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Behavioral and marketing sciences have found that building mental available brand associations is the primary purpose of marketing. However, this is not the only way to build these associations. It is important to understand the mental architecture (or prioritization of various decision criteria) that affect the buying decision, as this determines where you need to focus your efforts.

This applies to well-known, recognizable brands such as Coca-Cola or Apple. These brands have spent billions of years building strong unconscious associations with their products.

If your company is in the B2B world or has a new, lesser known or niche product, you may think that there are no relevant associations with this brand. Or that the purchase decision is primarily determined by useful System 2 factors such as the relative price (how expensive it is compared to other similar products) or the perceived value (what I get for this price) or the most important product features. Surely the purchase decision is more rational here?

If you work in a company where you need to market to other companies, you may also think that marketing works more rationally and linearly because your customers are more rational. That a business decision maker decides on behalf of a company and it's not his money, so they are surely deciding on the basis of more objective System 2 criteria?

The evidence suggests otherwise. After all, most buying decisions are still made by people. Research by CEB Global (now Gartner) and Google among 3,000 B2B decision-makers in 36 brands and 7 categories showed that personal value (i.e. professional, social, emotional and self-image benefits) is twice as important as business value (i.e. functional) Benefits and business results).

“Emotions not only play a role in B2B purchases, they are even more important than logic and reason. This finding shows a potentially untapped opportunity for B2B marketers to reposition brands around their personal value, ”the study concluded.

Duncan Smith agrees. "If we work in an industry that is perceived as more rational, like B2B instead of B2C," he says. "Then there is almost an understanding that people stop behaving as people just because they make decisions at work and not at home, which is completely ridiculous. And the same goes for medicines or doctors.

We have done very expensive tests several times because people want to ask an oncologist if blue is more prominent than yellow. But it's not an oncologist question. It is a human question. "

Emotions determine B2B purchase decisions

One company that understands this well is Turtl, a start-up that uses knowledge from behavioral science and psychology to create better business publications. In fact, they take the often long, boring, and often unread paper documents that companies create and turn them into online documents that they tend to deal with and ultimately edit. Your platform collects data about who reads what and which chapters and topics are important to readers. Her customers include companies such as Cisco, Allianz and The Economist. Your corporate mission is to kill the PDF.

"We encourage people to think differently about reading and the reader," said Nick Mason, founder of Turtl. “And not everyone wants to read everything. And not everyone wants to read everything in the same order as everyone else. Providing people with more options for what to read and when to read it, and allowing them to explore it speaks for the intrinsic motivational side of things.

"And what we find with many customers is that they get feedback from people who say," I love the format, I really enjoyed reading it. "Historically, there is a tendency in B2B that people think that when you put on a suit, everything is serious, and suddenly you stop being human and you become a machine. But what we are playing at is the fact that this is not only not true, but that you are actually more emotionally influenced than not.

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Richard Chataway, President of BVA Nudge Unit UK, and excerpt from his book The Behavior Business, published by Harriman House.

The Blake project can help: Meet the new requirements for an emotional competitive advantage in the B2B Brand Positioning Workshop NOW ONLINE

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy that specializes in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and brand building

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