How Behavioral Science Thinking Improves Marketing Effectiveness

The reason so much of a small business marketing efforts fail, is because we are trying to industrialize a department of our organization that can’t be industrialized. Implementing behavioral science thinking is perhaps the single biggest improvement a business can make to their marketing effectiveness.

In many ways, we could say that small business owners have never had it so good. It’s easier than ever to start a business, and there are a gazillion number of affordable marketing tools and services out there to help us on our journey.

But the one thing that’s stubbornly refused to budge in all this time is the traditional, let’s call it “economics-driven approach” to marketing that seems to be ingrained in the minds of most business people.

I’m not just calling out the disconnect between how most businesses think their customers buy stuff, and how customers actually buy stuff. I’m saying that, regardless of size, businesses need to rethink the way they’ve been marketing if they want to prevent their organization from appearing irrelevant to today’s buyer.

With increased market and category competition, and powerful tools such as LLMs, businesses need to review their marketing processes ASAP if they’re not going to be swept away in the current tsunami.

As Steven Covey says, “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.”

The Blind Spot in the Boardroom: Why Businesses Neglect Buyer Behavior in Their Marketing

In theory, marketing for a small business today should be easy – or at least easier. Compared to a decade ago, marketers have a huge armory of weaponry at their disposal. Customer research, feedback loops, demographic profiling, outreach workflow automation – this list is endless. For the price of your average monthly car loan payment, you can put together an awesome technology stack that’ll do pretty much everything except put the bins out.

We have so many tools – AI, custom audience profiles, remarketing tags, and whatever else. Yet the effectiveness of our marketing efforts is getting worse.

How can that be? How can things have been better before we had all of this tech?

Excuse-seekers will blame increased competition, or a more educated, savvy buyer. Blame-avoiders will mention some horse manure about customer attention spans getting shorter, or the greater choice in communication channels.

The real reason is a lot more basic: Most of what passes for marketing today just plain sucks.

Most of the business communication we see today seems to be missing a key component driver of messaging effectiveness: memorability.

86% of marketing isn’t recalled or remembered. Since annual global marketing expenditure is around $1.76tn (yes, trillion!) that means we’re flushing $1.5 trillion straight down the poop chute. Not exactly a great return on our money, is it?

The Illusion of Rationality: Why Businesses Misunderstand Their Customers

The core problem comes down to the way higher-ups in business equate the “process” of marketing with processes involved in other business units. Since their world is one stuffed full of logic and rationality, they think the rest of the world runs the same way.

Let’s look at manufacturing as an example. To increase the profitability of whatever it is we’re making, there are a number of tangible, logical, rational things we can do.

If we’re making widgets, we could invest in a faster widget-making machine, thereby increasing productivity and lowering per-unit cost. We could change our raw material supplier to one prepared to sell to us more cheaply. We could automate more human-dependent parts of the widget-making process, so that we can reduce the number of people we need to operate the machine. You get the picture.

That’s fine when we’re talking about manufacturing, where every part of the process can be precisely measured and documented. But applying such ’cause-and-effect’ rationalized thinking to marketing just doesn’t work. Why? Because we’re assuming our customers are rational participants who make their decisions based on logic, objective value, and a calculated pursuit of what economists would call “utility maximization.” Which is clearly very far from reality.

In the real world the vast majority of human decisions – including buying decisions – are driven by a complex interplay of emotions, cognitive biases, and social influences. In other words, as customers we buy from the heart, not the head. This holds true whether we’re talking about B2B or B2C (other than, in B2B, there’s usually more than one decision maker).

Behavioral Science: Rethinking Marketing Strategy

This is where Behavioral Science comes in.

Behavioral Science is an understanding of buyer psychology, in order to optimize its presentation to prospective customers, to increase the likelihood of a product or service being purchased.

It may have a fancy name, but Behavioral Science is nothing new. The key to success in marketing has always been to develop a deeper understanding of human psychology. For thousands of years, the best salespeople have been able to influence a potential buyer’s decision. By watching how a person behaves, listening to the answers they give to questions, understanding how people think and act in certain situations, yesterday’s salespeople could present their product in ways the customer saw to have value to them.

Behavioral Science seeks to codify the intuition of the best salespeople from yesterday, combining it with what the best minds in behavioral psychology and neuroscience now better understand about how our mind makes decisions. By recognizing and accounting for the biases, heuristics, and social influences that shape our behavior, businesses can create products and communications that are more appealing, persuasive, and effective to the buyers they’re seeking to attract.

The thing is, this has always been the case. Since the dawn of commerce the best marketers, advertisers, and salespeople were familiar with how we chose to present our product influenced the likelihood of purchase. Not with facts, logic, or rationality. But with emotion. With the things that make humans human.

Today, with Martech this and AI that, we’re trying to relinquish many of the responsibilities of marketing to automation, algorithms, and LLMs. Sure, the upside is we’re creating more with less. But the nature of what we’re producing is less fit for purpose. We’re failing to grow awareness, reputation, and revenue.

Our marketing has become less effective (failing to reaching the people who’ll buy) even though it’s become more efficient (cheaper/faster to produce).

So why are we doing it? That’s easy: we have something to point our finger at. By being able to blame “The Algorithm” when things turn all brown and smelly, we don’t get blamed by the boss.

The Future Of Marketing Is Psychological, Not Technological

The over-reliance on data-driven approaches and a stubborn, unwavering pursuit of efficiency ends up blinding marketers to the true drivers of consumer behavior.

Of course data and analytics are valuable tools. No one is saying they’re not. But they should not be the sole drivers of marketing strategy.

We’re trying to make marketing into the wrong kind of science. We’re trying to make it infinitely logical in its approach, and repeatable in its execution. As though “one size fits all”. As a result we have become overly reliant on measurable metrics, neglecting the (less tangible but equally important) aspects of human psychology and behavior.

But just because something is easily measurable, doesn’t mean it’s important to what we’re trying to do.

For example, the reason why a person may buy your product or service may not be because of its features, or that it’s better/faster/cheaper. It may simply be because they know they need something to solve a problem they have, and they vaguely remember having heard of your brand more than others in your category.

Buyers are often motivated by a desire to alleviate unease and uncertainty. Marketing campaigns that focus on identifying and addressing such anxieties, providing reassurance and building trust, can outperform the feature-laden ‘bullet-point’ type communications we so often see nowadays. Especially if they inject a little emotion into the creative execution. For example, have you noticed how you remember ads that are funny, more than ones that aren’t?

Appealing to buyers’ universal desires and motivations is far more effective than bombarding them with information and expecting them to join the dots for us. Instead of simply highlighting what a product does, what if we (also) mentioned how it makes people feel?

Creativity: The Essential Ingredient in a Human-Centric Marketing Landscape

The future for marketing is AI gobbling-up up the bottom end of content marketing, vomiting-out passable (but instantly forgettable) blog articles, images, videos, advertisements, or social media posts.

The mundane and the predictable becomes the norm.

This is why small businesses need to shift away from outdated models of rationality with their marketing. Instead, they should look to embrace the complex, often irrational realities of human behavior. The ability to craft compelling narratives, reframe problems, and engage buyers on an emotional level will become essential if we have any chance of being noticed.

Creativity, informed by behavioral science, will be an increasingly vital skill for marketers in a world dominated by cheap, AI-generated, mediocre content.

As buyers become ever-more saturated with information and advertising messages, creativity is essential for capturing attention, sparking curiosity, and creating memorable experiences that resonate at an emotional level. I don’t see AI ever coming up with “I’m Lovin’ It“, “Just Do It“, or “Think Different“, for example.

The ability to creatively reframe problems is a cornerstone in a behavioral science-driven marketing landscape. Marketers and business owners need to better understand the intuitive, emotion-driven parts of the brain, and acknowledge the significant role these areas play in decision-making.

This requires thinking beyond rational benefits and product attributes. Instead, it’s about focusing on creating emotional connections and crafting compelling narratives that resonate with buyers on a visceral level.

Creativity is crucial for crafting these narratives, designing experiences that evoke desired emotions.

How a Focus on Emotion Can Revolutionize Your Marketing

What I’m talking about is a shift away from traditional marketing frameworks that rely on abstract concepts borrowed from classical economic theory.

Instead, I’m urging businesses to adopt a more nuanced understanding of their customers, informed by behavioral insights and grounded in real-world observations.

• Go all-in on differentiation: Doing things the way everyone else does rarely leads to competitive advantage. When everyone follows the same recipe, they end up just reducing their differentiation and – without knowing it – increase competition. This why your business needs to stand out, to be seen as being different, and where all successful and effective marketing starts. This requires understanding how to trigger emotional responses and leverage the power of novelty and surprise.
• Simplify Messaging: When creating marketing content, it’s too easy to give in to the temptation of making communication sound grander than it really is. Too often, we want to show off. We want to demonstrate we know something about a subject that our audience does not. As a result, we embellish, extrapolate, and elaborate when – most often – what’s needed is something simple.
• Embrace Experimentation: There is no single right answer. What works for one business may fail with another. Continuous testing is mandatory, refining efforts based on insights extracted from both data as well as real-world customer feedback. Above all, we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge assumptions and try new things.

Businesses should consider adopting a more customer-centric approach to marketing. One that acknowledges the irrationality of human behavior and prioritizes building long-term brand value. Organizations can then create more effective tactical campaigns, maximizing their marketing investment, and achieve more sustainable growth.