Does Your Brand Need Therapy? Psychodynamic Marketing Can Help
Brands strive to establish themselves as strong, vibrant entities that offer value to consumers and connect with their target audience on a deep and meaningful level. But just like with people, sometime a brand’s personality can be out of balance, with certain aspects either underdeveloped or exerting outsized influences. And when that happens, you can use psychodynamic marketing techniques to reevaluate the brand’s foundational identity and values, as well as how they are — or aren’t — being effectively communicated through marketing channels.
Sigmund Freud’s model of the human psyche posited three interacting structures that must function in harmony. The id (operating on the pleasure principle) seeks to satisfy primitive instinctual desires. The superego (operating on the morality principle) helps keep behavior in line with our values and conscience, while the ego (operating on the reality principle) protects us from anxiety and conflict that may arise from the competing needs of the id, superego and external reality.
Psychodynamic Marketing
If we apply this intrapsychic structure to the relationship between brands and consumers, it would look something like this:
- Id: responds strongly to emotional stimuli, bases purchasing decisions on feelings of desire, excitement, or arousal.
- Ego: buying decisions are based on logical and practical considerations such as price, quality, utility and risk mitigation.
- Superego: guides individuals to make purchases that align with deep seated ethical and moral values.
Strong brands are capable of aligning themselves with all three components of the consumer psyche. Psychodynamic marketing bases decisions about what psychological modality to target in any given campaign on factors such as: brand personality, consumer psychographics — and their point in the buyer’s journey.
A Healthy Brand Personality
A brand needs to be able to captivate and engage consumers on a visceral level (id). It also needs messaging and positioning that’s clear, credible, and compelling (ego). And finally, it needs to have an authentic voice that resonates with consumers’ values.
As marketers, we’re always endeavoring to affect some kind of attitudinal or behavioral change. And the prospect of change — even if it’s just changing the brand of toothpaste you use — has the potential to bring up anxiety and activate defense mechanisms to resist our efforts to persuade. By leveraging principles of psychodynamic marketing, brands can tap into the subconscious drivers of consumer behavior and better navigate these complexities and connect with consumers in a more authentic, individualized and psychologically resonant way.
