You might have thought that psychology applies only to scientific things. However, you might be surprised to know that marketeers also play with our psychology with the help of the shapes, designs and symbols they use. In the constantly changing environment, marketeers today look at every possible opportunity to influence your psychological thinking in order to increase the demand of their products or sales for a particular product in the market.
Colour Psychology
Colour psychology tells us about how colour perception influences the thinking of a person and, thereby his desire. Red incites hunger and that’s pre dominantly the reason why brands like McDonald’s, KFC and Wendy’s use lots of red colour in their branding.
Blue colour symbolises security and safety, making it the reason behind lots of pharmaceuticals and banks using it.
Orange is associated with playfulness and something that fascinates the children, thereby you can see brands like Nickelodeon and Nike using it.
While making a website also people have different fascination towards different colours. 46% of the customers prefer seeing blue while only 23% say yellow is the worst website colour.
SHAPE PSYCHOLOGY
Shapes also play a major role in influencing customer opinion. Squares and rectangle are the most common shapes in cell phones and books as both shape symbolise something that is easy to use and handle.
A triangle shape symbolises motion, energy and unpredictability. Some of the brands using triangle logos are Mitsubishi, FILA and Adidas.
Circle , ovals and ellipses symbolises things which have no beginning or end, hence they are associated with unity and wholeness. They moreover symbolise perfection and cyclical nature of life. Many car brands use circle in their logo, for example Toyota, BMW, Rolls Royce thereby symbolising sense of perfection, unity and elegance
EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT FONTS ON CONSUMERS
One of the most underestimated elements of marketing is font size or typography. Typography is the art of creating and arranging text in a visually appealing manner
This print ad exemplifies the influence of typography. It capitalizes on the sharp contrast between the green background and white text, with concise two to three-word lines for easy readability.
The large font makes a strong impact, and the subtle use of transparency adds depth to the message.
The above is an example of bad typography with too many fonts and colours scattered through the whole text. Moreover, the presenter has made it pretty clumsy and tries to emphasize every text present in it.
OPTICAL ILLUSION TECHNIQUES/DESIGNS USED BY MARKETEERS
FedEx
Optical illusion often causes a misalignment between what our eyes sees and brain things. This is often used by marketeers in advertisement, the same can be seen in FedEx logo where there is a secret arrow in between E and the X.
The unique arrow helps FedEx stand out from the crowded market and conveys forward movement and speed. Customers may subconsciously associate FedEx with efficiency and speed due to this design element. Moreover, it acts as a memorable and distinctive feature of the logo.
TOBLERONE
For many of you, Toblerone might be your favourite chocolate. Many of you can easily see mountains and thereby the brand paying homage to it’s place of origin, Switzerland. However, if you look carefully you can also see a bear in the logo and reference to the capital city of Switzerland in the name itself.
It benefits the brand because it shows cultural relevance and the reference to Berns and bear logo aligns with the Swiss heritage which can be really appealing to the customers
The Comma Effect
As you can see the above are the same prices of a particular commodity, however various studies have confirmed the fact that sales of shopkeepers increased 11% more when they decided to put commas in their price tags
Relative size effect
In both the cases price is reducing from $100 to $79, however various studies have suggested that we as consumers tend to buy the second option more because the font size has also decreased along with the price, giving a clear impression that the price has decreased.
Price Ending Effect
Lastly, I would like to talk about the price ending effect that marketeers use. Marketing teams all over the world try to end the price of an item with 9, thereby leading to considerable increase sales as compared to the same ending with 0. Therefore, lots of times you might see items being priced at 999 or 1,999 as it created an impression that it is less than 1000 or lower than 2,000.
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