🧠 How Billion $ Brands Are Using Psychology To Sell More

Hey there 👋 

Welcome back for the 10th edition of Brandish

Your guide to crafting an iconic brand

I hope you’re having an extraordinary weekend thus far and are ready to spend the next 3 minutes and 9 seconds with me.

In this newsletter, I’ll talk about psychology and how you can use it to get more customers.

The last newsletters I did on psychology got great feedback, so I figured that I’ll make some more of these.

So…

Kick your feet up, grab your Brez, and let’s get going;

Exposure, exposure, and… more exposure

Coca-Cola spends about $4 billion per year

L’oreal spend more than $12 billion per year

Nike spends more than $4 billion per year as well

Why?

Have you ever wondered why these BIG household brands spend CRAZY amounts of money on marketing - even though everybody and their mom knows them?

I sure have.

In fact, I was actually thinking about it today when I was thinking about what to write in this newsletter.

Here’s one of the conclusions I came to:

There’s this concept in psychology and advertising called “The Mere Exposure Effect.”

To break it down in simple terms, it basically means;

The more times we’re exposed to something, the more we start liking it.

… and the more we start liking and trusting something, the more likely we are to buy into it

Now, how can we use this tactically as a CPG brand?

Here’s how I think about it.

To increase the liking and trust of your brand, you essentially want to do three things:

You want to be exposed in as many places as possible, as often as possible, over the longest period of time.

So you can break it down into diversification (how many places your brand is exposed to), intensification (how many times per day people are exposed to your brand), and duration (over how many days people are exposed to your brand.

A few of the ways we’ve used to increase our “exposure diversification” is by investing resources into retail, offline advertising (for example, trucks & direct mail), and, of course, new social media channels (like TikTok in its early days, or Snapchat/Pinterest now).

For some of these resource investments, it’s hard to measure direct ROI to the bottom line - but the “mere” effect of the exposure definitely has an impact.

The most recent example of this is: After we launched in 4200 Walmart stores - we’ve started to see significantly better results in our online Shopify and Amazon sales

To increase your exposure intensification and duration, there’s really only two things you can do: Post more content across all your channels so your customers see you more - and post more consistently. This way, they’ll be exposed to you across multiple channels, multiple times per day, every day.

Putting exposure on steroids (without spending money up-front and without using paid ads)

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how I can increase my brand’s online exposure - without spending more money on Meta, Google, TikTok, etc.

Because… at the end of the day

Not only because I always want to find new and creative ways to get my brand exposed to as many people as possible, as often as possible…

But also because you simply can’t rely all of your business on these few channels

So, one of the things we’ve been starting to focus a lot on is creating our influencer marketing and affiliate programs.

Now, diving into the details of our entire strategy here can take up an entire newsletter of its own (and it will, soon)

But the overarching idea we’re thinking about is this:

If we can pay people up to 50% commission (equal to 2x ROAS) to promote our brand to their audience (whether that’s ten people or 100,000 people) - we can essentially tap into:

A) An audience we might not have hit through our ads

B) An audience that trusts the influencer/affiliate and are therefore more prone to buy

As a result, we get More exposure, more sales, and… as a bonus, more content to fuel the entire engine.

Quick question…

So, if you found this newsletter helpful - please forward it to a friend or colleague and tell them they can sign up by clicking here

Also,

If you want to see more content from me - follow me on Twitter (PS: I’ll drop a lot more content there soon)

Thanks for reading along

As always, thanks a lot for reading along.

I appreciate you and look forward to seeing you again next week