Fourteen Lectures on Consumer Psychology

Chapter 7 Group Sales (1)
Consumers do not always appear as individuals, but sometimes appear as groups.A group is neither the sum of simple individuals, nor the sum over individuals, but a combination of many individuals with similar characteristics in some respects.One of the characteristics of crowd psychology is the phenomenon of trends, which can stimulate consumption by creating demand.Therefore, comprehensively assessing consumer groups, understanding the psychological characteristics of groups, and predicting trends will make your sales more targeted.

group definition

The target of body advertising is not one person, but a group of people.Newspaper advertisements are published not to attract one person, but to attract the attention of a group of people.These people are defined by Roth as a "group".A group refers to a group of people who have similar values, have the same perception and behavior in life, and are a group of psychologically similar "collectives".The target of many modern sales is a group, and the advertising targets targeted by various media are also group-oriented.

It should be noted that a group is neither the sum of simple individuals nor a new sum over individuals.It can be seen as a combination of multiple individuals with similar characteristics in a certain aspect.Everyone knows that other people in the group will hold similar views, so when he is in a group he feels stronger than when he is alone.From this we can see that the collective mind is not the same as the individual minds of which it is composed.

Careful reading of newspapers and magazines can reveal clues to the existence of groupthink.In articles about groups, the author generally refers to himself in the plural, which means that he is not just himself, but a spokesman for a group.He uses "editor's lounge chair" and "editor's mailbox" to indicate this relationship, and begins his character column with "friend of the people", "worker's column" or "boys and girls", implying that he is sitting among readers, A spokeswoman for a particular group that belongs psychologically to the same category of people.

From a psychological point of view, we can assert that the readers of sales media constitute an independent subject.This subject is not a loose aggregate of one kind of thought, isolated from the rest of the world, but an organic union, an integrated thought of many individual thoughts, as mentioned above.

Every popular publication is unique, and the groups gathered by the publications are complicated.For example, the "Chicago American" and the "Daily Mail" are not the same in name or content. The readership of The Country Gentleman is also very different from that of The Fireside Companion.

It is also the case that a person may be a reader of many different media at the same time.He may be a common reader of The New York Times, The Republican, The Congregational Friends, and The Chronicle Of Business And Finance.From the various magazines he read, we can't conclude that he is abnormal or has a split personality.The explanation for his wide-ranging reading habit is that when he reads The New York Times, he shares the same views with one group of people; when he reads The Congregational Friends, he shares similar thoughts with another group.

Nevertheless, through readers' choice of different journals, we can still target different consumer groups.Because groups who read the same periodicals tend to have similar tastes in consumption and tend to choose the same or similar products.By studying the style of this periodical, salesmen can find out whether the consumer groups who read this periodical will be interested in their products.The simplicity of this approach is that one class of people can be studied at a time, but the work is like studying one person at a time.For example, the reasons that make one reader of The Liberator give up on it can also make other readers of the magazine give up reading it.And attracting one reader to The Christian Herald attracts a class of readers to the newspaper.

Salesmen and advertising managers often complain that there are too many media they want to use to convey information to consumers!These various media give them a headache.In fact, the diversity of media is a favorable factor for advertisers, because making good use of these media will greatly simplify their work.But in real life, there is not an infinite "consumer group", but many "consumer groups".Each group has its own favorite products, or a favorite type of salesman, so a salesman can only win the favor of some of them each time.

If you want to launch a sales campaign by analyzing the readership of different publications and various media, the salesman will face a difficult problem: how to distinguish the consumer groups that different publications and different media attract?Some scientific methods will be given below.

Assess consumer groups
The first step is to determine a clear goal, and all information about sales activities and this target consumer group.To complete this step, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive survey on this consumer group:

1. Geographical conditions.The place where the target group lives should be included in the survey report.For example, a skate shoe manufacturer would not advertise in a journal that is distributed primarily in the South because the South is not where the target group lives, even though many journals are more than willing to provide data on the region in which the journal is distributed.

2. Economic situation.The survey report needs to include data such as the approximate property and income of the target group.Some journals routinely collect data in order to determine the number of journal core subscribers.

3. Social conditions.How does the society in which the target group operates?What is the mainstream occupation?What are your favorite sports and leisure activities?
These data are difficult to collect and are generally only available through secondary sources.The biggest difficulty is describing non-numeric content with data, such as the specific situation of subscribers.One journal used a very ingenious solution to this problem. They collected telephone numbers across the country, and then reversed them to find all the people who subscribed to their magazine.Although it is impossible to obtain relevant information such as the social status of journal subscribers using this method, it at least provides a way to count the number of subscribers.

This example shows that the salesman has noticed the difference between different consumer groups, and is actively seeking a method to scientifically measure this difference.Although good results have been achieved, they still ignore an important survey method, that is:

4. Psychological methods.The reason for the huge differences between consumer groups is the difference in group psychology, such as differences in cognition, feeling, motivation, etc.Some salesmen, who are vaguely aware of this fact, often say that the main readership of X's issue is intellectuals, and that the fans of Y's issue are mostly ordinary people.Apparently, Journal Y was very influential among the "working" class, while Journal X was the opposite.If such differences do exist, there must be ways of measuring them.This work is very difficult, because most of the concepts and content related to psychology are abstract and vague.Moreover, it is only in recent years that psychology is considered an exact science, so we have not found a psychological ruler that can measure all psychological phenomena.

Different reader groups have different psychological activities and preferences.Looking for a way to tell them apart, we researched several newspapers and magazines and found a way to determine what kind of readership a certain journal attracts.The process and results of this method can be expressed numerically.Although the differences in advertising and sales are not very obvious due to the different projections of these psychological activities, they have a great impact on advertising and sales styles, so we hope to find a way to solve the following two problems that advertisers often encounter.These two questions are: which medium should be used and how to advertise on this medium.

The content of the preparatory stage is very simple, as follows: choose two journals that serve different readerships, the "Daily Mail" and "The Chicago American".Extract continuous fragments of about 6 characters from 5000 sections with similar content, including the editor-in-chief column, news column, and character column, of the two newspapers. Note that the number of words selected in the two newspapers is the same, and arrange these words into a table according to the number of syllables . The Daily Mail has 70 percent more words of two or more syllables than the Chicago American, and the remaining three-syllables, four-syllables, etc. have a similar percentage difference.

In order to test whether this method can accurately distinguish the similarities and differences between the two magazines, we used the same test method to compare the two magazines "Century" and "American".The results are shown in Table 1, and it turns out that this method is also suitable for magazine discrimination.The results show that the frequency of words with two or more syllables in "Century" is 36% higher than that in "American", words with three or more syllables are 59% higher, words with four or more syllables are 67% higher, and words with five or more syllables are more frequent than those in "American". 100% higher for words.

(End of this chapter)