Undeniably, marketers are practitioners of psychology. The most successful manage their organizations in a manner similar to a research psychologist – always testing, observing, and interpreting. Each marketing campaign is a unique psychological experiment with the target audience as test subjects.
One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time was conducted by Solomon Asch, who demonstrated the extreme power of conformity in groups. In Asch’s experiments, subjects were told that they would participate in a test as part of a group. The subjects simply had to correctly identify the length of a line.
However, unbeknownst to the subject, the others in the room were actually part of the experiment. At first, the colluding participants answered the questions correctly, but soon after began providing incorrect answers. Surprisingly, three-quarters of the subjects quickly went along with the rest of the group and also gave the wrong answer.
The unexpected results of Asch’s experiments demonstrated the extreme power of conformity. It is based on a primal human need to be accepted and a reliance on others having superior information. This influence is even greater in real-life situations where decisions are more ambiguous and more challenging to judge.
Asch’s experiment holds 3 important lessons for marketers and business
people:
1) Make sure your subjects hear the other participants. Endorsements, testimonials, and case studies really do make a big difference. They are the voices of others telling your audience the correct answer.
2) The larger the group, the greater the influence. For start-ups, this means achieving rapid growth and scale must be a top priority. Being number one in a category is the strongest endorsement of the largest group. Today’s relatively small sacrifice for growth can be easily repaid at 10x or 100x greater volume down the road.
3) Don’t make an Asch of yourself – Test, measure, and adjust all of your marketing programs on a continuous basis. There are endless ways to market, but it is a zero-sum game and there is a real opportunity cost to every activity. I can only hope that all of my competitors will commit heavily to the next Second Life that comes down the pipe.
In the end, the message is this - have great products that solve real problems in ways that delight your customers, and achieve greater success by leveraging your message and methods of communicating.
Great article – I saw a video of this experiment in action. It’s amazing to watch how a group/crowd can affect a person’s actions.
Nice blog.
Yes, well done. Glad I heard about this blog.
Good reminder to keep ones eyes and ears open auto observe and listen.
The psychology of buying behavior is an interesting subject indeed. Product and service providers, and we as marketers, need to remain cognizant of how influential these pressures to conform can be as they affect product and brand choices and tend to be strongest when the product is visible to others whom the buyer respects. Recognizing this strong group influence, we all need to be diligent in our efforts to reach opinion leaders—the people within reference groups who, because of their knowledge, personality, skills and other characteristics, exert influence on others. Great post!