Effective marketing starts with people. Because understanding your customer is crucial for the success of your sustainable brand, John Marshall Roberts devoted most of his Sustainable Brands Boot Camp session* to psychology and the understanding of your audience’s worldview. To design effective communications you must understand how your audience makes sense of the world — its core values that filter perception and thoughts.
Roberts used the human development psychology of Clare Graves as his conceptual framework: people’s thinking and worldviews evolve and become increasingly cognitively complex in a systematic way along 8 levels. The following levels are the most common in the U.S. today:
- Absolutistic, 20% of population; values discipline, authority, and purpose; thinks of life as a test; is best approached with calls to duty, doing the right thing, tradition or nationalism;
- Individualist, 30%; values success, power, affluence, and profit; life is a game; calls to action work best, as does emphasis on personal gain and bottom-line outcomes
- Humanistic, 25%; values empathy, honesty, relatedness and people; thinks of the world as one human family; responds to calls to imagine and help the community
- Systemic, 10-15%; values integrity, competence, sustainability, and balance; life is a system; calls to service work best as does a pragmatic planetary perspective
Psychographic segmentation also helps determine how your audience filters information. There are three filters people use, each of which comes with its own characteristics:
- Sensory filter: pertains to the what; engages attention; works through force; is material
- Mental filter: pertains to the how; engages interest; works through persuasion; is transformational
- Spiritual filter: pertains to the why; engages thought; works through inspiration; is causal
Your messages must be adjusted to your target audience member’s thinking and filtering styles. With increasing cognitive complexity, i.e. with people thinking more in humanistic and systemic terms, comes the increase in the use of spiritual filters. A winning communication strategy bypasses these mental filters through authenticity, humor, beauty, or a combination of these.
According to Roberts, a good why is in your brand’s DNA, is authentic, ignites inspiration, and assumes that “humans are connected and abundant”.
Though not new, the emphasis on purpose, “the why”, has gained traction (and will dominate) in marketing circles; most recently, I saw Simon Sinek’s TEDxPugetSound presentation on his “Start with Why” concept. With all other differentiators tapped out as their products became commodities, brands are trying to differentiate on meaning. Put simply, these days competition on purpose is where it’s at (or soon will be). That’s not a bad thing, if, as Russell Ackoff points out, competition has a cooperative objective: different purposes may be in conflict, but together they all aim for the betterment of humanity, for example.
That you must know your customer is a marketing maxim. Knowledge no longer suffices, however. Effective communications require you understand your customer as well.
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Image credit: hapal
* Disclosure: Sustainable Life Media granted me a free press pass for the Sustainable Brands Boot Camp – regular registration for the online seminar series is $395.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
excellent summary! really clear and to the point. thanks for being such a good listener.
yes, I was shocked to learn recently of Simon Simonek’s work. looks like he has started to dial in on some of the same ideas.
lord knows there’s room for all of us.
cheers,
John
@John: Thank YOU for a great preso. There is room for a lot of different purposes, indeed.
Hey Peter!
Great post – sort of sad I missed out on this Boot Camp, sounds like a good mixture of information.
Of course this is my favorite post…on Communications, on operating from a sense of purpose and from your “Why”.
Sort of interesting to see Clare Graves’ work used here – I’m very familiar with his spiral dynamics model. And while I think it’s entirely useful to know this information cognitively, here’s the part I find most interesting (per Simon Sinek’s research and some of Seth Godin’s):
That part of your brain that most resonates with the “Spiritual Filter”, the “Why”, if you will, is not directly responsible for language. So this means it’s nearly impossible to accurately describe these aspects. How do you describe falling in love? The feeling of passion? It’s tough. This makes our jobs as communicators challenging and even more important to operate from “Why” because the old adage rings true: actions speak louder than words. Especially when it comes to authenticity and purpose.
Thanks for a great post series!
@Megan: Thank you for sharing. It makes me think of emotional business intelligence, if there is such a thing. Putting it all into practice is the challenge.