Here are a few commonly known truths about incentives: many consumers enjoy them, they have to be relevant to a brand's target audience to work well, and they should provide value to the consumer. While it's not hard to find data and analytics to back up these facts, the psychology behind what practices work best for leveraging brand rewards isn’t as available to the average marketer.
Dr. James Giordano, professor of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, lent us his expertise to address how concepts like the human ego and cultural identity affect neurocognitive processes involved in consumer rewards, desires and decision-making.
Here are 5 things to know, which can help your brand strengthen its consumer incentive strategy:
1. Consumer engagement is sparked from ego.
To get a little, you’re going to have to give a little.
In other words, convincing a consumer to take part in a campaign or engage with your marketing content is only possible if you speak to the brain functionalities in which the human ego lives.
“One of the things we know is that humans, almost like any other animal, are very egotistically driven. Every decision we make as humans has to be meaningful to us; so, that thing you want me to do as a marketer, as someone who’s trying to influence my behavior, has to have individual resonance with me [such as] speaking to how I identify myself [or the things I find interesting],” said Giordano. “What incentivization provides is a first-person subjective reward and reinforcement for whatever it is you’re trying to get people to do — whether it is to make a decision to buy something or to engage in some action.”
And in order to do this well, you need to know your audience. Using his background in medicine, Giordano explained why:.
He spoke about precision medicine, the idea there is that if doctors can understand as much as possible about the person who is in front of them — their medical records from birth, where they lived, their gene pool — that allows medical professionals to accumulate metadata, which provides a basis for maximum leverage to be able to better service that patient. The same goes for marketers interested in understanding how to incentivize consumers.
In other words, the more you know about your consumer — what makes them tick, what they like, what they don't like — the more you can appeal to their sensitivities and sensibilities.
“You want to appeal to things they’re sensitive to, [and] you want to reinforce and support those things they have sensitivity to so you can make them feel good in two ways. One, you can fortify the things that make them happy, or you can say by doing something or acting a way or making a particular choice this is going to take something away that they find to be distasteful, burdensome or threatening,” said Giordano. “The more you know about them, individually or as a target population, for your consumer engagement and your incentivization towards their decision, the deeper, the further, the more effectively you can go to get them to a place where they’ll make a certain decision.”
2. It's important to understand who your consumers want to be.
Upon first thought, it may seem like incentivizing a person based on their culture — where they lived, the people they come in contact with, their hobbies and interests, is your best bet in encouraging them to participate in a campaign or find brand rewards attractive. But Giordano says it’s not just someone's culture of origin you need to look at, it’s also their culture of identity.
“Their cultural identity defines who they want to be. So, if you can appeal to who they are, but who they want to be then doing what it is you’re asking them to do fortifies their integrity and strength in their identity,” said Giordano.
Some industries have been able to do this exceptionally well. Giordano references the tobacco industry as one line of business with a great track record in reinforcing their consumers’ cultural identities.
“Before they did away with cigarette advertising, they were trying to depict who they thought that cigarette smoker wanted to be: somebody cool, a worldly woman, a cowboy out there on the range…” said Giordano. “The messaging allowed you to believe that if you wanted to be this cool person all you had to do was smoke a cigarette.”
The brands that do this well not only reinforce those cultural identities, but help to strengthen them.
“It captures some inner vision of consumers that they’re trying to cultivate and whatever it is that the [cigarette brand or military] is trying to sell is a tool, a symbol, a narrative of that inner vision. That vision is therefore strengthened or enabled by what it is being offered,” said Giordano.
3. Brands should avoid cultural assumptions.
Giordano was born in New York City, and while he hasn’t lived there full-time since 1986, if someone were to ask him where he was from, he’d say he was a native New Yorker. Looking at his last name, you may have been compelled to believe he is Italian — he’s not. These sort of cultural assumptions with your customers can lead you away from their cultural identity, a drastic mishap Giordano says you don’t want to make:
“So yes, cultural awareness is vital, but cultural awareness needs to be far more precise than just making a particular assumption that a guy named Giordano probably has Italian relatives. You want to know that this person has roots in one place and has strong identification with his familial Tirolean heritage versus his Italian last name; those subtleties allow me to express that identity and seek things that reinforce it.”
Cultural assumptions might leave you vulnerable to offending a consumer or completely missing the mark on your customer’s ideal identity.
4. Identifying your intended audience is a critical first step.
So, is there a surefire way to guarantee that each time you communicate with your audience you’re incentivizing them to move farther along in their journey? Unfortunately, Giordano says no such thing exists.
“A big part of marketing requires you to do your due diligence to understand your demographic. So the first step in good marketing is asking yourself who’s going to be your intended audience?” said Giordano. “ If you’re trying to appeal to the general public, you can’t do that with a single marketing strategy. Getting people over 60 to buy your product is going to be very different from getting people who are 25 to buy your product.”
In Giordano’s eyes, one brand that has gotten it right is Mercedes-Benz.
The luxury car retailer is known to be fairly expensive and is often consistent in their advertising that Mercedes-Benz is a quality brand. These are things that would typically speak to an older, more established crowd of consumers. In order to garner a younger audience, Mercedes-Benz had to incentivize younger drivers with content they could relate to.
“One of the things that Mercedes-Benz did very well was begin to appeal to the younger market demographic by adding particular assets to their vehicles that were racier. They started to not just talk about how great their car was, but how Mercedes-Benz was a fast car and had appeal,” said Giordano. “We know that [appeal and quality] works for an older person who has money, but Mercedes-Benz also dropped the price point on the entry-level vehicle. They kept it high enough so people would have to spend some money on it, but low enough to make it reachable where a young buyer could acquire the value that product has.”
5. Familiar incentives are more attractive.
If there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to incentivizing consumers to do something, diversifying your incentives might start sounding attractive. We’re here to tell you to fight the urge — Humans like what’s common. But, in the case that you really want to give your consumers something new, you’re going to have to prove to them why they should listen to you.
“The familiar, or things that are equivalent to the familiar, are the things we find to be most attractive and the least risky. There’s a couple of ways to appeal to that; if you want people to take risks and try something new, you have to be very overt in your demonstration and explain that what is familiar to them lacks value [for some reason or another],” said Giordano. “You have to give them the “because”; tell them that what they were doing lacks value because of ____ and then offer them something that gives them all the benefits of the thing they loved plus none of the burdens, risks or uncoolness that the thing they used to do does.”
Incentivizing consumers is more than offering a good-looking product or exclusive reward. You also have to understand your consumers’ cognitive desires and what fuels them to engage with an incentive once it’s presented to them. Rely on brain science to give you the answers you need.
