Fourteen Lectures on Consumer Psychology

Chapter 8 Group Sales (2)
We continue to study the literacy levels of the different readerships that magazines attract.This study examines sentences in magazine articles.We took 4 consecutive sentences from the same-page columns of 8000 same-month periodicals (two newspapers and two magazines).Sentences are classified according to the number of words contained therein, and belong to different sentence groups with a difference of 10 words.Thus, sentences containing 1 to 10 words belong to the first group, sentences containing 11 to 20 words belong to the second group, sentences 20 to 30 words long belong to the third group, and so on.Sentences of different lengths are assigned to different groups, and the percentage of the number of sentences in each group is shown in Table 2.The results showed that articles in the Daily Mail used more long sentences than in the Chicago American.If you count sentences with more than 20 words as long sentences, and sentences with 10 to 20 words as medium length sentences, you will find that the number of long sentences in the "Chicago American" is higher than that in the "Daily Mail". 5.6% less.That is to say, when the percentage of long sentences in "Chicago American" is 43.4% of all sentences, the proportion of long sentences in "Daily Mail" will reach 49.0%, and the use of long sentences exceeds 1/ of the total number of sentences. 3.The difference between the number of long sentences used in magazines is even greater, with only 33% of the total sentences in American compared to Century.

This result is not to say that newspapers and magazines with more polysyllabic words and longer sentences attract more intelligent readers, because the number of polysyllabic words and long sentences is not a measure of erudition or vulgarity of readers.However, one thing we must admit is that in general, people who like to read long sentences are mostly people with a relatively high level of education.Many vocabulary tests also show that people with larger vocabularies have higher IQs, so we assume that people who know more polysyllabic words are also smarter.

However, the verification method just adopted is actually too incomplete to prove the truth of this hypothesis.Differences between the readership psychology of different periodicals, and content differences that often come to the attention of advertisers, are much more numerous than the above mentioned.In particular, consumers have differences in their emotional preferences, such as taste and interest.These differences in sentiment preferences can be categorized by calculating the page size (excluding advertising space) allocated to the different topics of reading content for each selected research journal.Categorize the content of magazines and newspapers according to different headings, such as politics, business, religion, literary criticism, science, sports, etc.

By making statistics on the data of these periodicals, the salesman can obtain a set of data related to the advertisement layout.These data show the size and number of ads a magazine uses each month for other products that are very similar to what the salesman is about to sell.From these different lengths, it can be found that the readers of the magazine are interested in this kind of products.Of course, if more magazine data are collected, it will be found that readers' preferences are closely related to the journal's choice of different subject sections and advertising categories.

The different ad pages offered by journals for different products were our next test data.If the salesman uses the "historical research method" mentioned above here, he can easily find out the percentage of the total number of advertisements published by this journal over the years for products similar to the products he will sell.For example, a salesman who wants to sell tennis-related products may choose to place an ad in a periodical where more than 20% of the advertising content is sports.

Needless to say, this preliminary method of investigation applies to all practical situations in group selling.The above examples are mainly given to illustrate that different journals have different readerships. With more human input and collaboration in psychology experiments and advertising copy rooms, we hope to eventually find a useful measurement method for advertising personnel. , so that different psychological activities of different reader groups can be observed and measured.

Different media require different advertisements
After deciding on which media to advertise on, advertisers who are familiar with the psychological factors affecting group consumption will modify the advertisement appropriately according to the different psychological characteristics of readers of each media.

There is a good example of using different advertising strategies for different media.We are not sure whether Mr. Frank Flemen has scientifically studied crowd psychology, but as general manager of HW Gossard at the time, he launched a successful advertising campaign involving 11 different national women's magazines.He knows that these 11 magazines all target different groups, and the content and form of advertisements need to adapt to the different styles of these 11 magazines.Because the style of these magazines cannot be described by simple numbers, Frank interviewed the editors of each magazine and asked them to describe the characteristics of the different female groups targeted by the magazine, and then the advertising copywriters would closely follow the different editorial policies and readership groups of the magazines. come up with different ad copy.

For example, the tenets of Good Housekeeping are closely tied to Dr. Waley's ideas and food safety.The magazine guarantees the authenticity of the advertisements published in it, so readers believe the advertisements in "Good Housekeeping" very much.According to this theme, the advertisement published in this magazine is a picture of a swirling galaxy against Gossard's products, with the slogan: "Good quality that has been verified and tested".

The full-page ad in Vogue featured an aristocratic woman in a limousine.She seemed like the kind of person who would pay $25 for a Gossard underwear without blinking an eye instead of paying a penny for a newspaper.The advertising tagline "As rich and beautiful as Dora Rogers" will have a lot of positive effects on those proud, wealthy upper-class ladies.They will be more convinced that it is the shaping effect of Gossard underwear that they can walk out of the Rolls-Royce and enter the high-end salon.

After enumerating the different styles of ads that appeared in these different magazines, Frank concluded: "Our ads are successful simply because we have different ads for different styles of magazines that fit their style."

Using this method, even without rigorous scientific measurement assistance, such good practical results can be achieved.If you can combine scientific measurement with this method, you will definitely get a more effective group selling method.

Characteristics of Group Psychology—Trend Phenomena

One of the characteristics of crowd psychology is the phenomenon of trends.A trend phenomenon can be defined as "a group of people who repeatedly choose a product over and over again, for these buyers, practicality is not the main reason for purchasing".Trends are one of the main psychological factors affecting modern sales.Everyone knows its power, but few people have summed up the law of its occurrence, so salesmen have no way to use it.

Analyzing the trend phenomenon is to reveal some knowledge about it, such as how it is produced and how it operates.To clarify these issues, we must first understand several characteristics that appear in the generation and development of trends.

1. The first is universality.Trends can occur on any object of human behavior, such as clothing, speech, dance, gait, and hairstyle.Another common explanation is that the trend can happen to just about everyone, shining its splendor everywhere from Fifth Avenue to the palm-fringed sands along the South Island coast.

2. A trend is not judged by its usefulness.In fact, many trends are popular precisely because they have no practical value.High heels, for example, are popular because they prevent a woman from working freely, thereby proving that she belongs to the well-to-do class with free time.

3. There must be some innovative elements in the beginning of the trend.

4. The reason for the rise of the trend in the first place is that some people want to show that they are different.If a girl living on the Riverside Coast in California or Zululand in South Africa wears a string of green beads that her peers don't have, that bead sets her apart.

5. The next feature of the trend - imitation, other girls will imitate her and also wear a string of green beads.

Among the seven social groups ABCDEFG, individual D adopted a new idea. She wore a string of green beads, which quickly distinguished her from those around her.But when everyone else imitates her behavior and wears green beads, we can no longer distinguish D from all of them.

6. From this imitation behavior, we can find that the first person to make changes in his life and clothing is often imitated by others.

7. After the imitation stage, the trend-setting individuals who once had new equipment no longer stand out.

Trendsetter D finds himself reduced to the crowd.So I changed my decorations (maybe a new kind of bow on my shoes).This innovation once again made her stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, her look would be imitated again, so she had to find the next symbol that could distinguish her from the crowd.

8. After so many cycles, it is difficult to create a new trend symbol.So people are forced to pick up elements that were popular a long time ago.The element that has been dormant for a long time, although popular a few generations ago, is full of novelty in the eyes of the new generation.In other words, the trend is cyclical: shoes cycle from wide to narrow, from high heels to flat bottoms, and the length of women's skirts also swings back and forth between long and short and loose.

Is there a rule to follow when trends are popular?Many people have given the answer.But it is meaningless to think and infer only, and the explanation must be confirmed with survey data.The above is a brief summary of the trend situation.Any trend can be analyzed using the characteristics listed above, and salesmen can also find some business inspiration from this analysis.

The relationship between trends and sales
Clearly, trends can stimulate consumption by creating demand.In the same way, a weakening of a certain trend will also reduce consumer demand for a particular commodity.Therefore, salesmen need to study trends from the perspective of data. If possible, by studying trend data, salesmen can predict what kind of products they need to buy and how many such products they need to store before the next wave of trends arrives. How long will it last, and when will it start preparing for the next wave.

In introducing a new product to a certain group of consumers, a salesman can be sure to succeed if he understands the psychology of fashion trends and designs his marketing plan accordingly.He can use rule 4 mentioned above to sell the product by showing the consumer how a product can give the consumer different individual characteristics and make him stand out from the crowd.According to rules 5 and 6, the first buyer of the product that the salesman is looking for is preferably a trend leader recognized by a certain social group.To the rest of the social group, the salesman can tell them that you, too, can differentiate yourself by buying from us like the leader of your group.

summary
Consumers do not always appear as individuals, but sometimes appear as groups.The phenomenon of crowds leads to a characteristic crowd psychology.This lecture introduces several psychological characteristics of groups, then extends to trend phenomena, and finally discusses the relationship between trends and commercial sales.

The psychology of the readers attracted by various sales media is different.Therefore, if a salesman wants to conduct sales in a targeted manner, he must investigate some characteristics of group psychology from the following aspects: geography, economy, society and psychology (the sample investigation of the last few characteristics, we use data to show the differences between them. Significant difference between ).Through these scientific investigations, salesmen can more appropriately choose different sales media for different consumer groups.

(End of this chapter)