Keywords: consumer psychology, advertising, marketing imagination, consumer psychology and advertising research
Consumer psychology plays an important role in consumption, and consumers' consumption behavior is often influenced by their psychology; With the development of information society, the status of advertising has a great impact on people's lives. Proper use of the effect of advertising, combined with consumers' psychology, will bring different consumption benefits.
A. Consumer psychological analysis
Consumption is an important behavior and process of human social and economic activities, and it is the basis of social progress and production development.
Premise. The main body of consumption is people, who need food, clothing, housing and transportation and live in a complex and changeable social environment. Therefore, the study of consumption is inseparable from the study of people in consumption activities. The study of psychological laws and behaviors in human consumption activities constitutes the basic content of consumer psychology research.
(A) the internal factors that affect consumers' psychology and behavior. 1. The psychological activity process of consumers. Any psychological activity has its process of production, development and completion, including cognitive process, emotional process and will process. By studying the occurrence, development and regularity of each process and the relationship among the three processes, consumer psychology can find the * * * essence of psychological phenomena contained in consumer behavior. 2. The psychological characteristics of consumers. People's personal characteristics and differences in interests, abilities, temperament and personality are the important psychological basis for consumers' different buying motives, buying methods and buying habits. 3. Consumers' needs and motivations. Demand and motivation are the source and motivation of consumers' various consumption activities, and they are also the starting point of our research on consumers. 4. The physiological factors of consumers. Due to age, gender, health status, body structure and other factors.
Characteristics and differences will lead to various types of consumption behavior, which is also the production and operation of production and operation enterprises.
Problems that must be considered in middle school.
(2) External factors affecting consumers' psychology and behavior. Consumers' psychology and behavior are not only influenced by personal factors, but also by their social and historical conditions and social factors, so people's consumption activities are similar. Moreover, only by studying the laws of consumers' psychology and behavior from the perspective of social factors can we scientifically explain consumers' psychology and behavior and provide practical basis for the prediction of consumers' psychology and behavior. External factors have many influences on consumers' psychology and behavior.
The main factors are:
1. Social factors
2. Market factors
3. Commodity factors
4. Natural factors
Different objective and external factors affecting consumers reflect different psychology and behavior.
2. Advertising:
The so-called advertisement, understood from the literal meaning of Chinese, means "to advertise widely", that is, to inform the public of something or to suggest the public to abide by a certain regulation. But this is not the definition of advertising, but a broad explanation of advertising, which shows that advertising is a means to spread information to the public. In a narrow sense, advertising is a kind of paid publicity. Encyclopedia americana explained: "Advertising is a form of sales, which urges people to buy goods, services or accept certain opinions. The word advertisement comes from French, which means notice or report. Advertisers pay advertising fees to tell people the benefits of a product, service or plan. " Greenwald, an American, explained the word advertisement in the book Dictionary of Modern Economics published in 1973: "Advertising is a way to provide information about specific goods, services or opportunities to private consumers, manufacturers or the government in order to achieve the ultimate goal of increasing sales. It spreads news about goods and services, telling people what they are, what they are used for, where to buy them and how much they cost. " There are various views on the broad definition of advertising.
It is mentioned in the definition of advertising that advertising is a mode of communication or activity. Another mode of communication or communication activity that is also very common in society is called "publicity". Before the advertising industry is fully developed, it seems difficult to distinguish between advertising and publicity. The public regards publicity as advertising, or regards advertising as publicity. According to the explanation of Ci Yuan, propaganda is to announce to the public in words or characters. It is no different from advertising. But now it is generally believed that there is a clear difference between publicity and advertising. The so-called propaganda means that the broadcaster, who holds a certain social and political position, announces to the world the political opinions he believes in or supports through the mass media, so as to arouse the public's thoughts and feelings, make them take certain actions, express certain attitudes and support the broadcaster's political position. The main feature of propaganda is its unique inflammatory and political purpose. Its most fundamental purpose is to serve the political interests of propagandists. Publicity does not need to be paid, and its purpose is not necessarily to promote goods or services.
In the name of advertisers, advertisements spread the advantages and characteristics of goods or services and the benefits that customers can get through mass media tools, seeking to arouse the public's desire to buy. Advertising is aimed at expanding the sales of goods and needs to be paid. This is an important difference from propaganda. It is more practical to distinguish between propaganda and advertising by political and economic motives, and to attribute propaganda to seeking political interests and advertising to seeking economic interests. In this way, the campaign activities in western society and the legal popularization activities in real society are classified as propaganda; And all kinds of activities to promote goods and services should be classified as advertisements. Advertising can't make the public adopt consistent behavior and attitude, which is the difference between it and propaganda. However, advertising takes into account the direct and immediate interests of consumers, and after making a commitment to such interests, it may arouse consumers' buying behavior.
Commodity packaging is an integral part of advertising elements. Commodity packaging is very knowledgeable, and its psychological problems are also worth studying. The function of packaging:
(1) Protecting commodities. People who wear less clothes will catch a cold, and poor packaging quality will spoil the goods. The direct purpose of packaging is to protect the inherent quality of goods from damage, which is the most basic function. This basic function refers to the fact that goods reach consumers from entering the circulation field, ensuring that their use value and added value are not damaged. The process of goods from enterprises to consumers has to go through many times of handling, loading and unloading and storage. Without good packaging, goods will be damaged to varying degrees, thus losing their use value and added value. Realizing the function of protecting commodities is the basic principle of commodity packaging design. If this principle cannot be achieved, the meaning of packaging will be lost. Consumers will increase their sense of trust and psychological security when they see packaging with scientific design and good appearance.
(2) attract attention. In the supermarket, there are all kinds of goods. If there is no delivery and introduction from sales staff, or consumers do not have clear purchase goals and specific brand preferences, shopping often feels at a loss. Therefore, those packages with bright colors, exquisite composition, strange shapes and eye-catching words can often make consumers put it down and promote purchases.
(3) transmitting information. The description of the function, usage and precautions of the goods on the packaging can make consumers increase their knowledge and deepen their understanding of the goods; The description and introduction of the weight, performance parameters, advantages and characteristics of commodities are convenient for consumers to compare among commodities; The ingredients of raw materials, processing methods, production dates, inspection marks and other contents can dispel consumers' doubts. If consumers buy a commodity for the first time, they can't make a correct and quick choice without the necessary commodity information.
(4) add color to the goods. Packaging uses different raw materials and different colors, so that the psychological functions such as symbolic meaning and aesthetic value contained in goods can be better displayed. The safety and convenience of packaging, combined use and highlighting goods can cater to consumers' psychological needs from different angles and increase the charm of goods.
(5) Promote sales. With the expansion of sales methods and the change of consumers' living habits, packaging has gradually expanded from the initial function of preventing loss and pollution to the function of promotional activities with additional significance. For example, "Ballet" pearl cream produced in Jiangsu, China, not only sells well in Hong Kong and Macao, but also sells well in France, the United States and some countries in Southeast Asia. The reason is not only its good internal quality, but also its efforts in packaging. They designed the outer box with a white background, with a pair of dexterous hands in the middle and a glittering and eye-catching golden pearl, which was gorgeous and outstanding. After the bottled pearl paste is packed into a carton, a small foam tray is placed on the bottle cap, and a small pin inlaid with pearls is placed inside. When you open the carton, a shiny pearl pin immediately jumps into your eyes. This is particularly attractive to women. The instructions also state that if you buy more than 50 bottles for your own use, you can also string them into pearl necklaces. "Ballet" pearl cream has gained a great reputation and its sales volume is increasing day by day.
In modern management, the role of advertising packaging in promoting sales cannot be underestimated. Dupont Chemical Company, the largest chemical company in the United States, once put forward the famous "Dupont Law": that is, 60% of consumers make purchase decisions according to the packaging and decoration of goods. Therefore, how to design commodity packaging that adapts to advanced sales methods and is acceptable to consumers has attracted more and more attention from commodity producers and operators.
3. Consumer psychology and advertising:
As far as the essence of consumption is concerned, enterprises should be close to customers and meet their needs as enterprises. However, more and more enterprises make me feel divorced from the actual operation and too keen on competitive games, instead of engaging in daily work around the consumer psychology of customers. In the past 30 years, great changes have taken place in most fields: total quality management has been implemented in manufacturing activities, costs have fallen sharply, supply activities are trying to transition to real-time management, the use of information technology has replaced a lot of written work in enterprises, and the number of managers has also decreased. However, what surprises me most is that behind all these efforts, the efforts made by customers have not changed much, that is, the operation of enterprises has not changed much. However, as theodore levitt said, "The purpose of enterprises is to attract and retain customers. If you can't attract a certain proportion of customers with purchasing power, enterprises can't survive. In order to solve their own problems, customers always have many choices. What they buy is actually not a product, but a solution to the problem. Only by persistently helping customers solve problems better, that is, providing them with better functions, higher value and more convenient services, can enterprises survive and prosper. " Can enterprises really keep pace with the times? The answer is that enterprises must keep pace with the times and enter the 2 1 century. Some enterprises are aware of the changes in this era and begin to adjust their direction and orientation. Some enterprises have begun to establish closer relations with customers through the efforts of "account managers" and carry out customer relationship management around key customer groups. More successful enterprises have begun to surpass their peers and lead the growth of change through the innovation of customer segmentation needs. But for most enterprises, there is no real deeper and closer understanding of customers. They still follow the definition of customers in the past, simply according to region or age or purchase scale. The fundamental problem faced by these enterprises is: I don't know what customers really need? Theodore levitt pointed out: "Enterprises should first understand what' better' is in customers' minds. In order to find out this, and then find out what work should be done, and complete those work with superb wisdom and enthusiasm, we must have imagination. "
In theodore levitt's view, "modern marketing science and in-depth analysis will be useless only if marketing imagination and enthusiasm are not exerted." The world always hopes to find some simple methods and elaborate plans to solve the problems they encounter. Now managers have joined the ranks; It is understandable that they should do so. However, the world is full of greedy competitors, who constantly invent new products and find new ways to provide products, thus bypassing those ingrained old things and running far ahead-that is, thanks to their imagination. Therefore, even those enterprises with deep roots must use their imagination. You know, it is their imagination and the dedication of their predecessors that have brought them to this step. "I quite agree with this view. In fact, every successful enterprise ahead of its peers gives full play to its imagination in meeting customers' needs and gives customers new feelings and help. It is these enterprises that can do this, let customers feel "value for money" and let customers interact with enterprises constantly, thus making this enterprise walk at the forefront of the industry. Enterprises that have experienced the baptism of market changes will realize that business practices all over the world are facing the same situation: many assumptions in business practices will collapse as long as they have imagination and courage to launch attacks persistently. Successful enterprises can always use their imagination to seize the huge opportunities brought by the continuous melting or even disappearance of market boundaries. Citibank's imagination of financial products opens a new era of financial innovation, IKEA's imagination makes it possible to personalize furniture and home, Alibaba's imagination of internet makes it impossible to do business in the world, and Focus Media's imagination of architecture turns advertisements into new display power. Theodore levitt's definition and exposition of "marketing imagination" has given us a broader perspective and a direction for our efforts. If you really understand, have marketing imagination, and add practical ability to customers, enterprises will certainly keep pace with the times. "The future is almost certainly a new future. The popularity of communication, travel and transportation makes our habits close, and it is our habits that determine our behavior and consumption. Judging from the main outline, these habits will become more and more similar everywhere. Resisting or resisting these habits in business means repeating the mistakes of some arrogant old companies-these companies are lying in the graves of the business world, and no one knows that they have been completely forgotten. " This is a passage from theodore levitt, and I take it as my conclusion, just as theodore levitt himself wrote in the preface, "I hope readers can find a lot of things that can be put into practice immediately from this book." However, I hope that readers' cognitive system can be slightly improved and their marketing imagination can be greatly stimulated, so as to achieve greater results in practical work. "
In fact, this wisdom has only recently been revealed. In essence, it is a simple summary of the conditions that an enterprise must have to succeed:
1. The purpose of an enterprise is to create and retain customers.
To achieve this goal, you must produce products and services that people want and value, and provide them to customers at prices and conditions that have certain advantages over competitors, and this customer group should be large enough to support such prices and conditions.
3. If you want to continue to do it, the income obtained by the enterprise must be greater than the cost paid, and the excess part must be large enough and stable enough to attract and retain the investors of the enterprise; Enterprises must also make their products and services at least comparable to competitors, and sometimes even one step ahead.
No enterprise, no matter how small, can do this by intuition or luck. It must be clear about its goals, strategies and plans, and the larger the scale of the enterprise, the more necessary it is to write them clearly, clearly convey them to employees, and often let the top management of the enterprise evaluate them.
5. In all cases, enterprises need to have an appropriate reward, audit and control system to ensure that planned things are effectively implemented or quickly corrected when errors occur.
Not long ago, many companies held completely different views and simply thought that the purpose of enterprises was to make money. But it turns out that this statement is meaningless, just like saying that the purpose of life is to eat. In fact, eating is not the purpose of life, but an indispensable activity in life, because people will starve to death if they don't eat. Profit is to the enterprise what food is to the human body. It is just a necessity for enterprises. Without profit, the enterprise will go bankrupt. The profit of an enterprise is the part where income exceeds expenditure, which is called positive cash flow. The cash flow of an enterprise must be positive, because the process of maintaining life is also a process of wasting life. In order to survive, enterprises must produce suitable products and services, so as to attract enough customers and pay them high enough prices; The production process will cause equipment loss and personnel fatigue, so there must be enough surplus to replace the worn-out ones. This "sufficient surplus" is profit, no matter which country's accounting system is applicable to your enterprise. This is why profit is only a necessary condition for the survival of enterprises, not an end.
In fact, whether working in obscurity behind the scenes or directly facing the public, it is very important for entrepreneurs to quickly establish product image, formulate appropriate marketing strategies and establish the market position of products. Howard schultz, CEO of Starbucks Company, has a unique view on how to create a famous brand in a mature industry: it does not rely on dazzling advertisements, but is committed to making employees enthusiastic about fragrant coffee, thus affecting customers' consumption behavior. Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, adopted a different strategy: he set up a personal image with affinity and personally promoted products. In 2006, LG's "chocolate" mobile phone integrated the sense of smell into communication products. Although everyone has his own unique method on how to sell his own products, the key is to find the method that suits him best.
In the market competition, commodities can make consumers realize that there should be not only high-quality commodity entities, but also infectious advertisements. Therefore, for industrial and commercial enterprises, reasonable advertising and packaging design is very important. When advertising and designing commodity packaging, enterprises must study consumers' consumption habits, consumption levels and consumption psychology to meet the needs of different consumers. For example, according to the different consumption levels of consumers, different commodity packaging can be designed: high, medium and low grade packaging, expensive packaging, gift packaging, simple packaging and composite packaging. According to the age and gender of consumers, we design the packaging of goods with outstanding personality characteristics: masculine packaging, feminine packaging, old-age product packaging, young and middle-aged product packaging, and children's product packaging. The color and pattern of the package should conform to the national customs. In a word, it is the purpose of industrial and commercial enterprise service to design commodity packaging to meet the diversified needs of different consumers according to consumers' purchasing motives and needs, behavior patterns and characteristics. For example, it is necessary to consider that goods should be easy to use and carry, to adapt to different consumers' concerns about artistry and interest, to be novel and generous, to be unconventional, to trust and so on.
Because of this, advertising activities must abide by some basic principles. These principles are:
(1) The principle of authenticity mainly refers to the requirement that the economic information disseminated by advertisements should be true. Advertising manuscripts should be true, accurate, objective, realistic, meaningful, not boasting, not forging fiction.
(2) The principle of distinct theme, that is, when promoting products, we should highlight the characteristics of products, avoid some words and pictures that have nothing to do with the theme, and avoid irrelevant empty talk. For specific advertising products, after market positioning, we should clearly implement advertising strategies, make targeted demands on advertising targets, and make attractive commitments in line with the facts.
(3) Planning principle refers to two aspects: one is the planning of advertising activities, and the other is the planning of advertising production. The former means that advertising activities must be combined with advertisers' commodity production and sales plans in a planned way, and become an organic whole of enterprise management and coordinate with each other. The latter means that advertising production must be carried out in a planned way, and advertising must work as planned from design, production to release. Commercial advertising is an integral part of market economic activities. In order to create good advertisements, it is necessary to conduct extensive investigation, analysis and prediction of the market. In order to arouse consumers' interest and desire, we must understand and master consumers' purchasing psychology and habits; In order to cooperate with marketing activities, we must master the laws of marketing. All this requires a complete advertising plan.
(4) The principle of artistry means that in order to strengthen the appeal of advertisements, stimulate people's aesthetic taste, and thus arouse people's interests and desires, necessary artistic exaggeration is carried out in advertising creation to enhance the impression of consumers. The authenticity, ideological content and distinctive theme of advertisements should be expressed through artistic forms. Advertising is a work of art that spreads economic information. We should use aesthetic principles to express the theme of advertisements through art, photography, songs, music, poetry, drama, dance and literature, and enhance the interest and appreciation of advertisements with its artistry. This not only enriches the cultural life and gives people beautiful enjoyment, but also strengthens the appeal of advertising and improves the advertising effect.
(5) The ideological principle means that the content and form of advertisements should be healthy. Advertising is not only an economic activity, but also a political propaganda activity. The theme and artistic form of advertising inevitably involve social issues such as what to publicize and what to encourage, so advertising should not only pursue economic benefits, but also bear social responsibilities. Therefore, advertisements must not use pornographic and decadent content to attract consumers' attention and induce their interest and desire to buy. As the soul of advertising, ideology is expressed through unique forms and artistic techniques, and ideology lies in the artistry of advertising.
The direct practical significance of studying and studying consumer psychology lies in that it is helpful for government departments to coordinate the whole national economy. To develop and correctly guide the consumption of our people, we must understand and study all aspects of consumption; On the one hand, with the great changes and development of people's consumption in China, many new situations and problems will appear, which urgently need to be studied and solved; It is helpful for marketers to improve the competitiveness of commodity sales. The commodity market has developed from the seller's market to the buyer's market, and the supply of commodities has greatly increased, the market competition has become more intense, and the marketing has become more and more difficult. Help consumers make their own consumption decisions. Everyone is a consumer. Everyone knows their own consumption behavior and the consumption behavior of others around them, which will help them make correct consumption decisions and make themselves get good quality and low price.
The interactive effect of consumer psychology and advertising research will have a greater impact in the future market, even beyond our expectations, which marketers need to develop and make good use of.
References:
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