Optimizing marketing & sales with priming
Priming is known to be one of the few proven methods employed widely to optimize marketing, sales efforts & look beyond just branding
Most marketing / product professionals would already understand that powerful branding doesn’t happen out of chance, if anything it the result of consistent methodical refinement of a structured thought process & eventually slapped up with a flavor of wit to induce some magic & create something of an “X-factor”.
Take this logo for instance. It hardly takes a fraction of a second for anyone to fit the word “KING” under the word BURGER there, isn’t it? And that goes for someone who hasn’t even stepped into one of their outlets till date.
Also, given that logo it doesn’t take much for a layman to understand what the store is selling (it very obviously is BURGERS) & the addition of the word “KING” at the end could help people’s perception gravitate towards the QUALITY / SIZE of the burger, which could make the experience more real when one happens to visit the store & order that whopper with a natural comparison to other burger joints cropping up in their heads automatically.
And what’s next, if one utters the word “BURGER”, a more likely response one is going to get is “BURGER KING”, given how it becomes a word-phrase and aren’t perceived as two words anymore, although they still are.
That in essence is the effect of PRIMING.
Definition:
"In psychology priming refers to the phenomenon where the exposure of one stimulus could immediately trigger an internal correlation forcing the subject to bring up another stimulus that they perceive proximal”
Priming is all around us and does affect our everyday life, in the way we see / perceive things, or even the perception of products leading to our choices.
If one is primed with the color YELLOW, they are most likely to remember a banana or a lemon (or even a pineapple) when you mention the category “fruits”. After being fed with Ads pertaining to chocolate all day the odds of someone including chocolate in their diet that very given day is pretty high, although shapes or forms could depend on accessibility & choice.
There are various types of priming as quoted in psychology:
There are many applications of priming when it comes to products & lets’ visit a few of them here.
Application to Marketing
The de-facto / immediate application of priming is known to be over marketing. Here are a few applications:
1. Sequencing
Adverts are often lined-up (sequenced) in a way that can gradually condition the minds of the audience preparing them to accept what’s to come next over the final pitch. Copywriters are often entrusted to pull this off using their writing skills structured around breaking down deep subject matter in a way that’s perceivable by laymen, rendering it without any room for anyone to sniff through it.
For ex: iPod Touch and how the notion of a portable music player (the tag line – “1000 songs in your pocket” hit home well) is rendered first and then how it goes beyond just music, captures gaming experience, photos etc.
2. Campaign Design / Email Flow
Be it elaborate artwork that are typical of advertising campaigns or e-mail flows that are sent out based on filters & triggers, to make them more effective the use of priming is well-known and stands as time-tested.
For ex: Recent electric toothbrush ads & how they tell you the effects of the product & walk you through the innovation helping you perceive what you’re missing if you don’t own one.
3. Nomenclature
The language used is the most important part of any advertising / marketing campaign & that obviously is medium agnostic. The nomenclature that some ads use would be enough to send many into a tizzy grabbing more than the attention they gun for.
For ex: All Clear ads sporting the “NUTRIUM OIL” in their shampoo. What is Nutrium oil really? When you google that term you’d notice how search results would lead to “All Clear Shampoo”. Are you surprised!?
And am sure there are many such products using fancy nomenclature that means nothing, even scientifically. Another similar one that I could remember is Toothpaste with “Cooling Crystals” which are nothing more than dissolvable menthol & its not like using menthol in toothpaste was an innovation of any sort.
Application to Sales
Priming and its application to sales although not that common as marketing is still quite interesting and one may find that the association is much older. Let’s visit a few of those here:
1. Pitch deck
Every other pitch deck in sales starts with the agent kicking-off with a quote or a well-known factoid or a belief or even the latest news scoop. This is also a type of priming where the audience is first prepared (and in some cases brainwashed) so that they willfully lend an ear & become more attentive / receptive to what’s being said.
For ex: Sales rep who is selling fixed income investment plans picking up on the latest scoop from the WSJ quoting severe volatility wiping out trillions of dollars overnight. If the rep is talking to a qualified lead the probability of closure might have just bumped up by 40% there.
2. Journey maps (customer to buyer journey)
Priming is also common across the way store layouts are designed in the Retail industry. Nobody wants customers to go through a pile of irrelevant products (showcasing the variety of the store) before they hit the section stocked with stuff they want to add to their shopping carts.
For ex: Firstly, to begin with, most storefronts are made of glass owing to how the layout of the store & its ease of access ought to pull crowds in. Also, the layout of the store is maintained in such a way that most-popular / most-bought products are stocked right there at the entrance, prominent & unmissable.
3. Product Pricing
It is common practice (also in the SaaS era today) to show slashed prices for products or to show a product that’s dearer first and then introducing the audience to a more economical alternative.
Both those strategies have proven to be effective. When the previous one is an example of anchoring effect the latter one of course is an example of priming.
Conclusion
Priming has been successfully employed to draft customer centric strategies by categorically working towards beefing up market fronted functions to psychologically breakdown the perceptions of the users to foster all-round growth. And once done well, the effects of priming are known to yield a lasting impression converting into a string of results.