Persuasion might have earned itself a bad reputation next to less favorable tactics like manipulation, but persuasion isn’t inherently malicious. In marketing, persuasion is an effective technique for motivating someone to take a specific action. This can mean purchasing a product, providing an email address, or visiting a brand’s website.
Let’s explore the ways persuasion is used in marketing. In this article, we will define persuasive marketing, explore persuasive marketing techniques like the Barnum effect, gamification, peak end rule, persuasive profiling, and scarcity, and discuss persuasion marketing examples.
What is Persuasive Marketing?
Persuasive Marketing Techniques
The Barnum Effect
Gamification
Peak End Rule
Persuasive Profiling
Scarcity
Persuasion Marketing Examples
What is Persuasive Marketing?
Persuasive marketing, also called persuasion marketing, is a marketing technique that uses human psychology to promote products and services. When this technique is added to your marketing mix, various psychological concepts are the driving forces behind your marketing decisions.
Persuasive Marketing Techniques
There are a variety of persuasive marketing techniques that each use their own psychological findings to persuade consumers to make a purchase. Let’s take a deeper look at five common persuasive marketing techniques.
The Barnum Effect
The Barnum Effect, also known as the Forer Effect, is the concept that people will believe highly generalized descriptions of personality traits as something very specific and accurate to them. The descriptions are general and apply to large groups of people, yet they make consumers feel like they’ve been specifically written about them.
This specific persuasive marketing technique gets its name from famed circus founder P.T. Barnum. While promoting his circus, he was quoted saying, “Always have a little something for everyone.” The Barnum Effect plays to everyone as a whole while making them feel special and unique as an individual.
The Barnum Effect persuasive marketing technique can be applied by identifying a trait widely found throughout your audience and making product descriptions and advertisements that address the concerns and desires of that personality trait.
Gamification
In regards to persuasive marketing, the gamification tactic involves taking elements from gaming situations and applying them to non-gaming scenarios. This typically includes things like loyalty programs, actual games, and unique ways for customers to interact with brands.
The gamification technique spans a variety of different applications, from completely obvious to more subtle uses. From scratching off a card to reveal a coupon at a department store, to first-person shooter games on army recruitment advertisements, the ways gamification can be applied in marketing are seemingly endless.
Peak End Rule
Coined by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the Peak End Rule is the concept that we remember our experiences based on two things: the peak of the experience and the end of the experience. The peak of an experience refers to the most emotionally heightened part of the experience, which could be either positive or negative. The end of an experience simply refers to the way it ended.
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The Peak End Rule is all about using the memory customers form about your business to your advantage. Our brains aren’t capable of remembering everything about experiences with each brand, and the Peak End Rule helps brands properly understand this and apply it to the experiences they create for their customers.
In order to start using the Peak End Rule persuasive marketing technique, brands should first identify the peaks and ending experiences they’re offering their customers. Brands can then evaluate ways to make each of these instances better, thus improving the overall experience and memory each customer has of the brand.
Persuasive Profiling
Persuasive profiling is the concept of applying a human touch to the interactions customers have with brands online. This persuasive marketing technique personalizes your product offering and selling tactics to meet the needs and personality profiles of each customer.
How you sell a product or service to your customers is just as important as what products or services you’re selling. Where shopping in person provides the opportunity for human interaction and personalized service, persuasive profiling offers the same customized service to online shoppers by analyzing their online behavior and quickly adapting to it.
Scarcity
In relation to persuasive marketing, the concept of scarcity preys on consumers’ desire to own things that are scarce or only available in limited quantities. Scarcity is an effective technique when marketing products or services because it increases desire. This tactic can be so effective that it often persuades consumers to purchase something they wouldn’t normally buy.
Persuasion Marketing Examples
One of the most commonly occurring examples of the Barnum Effect in persuasive marketing is how many people believe their horoscopes that are written in magazines, newspapers, and online publications. The horoscopes feel so specific to each one of us, but they’re written in such generalized form they apply to a large audience.
Another effective example of the Barnum Effect is the Spotify Wrapped report that the streaming platform publishes at the end of every year. The Spotify Wrapped reports are designed to make each listener feel unique from their peers. Spotify also takes it one step further and provides personalized playlists based on the songs in each listeners’ reports.
Are you unique because you listened to Olivia Rodrigo on repeat in 2021? The answer is no, you’re not. Spotify made you feel unique by compiling your top artists and songs for the year and presenting them to you in a format that felt uniquely personalized.
A great persuasion marketing example of gamification is the Starbucks Reward Program. Not only does this program offer you the ability to order ahead and check out faster, it also offers loyalists free coffee, bonus days, and special games to earn even more rewards. Your morning coffee routine is no longer mundane with Starbucks Rewards.
Conclusion
Now that you’re aware of persuasive marketing and the tactics involved in deploying this technique, are you realizing the ways in which it’s been used on you as a consumer? How will you be able to apply these various psychological concepts and persuasion techniques to market your brand’s products or services?