Episode 410: 3 psychological needs that could help drive sales today
In this episode, Fiona talks about the importance of psychological needs in building an engaged audience and community for your brand. Discover how understanding and aligning with these needs can significantly impact your marketing strategy and business growth. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Differentiating between physiological and psychological needs
Exploring Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Psychological need for pattern recognition
Building trust through consistency in brand messaging
Examples of pattern recognition in daily life and business
The importance of belonging in brand engagement
Examples of brands fostering a sense of belonging
Understanding colour psychology
Utilizing colours to evoke specific emotions
Incorporating colour psychology into brand collateral and messaging
The impact of colour choice on customer perception and experience
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The first orientation sessions with my oldest son going to prep and you do you feel like I was like, I feel like I'm back at high school where you're like, “I want to fit in with all the parents." We have this sense of belonging and that sense of belonging can equally lead us to feel attracted to and connect with and buy into various brands. As a custodian of a brand, you want to consider the sense of belonging that your brand and your business are encouraging because by engaging with or buying into X, your audience is expressing y then leads them into being part of this community of Z, if that makes sense. They buy something because it says to the world, I believe in this, or I am part of this group. And we don't realise that so often.
Welcome to episode 410 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a coaching episode and if you need to increase your sales, and your engagement, if you're trying to build a bit more of an audience, and build a community for your brand, then today's episode is key. Before we get stuck into that, I want to remind people that group coaching will be launching later this year. We always get people after the fact that are interested in it. If you are keen and you're like, I want to be part of the next Group Coaching group, please make sure you put your name on the waitlist, those people on the waitlist, always find out about it before everyone else. You also get perks and a bunch of other things. If you're keen, go on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and you can find all the information about what group coaching entails, as well as put your name down on the waitlist. The other thing of course I want to mention is to pay my respects and acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I record this podcast and run group coaching. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people. I pay my respects, as I said, to their elders past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
I work with a lot of business owners and business owners in particular that are in a stage of transition. That could be levelling up, moving into a new category, taking a traditional brick-and-mortar store online, or trying to grow online. It could also be getting staff increasing, increasing their size, getting a partnership, all sorts of things. Constantly working with people that are transitioning of some sort, levelling up, changing things. One of the best elements of business that they can build regardless of what they're trying to do is a community, an audience, is a genuine connection with the people who invest, whether time or money or both into their brand. Today I wanted to talk about something that a lot of people miss when it comes to creating that audience, creating that community, and creating a genuine connection with their marketing.
That is psychological needs, like aligning what we are doing with basic psychological needs that most humans, pretty much all of us have. Today I thought I'd just pinpoint three of these and why they are so important. But first, let's figure out what I mean when I talk about psychological needs. When you think about physiological needs, you think about things like Maslow's hierarchy and on the bottom are food, water, and shelter. I think they're the three main things. People are also physiological just to function, we need things like sleep and good health and most of the time clothing, warmth, and clean air. Those are your physiological needs. You need them to survive physically. You can't get to the psychological stuff until that basic physiological stuff is met.
If you are hungry, if you are starving, if you can't get water or if you can't access shelter, the other stuff that I'm about to go into, not pale in comparison, but you need that basic physiological stuff to be met to then be thinking about, these other things. Let's say most of your audience hopefully are not in a stage where they are worried about those physiological needs. I just wanted to point that out because you do need physiological needs met before you then go on to thinking about psychological needs. But I wanted to talk about the difference between the two because I think sometimes people get them mixed up. Then psychological needs are things like achievement, competence, meaning being in your life in some way. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you've got things like safety, love, belonging, esteem, self-actualisation, understanding yourself, understanding the world and your place in it and all of those things.
But I want to pinpoint, as I said earlier, three of the psychological needs that I think are not considered when it comes to business by everyone. Of course, if you've done psychology or you've studied buyer behaviour or worked in that space, then yes, you may well know these. But I think when it comes to marketing, a lot of the time people don't consider the psychological needs of their audience at all in terms of how we create engaging content. How do we create things, not even just the content and the marketing, but the products and the services, and how do we relay those to people in a way that meets their psychological needs? I should also point out that in my own business, when I first started this, even though I come from a family of health professionals, my brother is a professor in psychology, and my sister is a GP who specialises in mental health.
My mom was a psychiatric nurse and social worker and had done a lot in that space. Even with that knowledge, my level of pulling these things together, when I started my business, I wasn't necessarily looking at what I was doing and thinking, which psychological needs am I tapping into? But when I look back, I was tapping into these things. As I have grown in my business and looked at the strategy behind marketing my business, my deli business, then I'm tapping into these things quite a bit and not in some manipulative marketing way, but just in a human way. I think when you market with humanity and you market to humans, not just to like, fix the algorithm, inevitably you are marketing in a way that is tapping into psychological behaviour and psychological needs.
What are the three that I'm going to talk about when it comes to this brand psychology? The first is pattern recognition. And this is a big one. And when you read this, even think about in your own life how this comes up in like your relationships and friendships and everything like that. Pattern recognition is to put it in another way, we all think that we have like free will and that we make up our minds about things based purely on independent thought when there are elements of psychology that are common to every single person on the planet and they massively impact the decisions that we make. Whether it's about buying a product, moving into a new relationship, or just trying to find a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a temple to start worshipping in.
We will use pattern recognition so much in what we do in our day-to-day activities that it's just like an inbuilt thing that we don't even realise that we're doing. Pattern recognition is this idea of looking for patterns as a way to trust somebody or something as I said. If you consider, firstly, let's say, let's consider for a second somebody in your life who is quite reliable, like a friend or a family member, chances are part of what makes them reliable is their consistency. And if you consider another friend or a partner or a person or somebody that you can't rely on and that you can't always rely on that person. While they might still be super enjoyable to be around, there's perhaps this level of unease or uncertainty or distrust as their behaviour can change rapidly from day to day and you're never sure what you're going to get.
Those people can also be exciting because you don't know what you're going to get and it's not monotonous and it's not the same, same all the time. However, when you're looking for trust, you need some level of reliability in order to build trust with somebody. The same thing happens when it comes to brands. Humans use this pattern recognition to learn to understand and analyse our environment without patterns in things. Then everything would be brand new every single day. And we would feel incredibly stressed because we wouldn't understand where this thing is taking us. Whereas when we recognise patterns in the short term, we create these long-term stories and memories about things in our life such as this is safe or that person is safe, or on the flip side, I need to avoid this or I need to avoid them.
We look for these patterns in people's behaviour and in physical reactions to the foods we eat. If you look at a child, I have a four-and-a-half-year-old and he is such a fussy eater he will over time see these patterns in like, didn't want to try that, but now I have tried it, I like that. And he'll say, “I like that mama, I like that.” And then when we're at the supermarket he'll be like, “I like cucumbers mama, remember I ate them the other day.” And he's looking for that pattern recognition. Whereas we'll have it on the flip side with let's say there's a certain dish that a family member makes that you just don't like you are looking for the pattern of like, the last two times I had that didn't like it, my taste buds didn't like it.
Or maybe your stomach didn't like it. You have that recognition of, not going to go there again. We learn this is how we learn a lot of the time. We also are looking for pattern recognition in like I said, people's behaviour, but also in things like architecture or government regulations. Regardless of where you live in the world, there will be certain things that you understand and you've recognised as a pattern. Things like putting a seatbelt on, it doesn't matter if I'm in a car in Italy or a car in Australia, I'll roughly know how to put a seatbelt on. Or if anyone who's ever like been on a plane, understands how to click the seatbelt on. It's a universal recognition. Once you've been on a plane a couple of times you'll know this is what happens or this is how they talk about the safety instructions.
If you look around a plane, let's say I'm on a plane from Melbourne to Sydney with a whole bunch of people who travel that route all the time. You look around when they do the safety briefing and like hardly anyone's looking, whereas the first time those people are on a plane, believe me, they would've looked at the safety instructions. But you get used to it and you're like, yep, used to that. I know that I recognise that that's the same pattern that they do on all airlines. I don't have to pay as much attention because I trust that, I know that because I understand it's a pattern. We are looking for those all the time. Same way that we understand green means exit, green means go, or green means way out. Red means stop.
We understand that from a very early age and when we look for that pattern all the time. Then how does it relate to business? Pattern recognition is what we do when we are looking at certain businesses or brands, we seek out consistency in their brand communications and in their messages. I know that I've had issues where a brand has appeared in a certain way online or maybe on their social media and their website. And then when you contact their customer service, it's like the worst, the worst misalignment. It becomes this level of distrust because you're like, how you appear on social media and even how you appear in your emails or how you appear on your website and when I contacted your customer service, they were so rude or they were so unknowledgeable, or they were so X, Y, Z, that does not fit the pattern that I had been recognising in relation to your business.
When it comes to looking at that and tapping into that as a business, you want to be thinking about what documentation or systems we have in place to create this easy streamless way that people can see and recognise the same patterns and the same consistency in our messages. This is where a systems approach to your content and marketing is so important because people will easily, what's that quote like? It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 20 seconds to ruin it. And it's so true. One of the quickest ways is to disrupt people's pattern recognition because it instantly leads to distrust rather than trust. Trust comes from, like I said, this recognisable pattern in the behaviour of a business. That's the first one, pattern recognition and thinking about in terms of your own business, how consistent is it in your messaging?
How consistent is it in the approach, the tone, and all of that across all your different touchpoints? A few years ago, my husband, I think I've talked about this before on the podcast, but my husband is a keen surfer, loves surfing, and would surf all day every day if he could. We don't live anywhere near the beach. He does surf once a week. But he was looking at this surf retreat and he'd been following this brand for a while and was like, I'm going to contact them. He had been following their social media, going on their website they had this warm approach, this wonderful tone of voice, very caring, very nurturing, aimed at the older surfer, like I'm saying older, but people over 45. They were having this retreat and it was going to be quite expensive.
It's on the other side of the world. My husband reached out to them on social media and wrote quite a nice DM. It wasn't just like, “Hey, wondering how much this was.” It was quite detailed about why he liked the brand, what he was interested in, and the fact that he lives all the way in Australia it would be a big trek, but he'd be excited. But he couldn't find information about the cost, so he just wanted to know if there was a rough cost so he could decide whether it was for him or not. Now these people wrote back with like literally the cost without even a dollar sign in front of it. No “Hey, so good to hear from you.” Like no warmth, no tone, no effort at all. And it completely was jarring to my husband.
Because he was like, “What?” How they come across in all their mediums and all their messages is not how they came across in this text message, which was like can't be asked at all, putting any effort in. That pattern recognition for him had gone from a level of like, this is who I think they are. This is the personality and vibe they're putting out about their brand. And yet when he approached them, what he got back was nothing. And to that point, he was like, he was annoyed about it and was like, here I was about to give them a huge amount of money and potentially get a couple of friends to go with him too, which would be even more and make half the retreat gang.
And yet they couldn't be bothered putting in a tiny bit of effort. That goes to that point of pattern recognition. If it's done well, it's done well. It's almost like it's done so well that people don't even realise it until it's taken away. And then that level of distrust comes in. That's the first pattern recognition. The second one that is so important is I think people always want to build these huge followings on social media, increase their email list or have a whole bunch of people turn up to their event or have a whole bunch of people come to their sale or whatever. And yet they're not tapping into this next one, which is crucial to build those things. And that is the sense of belonging. Again, let's talk about my husband.
I don't think he listens to these podcasts that often, so that'll be all right. He won't be like, “Why are you talking about me?” But my husband also loves skating, like skateboarding. He skates every day, every single day for a couple of hours and it's good for your fitness and he just loves it. He loves learning new tricks, he loves the whole skate community. He's been skateboarding for, gosh, I think since he was a kid and he's in his forties now, loves the culture. My youngest son, both of them is quite interested in skating as well. My husband recently bought my son his first pair of this particular brand of skate clothing, like these pants, these trousers. And he was like, he's finally like big enough that he will fit into these.
Because they only do like adult sizes. He was so excited to be like, these are the best for skating because I don't know much about skating myself, but he was so excited to give them to my son. Now my husband wears this particular brand and has forever, since I met him almost 20 years ago, has always worn them, I think because they're quite durable when you skate, I don't know, I don't rip as easily as jeans. Anyway, he was very excited to get my son these pants. When you look at that, you're like, that's great that's a nice story. What is it tapping into? It's tapping into the sense of belonging that the skateboarding culture is global and that a lot of skaters will wear this particular brand of pants and trousers. My husband was then sharing that sense of belonging that he has with that community, with his son, who's then also growing into, this brand is part of this culture that I'm belonging to and I'm part of the community.
It's this sense of belonging and we all do it. We all do it. I mean, it's easy to see it with particularly name brands where you're like, people buy into a designer handbag and then feel that they're part of that upmarket culture. But we do it all the time. It can sound superficial when you say it like that, but that sense of belonging, that I'm in the right place, that I'm buying from the right brands, that the brands that I'm buying from have the same value alignment with me, that I am part of, let's say a greater good. For example, you think about the brand Who Gives a Crap, which is a toilet paper brand, started here in Melbourne and is now sold all over the world. When I was in the US last year, I went to my uncle's stepdaughter's house and I was like, “You have, Who Gives a Crap.”
She's like, “Yeah, that's Australian, isn't it?” People buy into that partly because they want a sense of belonging to a community that is giving back, that is doing something more with toilet paper in this instance than say other brands who are not doing any of the sanitation work that who gives a crap does or contributes to. That sense of belonging is tapping into this ancient need that I guess we all had. You've probably heard the stories to death about when we were all living in caves and we had this need to belong to a group for our survival. If we weren't part of the group, we were ostracised and we wouldn't survive. We wouldn't survive without this group. We have that in us, in our DNA, but also when we've all experienced that, you think about when you're a teenager, I mean this sense of belonging is so crucial.
As a teenager, I was talking to my husband the other day saying, that all the creative people that I know didn't belong in high school and felt like they were misfits and they become the most creative, interesting, empathetic people later in life, but we all have this need to belong. We have this need to fit in. That sense of belonging is this psychological need that can lead us into all sorts of communities and groups throughout our lives. That will change when you become a parent. Then you want this belonging like a sense of belonging to the mom's group or the dad's group or the parent group. You want that sense of belonging when your child starts primary school of like, I fit in, not fit in. But I remember I should say that the first day of prep with my son or the first orientation sessions with my eldest son going to prep and you do you feel like I was like, I feel like I'm back at high school where you're like, I want to fit in with all the parents.
We have this sense of belonging and that sense of belonging can equally lead us to feel attracted to and connect with and buy into various brands. As a custodian of a brand, you want to consider the sense of belonging that your brand and your business are encouraging because by engaging with or buying into X, your audience is expressing y then leads them into being part of this community of Z, if that makes sense. They buy something because it says to the world, I believe in this, or I am part of this group. We don't realise that so often I work with a lot of people who say, I love your business and I read your book and I listen to the podcast and I'm part of your community because I also am creating a meaningful business.
I also want to create a business that doesn't take over my whole life and I want to have that freedom of time. There'll be different communities around different business coaches. There might be a business coach who's all about making $10 million tomorrow and buying the cheapest stuff off some person on the internet and selling it for a massive markup. And then they're not talking about things like landfill or anything else. That's fine for some people and for other people that's not fine. And they want to be part of another group that's that's talking about something else or maybe something a bit more meaningful than they might think. You want to think about how you encourage and how your people retain a sense of belonging when they purchase or even just interact with your brand.
I think that like I said, one of those brands that does this well is who gives a crap? But there are so many other businesses that do this just as well. Think about in your own life the communities that you feel a sense of belonging to. It could be your yoga group, it could be a Pilates class, it could be a running court place, it could be even just running because maybe you wear a certain running shoe that all the other runners know about. Another brand that does this is Metcon Creative. I'm going to give a shout-out to one of my past clients, Boris from Metcon Creative, even the name when he first came to coaching, I said, “What does Metcon mean?” And he was like, “If you know, you know.” I was like, “I don't know.”
I mean he didn't say it rudely or anything, he was just saying it means metabolic conditioning. He predominantly works with people in the fitness space in gyms and in some metabolic conditioning groups. That's who he's tapped into. He's doing very well in his business. If you're a gym, if you are in that space and you need your website done, your branding, check out Metcon Creative, but even the name is creating a sense of belonging. People who get it, who understand Metcon means metabolic conditioning. They understand this is the place for me, this is where I belong because I'm also obsessed with that stuff and I'm running hundred-kilometre runs or all the things that Boris does. That sense of belonging is evident in the name itself as well as the content that he puts out, as well as the clients that he works with, as well as the testimonials and the case studies that he can put out because people see in that their own business and they're like, I want to work with somebody there. After all, that's a sense of belonging.
Sense of belonging is the second psychological need. The third one that is probably a bit more easier to understand I guess for a lot of people is colour psychology. When it comes to visual branding, this is something that people tap into. I hope they tap into it, especially if they're working with a graphic designer or somebody to help bring the visual language to life. Because colour psychology is all around us now, unless you are colourblind, in which case I'm not sure there's a spectrum of that. I am not colourblind myself. I am speaking only from my perspective of having full-colour sight, I don’t know exactly what you should call it. I would need to look that up. But let's say for people who are not colourblind, the colour psychology that comes into play is all around us all the time.
When you go to get a facial or a yoga studio or somewhere else that's supposed to be eliciting this idea of like calm and tranquillity, often the lights will be lowered. Often it's not going to be a harsh, bright light, there might be softer lights, there might be salt lamps, there might be little candle things on. All of that is giving us a psychological cue as to what we can feel in this space. Likewise, if you go into a children's play centre, it will usually be bright, crazy colours, cartoons, a whole bunch of things. It'll be like happy fun. You'll get a lot of yellow in there, which is often shown as a psychological colour to elicit things like feeling joy, exuberance, and excitement. Yellow is also associated with youth. That's why you'll find it in a lot of youth clothing shops, and a lot of fast food outlets as well will have that.
When you think about colours like red, red is usually seen as urgent. It's why we have ambulances and red crosses, that's why we have red lights flashing for police or anything like that. But also red is what usually is used for sale templates or sale messaging that's out there. It's red. It's like, pay attention. Red is sometimes used by some businesses as a way to elicit that urgency factor. Likewise, blue. If you think about the colour blue, so often blue is, if you look at health insurance companies, the majority are blue. When you look at their branding, it's blue. If you go into any corporate office or a law firm, a lot of the time it's blue accounting. Blue and blue are signalled to us as quite a safe, trusted colour.
It's neutral in a way. It's seen as strong but not too strong. It's not overbearing. It's seen as this trusted element. It's bizarre, isn't it, when you think about colours they have these meanings, but they do. And even gender comes into colour, which is so interesting. I have two sons and both of them when they were young, loved pink. We talk about pink all the time. And my son, my youngest is four and a half. The other day we were talking about what our favourite colours are, and he said, I do like pink. But already he is being taught by society. He has a pink bedspread, and he loves to paint his nails pink, but it's this crap in society that says these colours are associated with this gender and these colours are not.
You may have a brand that looks at colour psychology from that perspective and is coming up with gender-neutral colours. And maybe you're a kid's brand and you're like, I'm not going to buy into this idea that some kids can wear this me kid can wear that. Colour psychology comes up all the time. If you are thinking about, let's say you have a shop, you're trying to create a more tranquil feeling when people come in, you want them to just enjoy the experience, then be looking at the colours that you're using in your point of sale messaging in your decals on your front windows in on the door itself. I have a client who has a beautiful homeware shop, and I think they have a beautiful pink door, but I think in the past they have changed that colour up a few times a year.
You think about the door of the shop so many people are passing by. Many people are looking at it. Many people are pushing the door open, pushing the door closed. That change of colour on a door, even though you might think, that's not something I'd think about that can have an impact on people and the way they experience your business, particularly if it's a physical business. Likewise, if you send out emails and you have colour and you have colour blocks or different templates on your emails, like, how is that coming across? What are the colours saying to your audience? And it's an important thing to think about because the choice of colours that you bring into your brand collateral everything from your logo through to your choice of wall colour in your bathrooms, speaks to your brand message.
Another one is where, and it again goes to this pattern recognition where if you go to a restaurant and say that the restaurant's like beautiful, and then you go to the bathroom and it's like that same level of care about colour and tone and how you're feeling and the ambience is not carried through to the bathroom, even though the majority of people that in a restaurant for two or three hours are going to need to go to the bathroom, it's like, why hasn't that come in? It causes to go to the first one, pattern recognition to be distrusted. Colour is a huge part of a business and the way that we can tap into psychology through our business and our messages. That is it for today, there are so many other psychological needs, but if you're interested in this, definitely get in touch because this is the stuff that I'll help people with all the time.
It's also stuff that I mention in my next book, which is coming out very soon in September, but it will be available for pre-order pretty shortly. I don't even know if it is available already, but we are going to put it on our website soon, available for pre-order. Make sure you subscribe or if you are on our Sunday email, you'll be the first to know about that as well. And suppose you're not on our Sunday email. In that case, that is an email that goes out every single Sunday to thousands of small business owners and gives them a bit of a personal insight into what I've been doing in my business, what things I'm seeing from clients, as well as just tips and insights and those things are shared there. First, before they go into any other marketing channel that we have in this business, you can subscribe to that email at mydailybusiness.com/subscribe Thanks for reading and see you next time. Bye.
