The truth about marketing using your animal instincts
- BRAND BUILDING
- AUTHOR: KENSHŌ
- DATE: 9 MARCH 2022
Have you ever met someone, and it felt just right? Have you ever connected with a brand or marketing campaign on an inexplicable, emotional level? You may even consider yourself as someone who makes well-informed, rational decisions, there is a web of emotions that influence decision making. Most people call it a gut-feeling. We, marketing professionals, call it animal instinct.
We’ve made the connection between our animal instincts as marketers, and how they can have a positive effect on your brand, as well as the instincts that can influence decision making for customers. We now utilize this behavior to create powerful, emotional and recognisable marketing campaigns.
Our instincts are a powerful force, and can transcend rational thought. We’ve witnessed how these primal urges can give way to super human abilities – ever heard about that mom who lifted a car to save her baby? These animal instincts are the bedrock of everything that makes us human.
Instincts also serve a higher function by influencing and enabling marketers to influence the acquisition of knowledge, social cooperation and purpose. In this blog, Kenshõ explores what marketing companies in Oman and marketers everywhere can derive from man’s natural inclinations, and how these can play a key role in influencing others.
Animal instincts for business survival and marketing success
Humans are no longer forced by nature to act in certain ways; however, these prompts still live strongly within us. At one point or another, you’ll come across an article that considers the four most common animal instincts for business survival and links them to business. Kenshõ takes a different approach, and we’ve linked our animal instincts to marketing. We realized that once a brand makes that initial connection with the audience, it’s easy to connect with them on a more primal and basic level.
Below are the three animal instincts your brand should have on their marketing team to ensure successful performance and ROI at every turn.
The animal instincts inside your marketing team
The owl: the eyeful
Who she is:
The owl observes. She lives up to her name of being wise. More than that, she takes pride in her second-to-none knowledge, experience and expertise. In fact, she’s driven by her subject matter expertise, and eager to extend or share her knowledge to deepen marketing ROI and improve brand love.
How having her in your marketing team benefits your brand:
Everyone needs an owl in the marketing team. Owls keep the brand information, purity and realness in check. They use their expert knowledge to ensure that the product or service is always portrayed in the best possible light. With an owl in your marketing team, you’ll always foster customer confidence, because brand expertise and product knowledge will emanate from each campaign.
The wolf: the insightful
Who she is:
Wolves are incredibly ambitious, brimming with self-confidence and never shy away from hard work. A wolf in full stride is quite impressive, no one gets the job done as efficiently as the wolf. In addition to personal ambitions, wolves have a pack mentality, and thrive in an environment where they lead from the front.
How having her in your marketing team benefits your brand:
Wolves in marketing demand absolute loyalty and provide the same allegiance to their brands. The real value of the wolf comes from their ability to perform under pressure, enabling them to attain the highest execution levels. Wolves also pride themselves on their strong communication instincts, ensuring that all stakeholders are always well informed about their projects and campaigns, and that no piece of information goes amiss, as everything is recorded and communicated accordingly.
The leopard: the powerful
Who she is:
A dominant member of the marketing team, the leopard is a natural leader. Years of experience, performance and wisdom establish the leopard as a highly respected individual within a team of people. Leopards display innate self confidence and elegance. When they have a goal in mind, their focus burns with intensity until the task is done.
How having her in your marketing team benefits your brand:
Leopards are solitary creatures who are always on the move, seeking out the next best idea. There is always a sense of immediacy and electricity when a leopard is on a mission, whether that’s coming up with a new strategy for your brand, or creating the latest campaign. When a leopard is on the job, you know that results will follow.
At Kenshõ, we have a triple threat in the form of an owl, a wolf and a leopard on the marketing team who take an integrated approach to marketing when it comes to scaling your business. Meet our tribe of storytellers and see how we can take your brand to new heights.
From animal instinct to successful marketing
The question here is how we, as marketers, can use our animal instincts to unpack our audience desires, and tap into their gut to create an outcome that is both favorable for the brand, and that maintains brand authenticity.
We retain some instinct inspired urges that exert strong influence over us; what sets us apart from the animals is that we possess the free will to act on these urges or not. Once we understand that psychology goes beyond the lived experience and also encompasses some of our most basic animal instincts, we as marketers can put strategies that influence into place.
Fight or flight in marketing
Fight or flight is perhaps the most recognizable response. Instinctually, this is something that does not enter the thought process, but the decision is made subconsciously. Scenic triggers used in design bring about the same instinctual response as fight or flight. These sensory cues affect the subconscious and allow marketing professionals to create emotional association between brand and audience using audiovisual triggers. For example, no one needs to explain that a shark fin means get out of the water, or that a peach is soft, juicy and fuzzy.
The herd mentality in influencer marketing
The herd mentality refers to the transmission of a single message resulting in mass appeal, action and ROI. Influencer marketing is probably the most popular marketing technique to bring about this herd mentality, because the word of one trusted source can inspire many into action. In fact, influencer marketing is just an evolution of word of mouth. If you remember the Tupperware parties of the 1990’s, that was the beginning of the movement, and even though marketers didn’t take the impact of WOM very seriously, today it has a serious impact on the way that audiences behave.
Blending in or standing out on the market
In nature, animals that want to hide blend in, while those looking to mate, stand out. In marketing, we know that it’s human nature to notice anything that’s different or unexpected. Marketing and advertising professionals can use this to their advantage by creating a visual distraction that contrasts the surrounding in a noticeable way.
It’s clear that animal instinct has a huge role to play in human nature, and throughout every aspect of the marketing journey. Despite how mindful and sophisticated we’ve become, our primitive instincts are still a prominent part of our DNA. Marketing teams who recognize this and use it to their advantage position themselves and the brands they represent as a cut above.
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