Par J.E.F
Consumer duality:
the two-in-one Xerox tête-à-tête reality
the two-in-one Xerox tête-à-tête reality
Albert Einstein once said:
"We are facing a new kind of complexity: we carry two contradictory images of reality separately none of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do”
Today, the new consumers are telling us: '' Now you can forego of your unilateralist thinking and the only option you have is bilateralism, you can monolog all you want, we’re not listening, dialogue is your only option, get to know the real me or die'' consumer 2.0
Since the dawn of 2011, we began to witness a new consumerism movement, a revolution that shook companies of their foundation worldwide. Unlike our perceived reality of the new consumers. Today, the latter greatly feels burdened by our ambivalent enunciation of how we perceive, understand, and communicate with them.
The new wisdom of consumer duality
While fully rejecting our discourse, they are telling us, your communication blind absolutism and your naive speeches are worthless if they are not chaperoned, corroborated, and validated by us.
They add: ``your autocratic behavior no longer works. you really are galore if you have not yet understood that we are two consumers in one, understand that this duality is there to confuse you and put you on the path of distinction, individuation, and speciation, nothing in this world is homogeneous including us.
'' Our feeling is neither adversary nor discordant to our reason. Our emotion and reason are two twin components in our human consciousness. Our emotion is the response to any stimulation around us. The reason is the power of our intelligence that lets you submerge below our surface to undermine our axiom. You can contrast them against one another to see a set of opposite poles, but you can only see us as a single system of a cooperating harmony.'' consumer 2.0
Sub I consciousness
An odyssey into the fjord of the unconscious consumer
Since its inception, cognitive revolution reflected this metaphor: the mind is like a computer. We are all a set of running software on 3 pounds of neural hardware. The computer metaphor had helped to stimulate critical scientific breakthroughs. It led to the birth of artificial intelligence and helped make our inner life an appropriate subject for science.
Everything we do is oriented as in a computer, games, web, Facebook, Second Life, etc ... people have become evangelists of technology they can touch, feel and validate everything in their path to acquire truth about brands. Hence Brand Trust –R-Scores Artificial intelligence (CNN)
Today we live in a world dominated by filtering, acquiring, ordering and transacting, nothing we say or do will convince the audience unless backed by the HOW factor. Today, by the modern economic standards and consumersism 2.0, our marketing communication isn’t worth much, it appears, if it is not corroborated evident stories.
The contemporary consumer tells us, do not tell me, show me. We refer to the 5 Y old unconscious mind. Hence how do we explain neuroscience to a five year old child and expect to win their selective attention?
Conditioned by behavior resulting from economic turning points, our unconscious reacts uniformly. This is a recurring phenomenon of response to every 20 to 80 years of reoccurring events timeline .
Our unconscious is disconnected from the conscious and has its own operating mechanism. The unconscious mind perceives, thinks and reacts independently. The power of the unconscious is a level above the conscious, as it constitutes 95% of our overall brain faculty.
Conditioned by behavior resulting from economic turning points, our unconscious reacts uniformly. This is a recurring phenomenon of response to every 20 to 80 years of reoccurring events timeline .
Our unconscious is disconnected from the conscious and has its own operating mechanism. The unconscious mind perceives, thinks and reacts independently. The power of the unconscious is a level above the conscious, as it constitutes 95% of our overall brain faculty.
· Since its intrauterine period, the unconscious mind is programmed and because of all its sequels and sequences already incorporated in its architecture, It is impossible for the unconscious mind not to be programmed.
· Unequivocally, everyone is programmed. The unconscious has no free will, it is infinitely prudent, perceptive and powerful, but paradoxically, without a program, the unconscious can do everything but claiming a program. (Only conscious acts at this level do).
· The unconscious has a relentless logic (like a computer). It accepts suggestions and programs and implements them blindly. If you plant the positive in the unconscious, you reap the positive.
· The unconscious mind is responsive. It reacts impulsively in an order that it dictates. It does not reason. To decode a message, it cannot manifest or reflect all its desirable nuances like the conscious does. True or false, it accepts an idea as a whole under the programs from which it operates.
1) the Conscious: subject itself
2) The unconscious: (parents, teachers, society in general).
- No program, even the most deeply rooted is irreversible. We must first deprogram and reprogram the unconscious. (Cerebral recycling)
- The unconscious, in our physical universe, is subject to the law of causality. Every thought is a cause whose effect is manifested outwardly. At the root of every action, it starts with the first ideation.
- Once the unconscious accepts an idea or message, it begins to implement it immediately.
- Words have power over the subconscious, the words we say and our own inner monolog. The subconscious acts as a spectacular amplifier; It takes literally words (at face value).
- The unconscious does not understand negation. It retains the dominant idea of the formula or suggestion. I.e. "I have no stomach ulcer", the subconscious keeps only "stomach ulcer ''
- The unconscious knows exactly what is good for it. it knows the answer to its
needslatent needs. It is a monumental reservoir of resources and creativity. However, there must be order to react, namely the Salient and the tangible creativity and narrative of good sense if not, it panics and does not react. - The unconscious is particularly sensitive to the language of emotion and logic.
- The unconscious reacts very strongly to mental imagery (a picture is worth a thousand words: visual storytelling).
The purchase process: the unconscious trigger
the conscious action
the conscious action
The biggest part of information never actually reaches the conscious mind. Invariably, the consumer cannot buy something that he does not notice (selective attention), the product passes through by subconscious filter before the conscious mind even considers it.
If selling is our objective, wouldn’t be more logic to aim cupidon at the unconscious instead of the conscious?
For decades, we hired sales people, marketers, vendors and field / product experts, i.e. car sales, beauty products, etc. yet all these professionals have one objective: persuading the consumer to buy. We spoke, we screamed and we pushed to make a sale, we struggled uphill to compete so that we meet our quota.
Let us stop for a brief second
When companies were asked,
Are the sales people professionally trained about the product they're selling?
The answer was 100% of them are well trained
Are the sales people professionally trained to understand the consumer whom
they're selling the products to? The answer: 2%
''For decades, companies invested almost 100% of their time on people processes, product processes and strategy processes yet only 0% was invested on consumer processes.''
Forester
Sadly, in the ever raging competition battleground, consumer behavior continues to evolve at a supersonic rate, yet, we continue to witness product-focused crosscurrents waging a losing battle at an alarming rate. May I recommend this paper by Harvard Business: Learning the sales curves
To catch a fish, we must think like a fish NOT like a fisherman: hence thinking, feeling and reasoning like consumers require us to nest in their minds and grow in their hearts.
Today, selling is being replaced with facilitating. Facilitating the selling process requires us to nest in the consumers minds and live in their hearts. Hence, when the new consumer feels that his story is understood and that the brand reflects his story, selling becomes like a walk in the park.
Today's consumers 2.0 are becoming super ''Indiana Joans'' (plural) and be assured that before they consider buying a product they would have done a spectacular comparison digging and received many of their peers and family recommendations before arriving at the dealership footsteps
When a consumer enters a car dealership , he's 50% sold; all they need from us is to be facilitators not pushers, our primary role is to remove the last debris of doubt that remained lingering in their minds from past unpleasant experiences. To do so, requires us to :
- Activate the 6 cerebral stimuli;
- Activate the 6 Trust drivers;
- Eradicate fear and doubt inhibitors;
- Activate the 4 happiness drivers
Before selling the product, it is crucial that we understood the product from the consumers perceptive angle. Hence, while selling, it is paramount to put into focus the product happiness and value ecosystem perspectives:
- Perceptive;
- Altruistic;
- Utilitarian;
- Transformative
Change in the new economic era solicits a new understanding of selling, hence, selling to become a marriage of art and applied science . whether it is a B2B or B2C undertaking, the new definition requires the understanding of '' consumers persona'' that help us gain a deeper understanding of their buying behaviors. This model aims at creating what we call the paradox of the mirror.
Study of consumer behavior extends far beyond the paradox of the mirror, a few phases must take shape before he's motivated to buy We must first understand consumer salient preferences, that is to say how they favor a brand over another. Then, we must decode the maximization utility with his budget constraint. The combination of preferences and budget constraints determine his choices, and respectively combination of economic agents that maximize the brand value and its utility in his environment.
Today, as communicators , we are forever wrestling to discover and or in many cases to rediscover the fjord of the incessant update mode of consumers , bending our backs constantly to make sense of how they think, feel and reason.
Consumer behavior is becoming one most researched item on Google about enough to raise the alert level to red that the latter to become the GPS to growth and profitability. To improve strategic decision making, we all one way or the other invested in intelligence without knowing it, this helps us steer to making the right decision when purchasing a product or a service, ironically enough as we switch to being marketers, we seem lose track of the same making of a point. This is what is called human duality.
This hidden subjectivism is unseen as it requires extensive priming to decode it. By mining data VALUE about customers, and placing it in context allows us to subscribe to predictive intelligence: about their future buying behavior. Furthermore, this extract the reasons behind customer behaviors i.e, LATENT NEEDS
Conclusion
A capital barrier of consumer motivation is to construct a demand function to parallel it to the offer function. This predicament is resolved in two stages, first assuming a measurable cardinal utility of the product and ordinal utility that is slightly less restrictive. Hence, the consumer is always able to determine an assessment of the utility that the product value adds to his way of life. (social, technological, economic etc.) This becomes the well to explore to deepen our understanding of all consumer’s senses.
For the communicator (Marker, vendor) to communicate product or brand value effectively is to create brand value first then to match the latter with the consumer value ecosystem. By reciprocating this, the communicator and the consumer are now reciprocally linked, Chances to persuade and motivate him is heightened to optimum elevation.
For the communicator (Marker, vendor) to communicate product or brand value effectively is to create brand value first then to match the latter with the consumer value ecosystem. By reciprocating this, the communicator and the consumer are now reciprocally linked, Chances to persuade and motivate him is heightened to optimum elevation.
Thank you very much for your attention
