Definition of Ad•col•ogy:  n. The total integration of advertising and psychology for the express purpose of decreasing consumer resistance while creating immediate action.

Step 1    Analysis of Your Product/Service’s Psychological Motivators

Consumer decisions are seldom made via cold, calculated, detached and unemotional motivations. Instead, consumers make purchases based on emotional and often subconscious prompts.  Because of this, it is essential to analyze a product/service from every conceivable psychological angle to know exactly what will motivate the widest possible group of consumers to purchase a product/service

Step 2     Psychodemographic Consumer Profiling

In this step, both existing and future consumers are profiled to extrapolate a matrix of information concerning the psychological nuances that attract them to a given product/service are studied. In short, this is consumer profiling.

Step 3     Psychologically Crafted Advertising Messages

Whether television, radio, print, direct mail or Internet advertising, a tremendous advantage is that every word, image and element that goes into the advertising message emanates from a dynamic psychological meshing of everything we’ve learned from the target consumers.

Step 4    Media Buying (Psychdemographic Matches Media Options)

Overwhelming consumer and product intelligence empowers intelligent media buying with laser precise accuracy.

Case Study – GoodShop.com

Goodshop is a shopping portal whereby 700 + online retailers will give a percentage of everything a consumer buys to charity so long as you start the shopping experience at Goodshop.com.

Marketing Intelligence

For direct response advertisers, marketing intelligence means fully understanding the consumer and his/her buying behaviors from 360º and how to develop creative that taps into this intelligence.  The following is an example of how this played out with an actual advertiser – Goodshop.com

The following commercial was used to introduce Goodshop.com to a large conservative radio network.

Goodshop :30 (Salem Network – Generic non-host read) V-1.0

Work a virtual miracle for your church or charity! At GoodShop dot com over 700 of your favorite online stores have teamed up with GoodShop.com to donate a portion of each online purchase you make to YOUR charity. It costs you nothing! Give generously to your church, charity, or school simply by starting at GoodShop.com whenever you shop online. It costs you nothing. VISIT GoodShop.com that’s GoodShop.com.

Analysis of Advertising

Profile of Consumer

Female, 35-64, Avg. Income $55,000. Mother. Homeowner. 2.4 children.

On the surface, the above commercial should have produced results. It targets the right consumer and the message is concise and positive. The reason it did not produce results can be directly linked to failing to acknowledge that consumers do not change buying behaviors quickly or easily.

For instance, a consumer could hear the 60 and 30 second commercials, believe it is a good idea, desire to use the service and yet not give it a second thought several days later when she is at the computer making a purchase. Therefore, the advertiser could spend tens of thousands of dollars and never really motivate change in consumers.

We retooled the campaign by first identifying what would motivate consumers to:

a)    remember the service even days later while shopping online

b)   take more immediate and measurable action

Analyzing consumers who are motivated to give to charity, we centered on a theme. Instead of telling consumers you can give to any charity of your choice, we decided to target specific, emotional charitable tones with each commercial. For instance: in one commercial, we see small children in a hospital setting. Child (A) looks directly into the camera and says, “I’m Laura. I’m 8-years-old and I have Leukemia. Would you good shop for me?” She is followed by other children all with childhood cancers and each asking the consumer to good shop for them.

The purpose behind this creative approach is not veiled. Children evoke strong emotion in all of us. Suffering children even more. If the client is to have any chance of creating a long-lasting message that transcends the time until the consumer is online and buying, it will be a strong, emotional plea from a child.

Another psychological tactic was employed – repetition. Behaviorists understand that for any action to become a habit, it must be repeated a minimum of 7 times. In this case, hearing perhaps one or two 60 second commercials every few days would not stand a chance of changing a consumer’s behavior. To combat this, we condensed 60 second commercials into 10 second commercials featuring the children. This allowed us to get 6 times the frequency with a more impacting creative message. While the repetition was starting to trend favorably with consumers, we took it a step further. We created additional 5 second radio commercials featuring radio station employees saying, “I’m Mary Jones, KFI sales and I good shop for the Heart Association”. Because of the relatively low cost of 5 second messages, we were able to blanket the station with this creative – thus making it virtually impossible for a listener to miss multiple messages. Still, this model was great for frequency, but it did not solve the issue of how to create change in consumer buying when the commercial and the event were several hours and days apart.

To address this we took a two-pronged approach. First, we asked each host to choose a charity for themselves and their listeners to support. The KFI (Los Angeles) afternoon hosts chose a charity and began talking about all the money their listeners had raised for that charity, but instead of saying the amount raised, they implored the listener to go to the website right now and look at the total. They repeatedly complimented the listeners as well. This tactic utilized vanity and curiosity to move the consumer to go to Goodshop.com, even though they were not ready to buy. In this regard, we had ad least won half the battle which was getting the consumer to the site where we had an opportunity to get them to bookmark it.

Next, we created further curiosity (almost voyeuristic) motivations in our creative messaging suggesting the consumers go to Goodshop.com to see which charities celebrities chose to be their cause.

It was this multi-tactical approach (frequency + immediacy + compelling messaging + vanity + voyeurism) that ultimately caused consumers to change their internet buying behaviors. This is an example of marketing intelligence and how it plays out in direct response advertising.