Marketers as well as other
business professionals have to work with or for clients, customers, consumers,
potential clients, target groups, people etc. Regardless of the names we use to
describe who marketers are dealing with all day long, the naked truth is that
all these terms stand for humans.
Whether you call them customers, consumers or anything else has no real
importance. You as a marketer have to work with and for humans.
At first glance this is trivial.
I personally don’t believe it is so obvious that in our daily work we deal with
humans and my belief is based on observation, not on hunches. Too often
marketers as well as other professionals simply ignore human nature. I honestly hope that ignoring human nature is due to
mere lack of knowledge on the topic.
The core of a marketer’s job is
to understand, predict and influence human behavior, or at least a very small
part of it. Quite often, endeavors aimed at understanding or influencing the
behavior of people, clients, customers etc. are based on assumptions that are
not fully accurate. These assumptions regard the elements that influence human
behavior and human judgment.
The general assumption is that
human behavior is the result of the interaction between cold-reasoned judgment
and the personality or character of the individual. Quite often we believe that
our customers, colleagues or simply people around us are very similar to Mr.
Spok from the StarTrek series. We believe that people are some sort of reasoning machines. To some extent this
is true, in the sense that humans are capable of wonderful reasoning. Looking
at the modern world we live in, we should acknowledge that the buildings we
live and work in, the bridges we cross to get from here to there and the myriad
of high-tech tools we use every day are the product of cold-rational reasoning.
However, most of human life is not guided by this type of thinking. In fact
most of human thinking is based on the so called rules of thumb or in more
sophisticated terms – heuristics. When we go to buy a pair of jeans or
groceries we do not engage in very elaborate thinking. We simply want jeans
that fit well and look good. We want to get it over with shopping for groceries
and get back home to watch the football game or play with our children. When
your colleague goes to make some photocopies, very likely she has something
else on her mind and presses the buttons of the photocopying machine without
giving it too much thought. Her goal is to get things done and not to maximize
the efficiency of using ink and paper in the office, even if the boss told
everyone to be careful with the office supplies because the firm needs to cut
costs.
The second source of human
behavior that is established in popular belief is the character or personality
of the individual. We infer that what a person does is the reflection of her
character. We believe that bad things are done by bad people whereas good
things are done by good people. To a limited extent this view is correct.
Indeed, there are individual differences among people and they are valid
predictors of human behavior. However, these individual differences are good at
predicting patterns of behavior and not instances of behavior. For example,
personality traits such as conscientiousness can predict professional success
which is a long term pattern of behavior. At the same time, this personality
trait is not a very reliable predictor of an instance of behavior such as the
quality of a presentation given in a certain day at work.
Much of marketing related
activities are centered on getting to know who the customer is; to create a
profile of the prototypical client. Subsequently the marketers will adapt the
product, the distribution, the communication etc. to fit with the prototypical
client.
In essence, there isn’t anything
wrong with that. However, this approach is incomplete. If the marketer’s job is
to understand, predict and influence consumers’ (humans’) behavior, the
marketer should know that human behavior is not determined only by who the
person is. In fact, personality is the weakest predictor of instances of human
behavior. We tend to believe that what we do is determined (solely) by who we are, but this is not the case. A
few paragraphs later, I will present the other sources of human behavior. If
marketers, or any other professionals that want to understand and influence
human behavior, focus only on who the customer is and subsequently adjust
their offering, they ignore influencing behavior through other means.
Let me illustrate with an example
how factors other than personality influence behavior. Imagine Dana, a young
ambitious person. Her boss asks her to give a presentation to some very
important prospective clients. Her boss decides to give this responsibility to
Dana because she is very hard working, methodical and somehow perfectionist. In
personality jargon this would be translated in Dana has a very high score on the personality trait conscientiousness. However, Dana’s presentation is less than satisfactory
and her boss is unhappy.
Do you think that Dana’s score on conscientiousness
suddenly decreased? The answer is clearly no and Dana is as hard working and
methodical as she ever was. The explanation for her unsatisfactory performance
lies in what has happened in the previous days. Two days ago, as she was
working on the presentation three colleagues came and asked her to join the
celebration of another co-worker. Dana was reluctant because she still had to
work on the presentation. However, her colleagues insisted and told her that
she is not a good team mate if she doesn’t join the celebration; that members
of the team have to properly honor their colleagues on their birthdays. Dana
decided that she could finish the presentation the next day and joined her
colleagues. The next day some unexpected emergencies arose at the office and
she couldn’t finish the work. She would have stood over time, but she had a
date with a nice guy and she had already postponed their date three times. Dana
decided to go on the date and get home early so that she could wake up at 4
A.M. to finish the presentation. Unfortunately, Dana got a really bad
indigestion from the sea-food she had on her date and could barely sleep. She
did some work on the presentation between two instances of sickness. Just as Dana
got to the office, she received a call from father learning that her mother is
ill and was admitted into hospital. As you can see, nothing has changed in
Dana’s personality. However, situational factors are quite often more powerful
than someone’s character.
My approach on understanding,
predicting and influencing human behavior is based on a model that includes
four major factors that influence human behavior. I call it the 4 DimensionModel of Behavior. One of the dimensions is Personality. Although it is not a
very powerful predictor of instances of behavior, personality is a reliable
source of long term patterns of behavior. The other three dimensions are Social
Influences, Personal Internal State and Physical Environment.
Earlier on, I have emphasized on human nature and one major
characteristic of it is that humans are social beings. We live in organized
societies and each of us has our relevant others such as family, friends,
rivals, co-workers, people who we admire and people who we despise. As social beings,
humans are influenced by the social environment. When we are in a novel or
ambiguous situation in which we do not know what the appropriate thing to do
is, we tend to copy the behavior of other people around us. This happens to a
larger extent if the other people are somehow similar to us.
Imagine that you are visiting a foreign
city and you get hungry. In the city square there are a few terraces that sell
food. On which terrace are you going to sit and eat? You know absolutely
nothing about any restaurant. Are you going to sit on the terrace that has only
one table occupied or at the one where only two tables are free?
Very likely you will choose to sit on the one where many other people are
already sitting on. If other people sat there it means that they know that there
the food is good. At the same time, you have absolutely no reliable information
on the reasons that led those people to sit on that terrace. You imply that
they know something, but you have no proof of it.
Other times, we do what other
people do simply because we want to fit in a group. If at your office there is
a money collection for, say donating to the local animal shelter, and many of
your colleagues are giving ten euros, very likely you will also give ten euros
despite the fact that this month you are short on cash. You need to fit in with
the relevant social group of co-workers and this makes you behave similar to
them. These are some illustrations of how human behavior is impacted by the
social influences dimension.
Another characteristic of human nature is that we are biological
creatures and have biological needs. If you have ever gone shopping while being
hungry you have probably noticed that you have bought a lot more than you
planned and needed. Very likely you have realized this only after you arrived
home and ate something. Hunger creates an approach state of mind. We want to get food and this makes us buy more
things. The most interesting thing is that when hungry not only do we buy more
food items, but also more nonfood items.
Human nature also includes our emotional states, our feelings.
Sometimes we experience very powerful emotions such as fury or bliss. When we
are under the influence of strong emotions, most of our behavior s is very different
from the behavior we exhibit when we are in a cool state of mind. If you are furious because your boss didn’t
keep his word on sending you to that conference, don’t write him an e-mail
saying that his is a low life creature. Even if taking out all your fury makes
perfect sense on the moment, in a couple of days you will regret the bad words
you addressed him.
These biological and emotional
influences on our judgment and behavior are transient. Usually people are not
hungry for long periods of time and thankfully we are not furious for more than
a couple of hours. Most often we are blind to their influences and, in general,
we are almost incapable of predicting their impact on our behavior and
judgment. All these influences on behavior belong to the Personal Internal State
dimension.
The fourth dimension of the 4D Model of Human Behavior covers the influences of the physical environment. One
such category of influences concerns our senses. Throughout the long
evolutionary process humans have developed ways in which to perceive the
surrounding environment through the five senses. Although the environment in
which we live now is very different from the one in which our very distant
ancestors lived, our senses serve us quite well. However, the reactions and
psychological mechanisms that are triggered by our senses are the same as tens
of thousands of years before.
For example, for our very distant
ancestors food was scarce and ingesting and digesting as much highly nutritious
food as it was possible to find was perfectly natural. This is why we like
sweet or fatty foods. In today’s world such drives to eat fat and sugar are not
exactly useful and this is because today, at least in the western world, highly
nutritious food is abundant. A related illustration is that of the influence
the smell of freshly baked bread has on purchasing behavior. When smelling the
freshly baked bread our sense of smell tells
the digestive system to get ready for a treat. Digestion begins, but if there
is no actual ingestion, the sensation of hunger occurs. In turn, hunger changes
our thinking by inducing the approach
mindset and this, in turn, leads to us buying and spending more.
Let’s go back a bit to Dana’s
unsatisfactory presentation. You have learned earlier that the lack of quality
was not due to whom Dana is as a person, but rather those social
factors, physical influences and a change in her internal state, both physical
and emotional, were much stronger than her personality. If you are a marketer,
don’t you think this is the case for your clients’ behavior? Don’t you think
that all these three types of forces influence their behavior to a larger
extent than do their personality traits? Who
you client is might give you a
base-line long term pattern of behavior, but actions and instance of behavior are
influenced mostly by the other three dimensions from the 4D Model of HumanBehavior.
Discarding any of the four
dimensions from the 4D Model of Human Behavior is equivalent with ignoring
human nature.
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