psy·cho·lin·guis·tics
/?s?k?liNG??wistiks/
noun
- the study of the relationships between linguistic behavior and psychological processes, including the process of language acquisition.
My work involves this study of linguistics and the psychological process through the gateway of customers and what they buy. By no means do I perform psycholinguistic research and it’s pure form. Instead, I look at real-world human behaviors and convert them into a series of personality traits — all predicted. Theories of customers. Then, connecting traits to sales data, you have some understanding of why people make decisions that impact their pocketbook and the services and products they bring into their lives.
Why do this?
I’m amazed in the decades I have been around that marketers, really don’t understand what I want. I want to be delighted and surprised.
Some of the best examples of delight come from the off-line world. When is the last time the banner ad make you cry? Certainly, the real world can and so can video, compelling written stories, even the old 30-second commercial when given enough time, can work their magic.
Pick up a magazine, a real-world magazine that matters to you. One time I was in Germany and noticed that they had 10 different versions of fishing magazines. I can’t read German that well but I did notice how diverse the subject matter is. The obvious is saltwater vs. streams vs. lakes and of course what you can catch. What was fascinating to me is how marketers used different magazines for diverse products and services. Example: Lake fishing, Audi. Saltwater, BMW and so on. is this random or do they have a great understanding of their audience?
That got me to thinking, can digital media one day reach this and delight me with surprising things that exist in the world that I’ve never heard of.
Do I have to rely on my friends and family to tell me about new things?
Must I come up with a need in my life, a job to be done, and then guess at what product or service is going to fulfill that need?
Can marketers find the efficiencies of what digital has promised and combine it with customer delight, a real-world KPI that Amazon is focused on? Can you bring what works or has worked so well in stores, some stores, and bring that experience online in an economical way.
After 20 years of doing this type of work, why are things still so basic? We’re still talking about topics that I was executing and creating in the late 90s. All of that stuff should be dead and buried and we should have moved on by now.
It’s time for a paradigm shift that includes protecting our privacy, stopping unnecessary collection of data and yet, give people what they want. It can be done and it will be done.
What solves this problem starts with a few basic things:
The business operating system. You must have a mechanism in place that rewards creative, innovative ideas. You can’t just keep rewarding what worked in the past based on what some spreadsheet jockey tells you to do. It’s a flawed system that sets up a recipe for disruption.
You have to understand customers and what delights them. That’s not just a creative or marketing topic, it’s again an operating system that can next what’s inside of your CRM with a predictive CRM, a look like CRM of future size.
Having a theory of customers is critical. It’s integral to the above two items. Theories of customers cannot be solely based on surveys, clicks, and cookies. It can’t be based upon media alone — although that is a great feedback mechanism. It has to be based upon real-world theories of people. Theories have to be tested and they have to have causal connections to revenue.
These ideas are starting to get built into some of the best companies that will in the coming decade, wipe out the incumbents at an ever-faster pace. Organizations need to immediately budget for customer-centric answers yet dial into to significant changes in revenue.
What’s the best way to kill a competitor, grow, and do it fast.
Business OS x Customer Delight x CRM look-alike = growth