USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

Psychology of Priming:

how to create campaigns

that convert

In a lot of ways marketing and advertising is all about priming. Priming refers to a psychological
phenomenon when exposure to words, phrases, or images, influences an individuals behavior
without that individual being consciously aware of the prime. Brand partnerships, advertisements,
and sponsorships are all subtle cues to get customers thinking about a brand and motivated to
purchase a product or service. So, as a marketer, how can you use priming in marketing
campaigns with in order to drive purchasing behavior? One approach by leveraging psychology to
appeal to customers nonconscious motivations. By understanding and priming customer
motivations, we can better influence key interactions such as engagement, conversion and loyalty,
as well as create better predictive models for how different products will perform in various
commerce platforms and channels.
This eBook will teach you how to uncover nonconscious motivations, and more importantly,
how to leverage those motivations to prime your target audience and improve key
interactions, such as conversion rates.
MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

1. Introduction to Priming and Marketing

Priming is a powerful implicit memory eect in which exposure to certain stimuli (e.g., shapes,
colors, words) inuences later behavior or perception. The formal study of priming spans many
areas of research (e.g., cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology) and there are many types of
priming (e.g., perceptual, semantic, repetition, positive/negative). The form of priming that is
most relevant in the world of marketing is known as cue-based triggering. Cue-based triggering
has been eectively demonstrated in many areas of research (e.g., eyes on a poster leading to
higher tips, the weight of a clipboard inuencing evaluations of what is being read, a dirty
environment leading to more crime). In marketing, a company crafts a certain message,
promotion, or design around deliberate cues that are believed to trigger desired behavior in
customers.
One of the best known examples of this strategy
is in color priming. Companies put great
consideration into the design and coloring of
their logos. It is widely accepted, for instance,
that the color red triggers hunger. Youll notice
that the vast majority of fast food restaurants in
the U.S. have incorporated red into their logo
(McDonalds, KFC, Arbys, Sonic, Pizza Hut, Dairy
Queen, Jack-in-the-Box, etc.) in hopes of priming
a hunger in its customers which will drive them
to the nearest franchise. We know from years of
image credit: HelpScout blog post on color priming

research that people perceive colors dierently-they trigger dierent emotional and physical

responses depending on a number of individual dierences (cultural background, age, gender,

personality traits). Company logos are designed to resonate with the widest majority of their
customer base and thus individual dierences in perception arent a large consideration.

But how do marketers and advertisers craft promotions and

messaging for specic audiences? How do they choose the best cues
for the right customer?

MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

2. Appeal to Nonconscious Motivations

The rst step in identifying the best cues is to capture descriptive elements about your
customer base. There are many ways to segment an audience or market (e.g., demographics,
geographical location, interests). Psychological Traits or Trait Data (e.g., Extraversion, Frugality,
Traditionalism) is one of the best (yet underutilized) ways to measure, analyze and understand
your customers. Traits not only oer valuable insights into the motivations of your customer,
but they also oer the most precise and accurate framework for picking the right cues for
creating messaging and promotions.

Trait Data Helps You Find the Right Cues

Dierent cues (colors, shapes, words) can
prime and trigger dierent mental
systems, motivations, thought-processes,
and behaviors. In this way, dierent cues
can be aligned with dierent audience
segments for marketing and
communication eorts. The key to nding
the right cues for a given segment is rst
understanding what drives customer
interest in a product or brand, and
second, which cues can activate or trigger
these motivational drivers. Understanding
why people buy (or make many of the
decisions that they do) can be a
surprisingly dicult question to answer,
because the majority of our decisionmaking processes are unconscious.
Trait Data can be used to provide answers to this dicult question. Traits are enduring and
stable patterns of behavior, and can be thought of as resulting from chronic motivations that
dier between individuals. By measuring someones traits, a marketer can understand their
motivational prole. We all have dierent motivations that drive our buying behavior: Some of
us are motivated to buy fancy clothes, while others prefer shopping at the thrift store. These
preferences tend to be relatively stable over time, which is important because this means they
can be measured as traits.

MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

Connecting traits and buying behavior thus oers a glimpse into the underlying (and often
unconscious) motivations for why people buy. For example, if people who are high on statusseeking traits tend to buy a certain product, it can be inferred that they are buying it to attain
and advertise high status. Understanding why customers make the decisions they do is the rst
step in guring out how to trigger desired behavior.

Customer segments, regardless of their structure and size,

can be better understood with Trait Data.
For instance, lets say there are three distinct types of people that buy movie tickets online. Trait
Data is used to understand how these groups are motivationally dierent-- and how they should
be marketed to dierently. We may nd that the three types of movie ticket purchasers are very
dierent on one trait (e.g., Extraversion) but very similar on another trait (e.g.,
Conscientiousness).
Once the right customer motivations are
identied, a marketer can then come up
with potential cues that trigger these
motivations, whether it be messaging,
endorsements, ad design, or some other
means to reach potential customers.
Fortunately, Trait Data provides a kind of
common currency that can be used to link
cues with products by evaluating both using the same trait measurements. To take the above
example, a marketer may create 3 dierent messages for the 3 dierent types of moviegoers.
The cues related to Conscientiousness would remain constant across all three messages (e.g.,
Guarantee a seat!) because the groups did not dier on this trait. But the Extraversion cues
should dier across groups because there was diversity on this trait (e.g., high Extraversion:
Make sure to get tickets now so that all your friends can join you!; low Extraversion: Make sure
to get your tickets now to avoid the crowd!).

MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

Trait Data can be used to gure out what the best triggers are by assessing how people react to
dierent cues, and connecting these reactions back to their trait proles. Such research can
provide an objective and replicable assessment of how cues and products might work together
to lead to the desired outcome. This approach to identifying the strongest cue-based triggers
can be applied to any arena in which customer behavior can be measured.

3. Using Priming to Improve Conversions

Landing Pages and A/B Testing
Trait Data can be used to identify customer motivations, and the right cues to trigger these
motivations in all areas of digital marketing, including A/B testing. Weve used priming to help
brands increase conversion rates by understanding users motivation for visiting the sites. For
example, a B2C brand was looking for a way to increase landing page conversions in order to
improve user acquisition rates. Our challenge was to provide insight regarding what part of the
landing page design impacted conversion rates positively and negatively and to oer
recommendations for improvements without spending months on A/B testing.

NONCONSCIOUS MOTIVATIONS

We were able to identify that the highest conversion rates were seen by users who were high on
hedonism or the desire to have fun. Our recommendation was to change the font and
messaging that primed fun and pleasure in order to trigger desired behavior. As a result we
saw 800% improvement in conversion rate within three months.

MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

Advertising
Advertising is a great platform for cue-based triggering because each campaign is typically built
with a certain goal in mind. So, how can advertisers position the campaign to trigger the most
desired behavior from an audience to achieve your goal? Lets say that, as an advertiser, you are
trying to create a great campaign for a fast food restaurant that delivers wings. Research shows
that your ideal customer (i.e., the customers that spend the most money) is motivated to buy
wings by impulsivity. Your next step is to identify cues that will trigger impulsivity in your
audience (whether they be viewing an ad online, on TV, or in print).

NONCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION:

Potential cues to trigger impulsivity include large images, reduced text, and intense colors.
Again, this cue based triggering is driven by empirical ndings and can be further vetted in A/B
testing. Importantly, these psychological insights reduce the cold start problem in advertising
and allow designers and writers a tighter framework (and less guesswork) in which to create
messaging for their audience.

Social Media
Another outlet for priming is through online social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter,
and understanding how to use priming in social media will make you a more eective
communicator. For example, say your company sells high end fashion apparel. You should rst
understand the motivations of potential customers who follow you on Twitter or like your
Facebook page to best align the messaging with the target audience. Lets say you nd that your
followers are vain, open minded and are coupon-averse. Your next step is to identify cues that
will trigger these traits on social media platforms.

MotiveMetrics

USE PRIMING TO IMPROVE MARKETING ENGAGEMENT

APRIL 2015

Examples of potential cues that trigger

these traits are:
Vain people care about themselves, and how they are
seen by others. This motivation can be triggered by
cues for self-importance, high status, and prestige.
Open minded people love exploring new things. This
motivation can be triggered by cues for exploration, or
that something is new, novel, creative, and interesting.
Coupon-averse people are not motivated by coupons.
There are no specic cues to trigger their behavior, but
this indicates that coupons will not be eective in
getting them to act.

Rather than basing your content and

messaging on broad based themes, youre now able to prime and trigger motivating traits for
your specic audience.

Floor Sets
As with the above mentioned applications, traits can be used to inform the design, presentation,
and setup of oor sets. However, having a sales representative present oers another unique
opportunity for applying Trait data. We tend to be most convinced by people that are similar to
us, and that share our motivations and views. Thus, salespeople could be chosen based on their
own motivational proles, such that they match up with those of the target customers.
Employing salespeople with the same motivational prole as target customers could make sales
interactions more natural and genuine because the salesperson would share the same views on
the product as the customers. Such salespeople would like products for the same reasons as a
customer, and easily be able to articulate these in a way that connects with a brands customers.
Understanding traits allows marketers to understand what motivates behavior, prime said
motivations and trigger behavior based on a customer segments psychological traits. After
learning about how psychology provides you with powerful insights about your customers, and
how to use this insight to improve engagements, its time to actually put this data-driven put this
data-driven insight to work.

MotiveMetrics