are met. This is the theory that drives the writings and work of economist Stephen Levitt, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Freakonomics, which deals directly with a reexamination of the global economy based on understanding human decision making in this context.

But back to the example. Search engine optimization is an interesting subject. But what is the typical person or company looking for someone who knows SEO trying to accomplish? Typically it’s not to learn the ropes, but to have basic business ambitions met. Those ambitions are based, more times than not, on the immediate primal urges of the business owners: typically not enough money is being made, which is leading to a perceived lower quality of life for those working at the company. The drive toward your business is oftentimes based on the most simple of desires, ones that appeal to the animal tendencies within us all.

Establish Effective Advertising

Based on new found appreciation for the basic workings of the human brain, your marketing should be far more simpler than it otherwise would. Appeal to basic tenets of life; needs versus wants. No matter what your trade, there’s undoubtedly a primal urge that props it up or otherwise it wouldn’t exist. Finding that urge and exploiting it for the bettering of your marketing is key to succeeding as a start-up entrepreneur. People are always going to be much more concerned about the livelihood of their families than the ins and outs of a particular profession or business.

Little can be gained from over-analyzing the basic thoughts of those you market towards. Their reasoning for consulting your goods or services is something as simple as wanting to live in a more climate controlled home or have a more reliable means to travel to work. Overly sophisticated marketing campaigns, especially for those just starting out, can easily leave your market with nothing to go on but their intellect, which may or may not be an adequate enough of a source of decision. Instead, focus your marketing on the heart and on the gut. These places are where the majority of business decisions come from in the first place.