How strong is your brand : managing customer psychology

In the current climate with such a focus on the industry, now more than ever before, making clients happy is key: [1]happiness makes us want to share and this is within not only our social circle in a physical sense but now with a site like “Adviser Ratings” - in a virtual forum.

Happiness is achieved by bonding and in the financial planners office when a client is most likely feeling emotions of fear and anxiety, people look to cope with those emotions by bonding with the adviser and the advice process. As researcher Lea Dunn advises us “in the absence of friends, consumers will create heightened emotional attachment with a brand that happens to be on hand.” That begs the question : how strong is your financial planning brand remembering that you and your staff indeed epitomise your brand and it is what clients are looking to bond with?

What is required then is process that embodies your authenticity and most importantly has an understanding of the psychology of the client before, during and after the advice process and how you can use technology to enhance that engagement. Welcome then to “Technoclientology”: the psychology of engaging clients in a modern world, where we combine what we have learnt from neuroscience, modernity and behavioural psychology and when combined with a social world, we can enable clients to make better decisions.

Psychology

Just how do we make decisions and what occurs in peoples minds to help them evaluate situations. What do we need to know about how peoples minds work?

“Cognitive control and value-based decision-making tasks appear to depend on different brain regions within the prefrontal cortex,” says Jan Glascher, lead author of the study and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, referring to the seat of higher-level reasoning in the brain.[2]

In normal brain functioning people : a valuation network in the brain auto computes what's good and what's bad, before the person concerned has a chance to consciously understand the decision making process has occured. It is quick. It is intuitive and it is automatic.

This highlights the complexities in dealing with customers where you need them to make a considered rationale choice. The choice has less to do with the rationalities of your proposal and more to do with how they feel about you and your brand. In short they have a gut feel about what is good and what is bad for them : and if you have not connected with them then that good choice (rationally) seems the uncomfortable one.

Most people believe that the choices they make result from a rational analysis of available alternatives. In reality, however, emotions greatly influence and, in many cases, even determine our decisions

In a book, Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, puts forth that emotions are necessary ingredients to almost all decisions. What occurs is that emotions from previous experiences attribute value and impact how we consider the options in front of us. These emotions create preferences which lead to our decision. Damasio’s view is based on his studies of people whose connections between the “thinking” and “emotional” areas of the brain had been damaged. They were capable of rationally processing information about alternative choices; but were unable to make decisions because they lacked any sense of how they felt about the options. (ref Dr Peter Noel Murray).

So if you are not using some method of assessing past experiences and values and hierachies in a clients decision making you actually leave so much of your process to chance. When it comes to money : we have values associated with our experiences and these values have been passed to us from our parents. If you are not questioning clients about these experiences your process is like waiting for a magic eye picture to appear.

This all means that what you need to embed in your process is :

- a means of uncovering a clients values

- questioning on past experiences

- determining a clients hierarchy of choice assessment

- looking at their goals and the why of their goals so you elevate a simple statement of a goal or objective to a highly functional progression and pathway that you indeed can influence

- a show casing of you as an individual and your brand

Dr Peter Noel Murray reminds us that The influential role of emotion in consumer behavior is well documented:
•Advertising research reveals that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content – by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.
•Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation concluded that the emotion of “likeability” is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.
•Studies show that positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments which are based on a brand’s attributes.

We pay more for brand names. These brands have emotionally connected with us. The richer the emotional content of a brand’s mental representation, the more likely the consumer will be a loyal user.[4]



[1] The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brains Decide What to Share and Whom to Trust : Courtney Seiter

[2] Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides

Two distinct brain networks guide our reasoning and the behaviors we ultimately undertake based on those judgments

By Maia Szalavitz @maiaszSept. 04, 2012



[3] Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides

Two distinct brain networks guide our reasoning and the behaviors we ultimately undertake based on those judgments

By Maia Szalavitz @maiaszSept. 04, 2012



[4] How Emotions Influence What We Buy

The emotional core of consumer decision-making

Published on February 26, 2013 by Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D. in Inside the Consumer Mind