Cognitive Biases Make Marketing More Successful

Cognitive Biases Make Marketing More Successful

Promotional products will offer your brand benefits galore. Besides being an affordable marketing method, they ensure that your marketing messages stay with the target audience long after they’ve acknowledged them. In fact, most people hold on to promotional products for up to eight months, according to an article on Forbes.

Compared to the time pop-up ads last, this is a lifetime. Your target audience has the chance to interact with your marketing messages for longer, making them more likely to buy from your business. However, your success in using promotional merchandise to market your brand will depend on the method you use. If you can tie your marketing campaigns to some common cognitive biases, turning merchandise recipients into customers becomes easy.

Here are four cognitive biases to consider when using promotional merchandise to market your brand:

The Norm of Reciprocity

Most of the time, people feel obliged to return a favor. For instance, if someone opens a door for you when you’re walking into a building carrying something, you will thank them. And if you find yourself in a situation where the roles are now reversed, you are more likely to open the door for them.

When it comes to using promotional merchandise, offering your customer something they will find useful as well as visually appealing, such as a custom gift pouch, could potentially make them feel morally obliged to somehow return the favor. This acts as a simple way of making your brand more attractive to customers.

The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Every now and then, a new trend pops up, and people adopt it in large numbers. For instance, selfie sticks were once a trendy gadget among teenagers. If you had one, you were cool. If you didn’t, you were missing out. Ideally, people want to feel that they belong to a specific community, and interacting with common trends is a great way to achieve this.

Marketers are notorious for using FOMO to reach their target audience. If your business can find a trending item and promote your brand through it, you can enjoy the marketing benefits that come from it. Besides, people love showing off to their friends with the latest flavor of the month.

The Exposure Effect

Also known as the familiarity principle, the mere exposure effect hinges on the fact that people will love a specific item more than others simply because they have been exposed to it for a prolonged period of time.

A past study demonstrated the mere exposure effect in action. In the study, four women were instructed to attend a specific lecture several times throughout the semester. While the first one attended 15 lectures, the second one attended ten lectures. The third and fourth women attended five and zero lectures, respectively.

At the end of the semester, students were instructed to rate the four women based on aspects like familiarity and levels of interaction. The more time a woman had spent in a classroom, the higher they were rated. Your brand will definitely benefit from remaining in your customers’ thoughts for a long time. The trick is to find promotional products that customers will use for a long time to forge familiarity.

The Power of Free

cognitive biases in marketing - powerful free

People are known to gravitate towards free items. Getting free things along with the items they originally intended to buy will make most customers feel good or even appreciated. And if the gift is something they really need, your brand gets bonus points. The more customers use your free gift, the more they will correlate your brand with a positive feeling.

All of these cognitive biases make customers more inclined to use your promotional products, which means further exposure for your brand. What’s even better is that you might only have to add your logo to affordable promotional items before giving them to your target audience at social events. Don’t be afraid to leverage any of the above cognitive biases to increase the success rate of using promotional products.