The father of modern management, Peter Drucker, once stated that, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

If you take what Mr. Drucker says seriously, you begin to take understand your significance to your organization as a marketer. And with this awareness, you soon realize that your marketing must be focused on performance, leveraging every possible ethical advantage.

What I’ll share below are tactics that leverage what we know to be true about human nature. Playing off of human nature is a pretty solid bet, when you must produce results, since they’re timeless and universal.

Warning: Once seen, the tactics below can never be forgotten. Use these tactics responsibly and for good.

1. The Zeigarnik Effect

Think about your favorite Netflix series… How do they keep you hooked until next episode or next season?? A cliffhanger! And that includes an incomplete story.

The news uses this regularly, as well: Think about those headline that are teased right before the break, you know where they mention a controversial, en vogue celebrity doing something peculiar or shocking.

They’ll tease it a few times before going to break, as you wait, glued to the screen to hear the salacious dirt.

And when they return, you’re primed and ready to hear the juicy details, but the talking heads go into news, weather and even sports, before making a trivial reference to something that a 3rd rate Beyoncé impersonator got busted doing. And with a contrived chuckle, the news team signs off for the evening.

Fully underwhelmed, you hit the hay to catch some z’s, but the Zeigarnik Effect did its job — it grabbed and held your attention. (Lesson learned by the news example: make your payoff deliver!)

The Zeigarnik Effect is named after Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who observed the effect of interruption on her subjects, and how that affected memory processing.

Her findings essentially boil down to the fact that the human mind cannot deal with incomplete thoughts. We need those thoughts to be completed. It creates interest and we remember things left incomplete; this can be used to hold attention — an incredibly powerful skill in today’s world.

2. Make Them Identify with Exclusivity

MaslowAbraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a good starting place for marketing psychology and offering exclusivity plays into multiple needs identified by Maslow.

Belonging and Esteem: Everyone wants to be part of something, yet everyone needs to feel significant. An exclusive group, product, brand or offer make the consumer a part of the movement that goes along with the purchase, as well as it identifies the beholder as someone of some uniqueness.

Offering exclusive memberships, high-quality personalized promotional items, events or other touches reserved only for your VIPs is a good way to ingratiate them using this principle.

3. Social Proof

Everyone is doing it! As simple as that sounds, we’re very much influenced by — what “everyone else” is doing.
Putting it into social media terms, think about it this way — are you more likely to “like” a Facebook post that has been liked by 3 other people, or instead the post that has been liked 327 people?

When we see others doing things that we’re considering, we feel safety and comfort in knowing that it’s acceptable or a good idea. Social proof is a primary reason that testimonials prove to be so powerful in influencing buying decisions.

To Be Continued…