How to Listen for Sales Signals Grounded in Human Motivations and Needs on Belonging and Love
TL;DR: Customers will tell you with their words what their current needs and motivations are. Your brand’s message, voice and personality should meet them there. If you hear signals for love and beauty, you should consider positioning yourself with lover brand attributes.
Even a century ago, we’d only begun to ask scientific questions about the need for belonging, and here we are siloed into our homes for safety.
What of those whose belonging needs expand past the home? This is true for an entire collective of humans.
Maslow writes this compels our human instinct and affinity for being part of a group.
When we give and ask for love, it is inherently tied to belonging.
When you love a person, product or service deeply, you feel a sense of belonging and togetherness.
You may also experience this feeling of belonging in its shadow form that evokes envy and jealousy, maybe even a sense of ownership in the belonging need.
Way back nearly 100 years ago Maslow suggested that our culture’s rise of interest-based groups are an answer to the belonging need as we live increasingly mobile, industrial lives.
Business can speak to this need with services, products and language.
Signals your audience or customers are seeking this need in some way are the high use of the word love, stories about aesthetic and beauty, expressions related to individual persons and other feelings of closeness or intimacy.
There are a few languages of love we know, thanks for Gary Chapman: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, physical touch.
One sign the collective (our whole world in my own global brand experience) is looking for belonging, intimacy and love is how well a free gift promotion works in direct to consumer brands. This promotion is right there at the top of the best ways to increase sales across industries.
Right alongside the free gift promotion’s success is the rise of brand Facebook groups.
Facebook groups are a direct answer to quality time and small group lives are as close to you can get to physical touch in the online world.
If you are navigating new channels, products, or services, and you think you may be a Lover archetype brand or your customers are seeking belonging needs, the best way to answer them is customer listening.
You must build systems within your brand to collect customer feedback.
Often the most accessible is customer reviews and testimonials.
If you need support in collecting these, you can message us for a guide.
If you have customer reviews and testimonies, use them to unlock messages about their sales signals. Vox Verba can do this for you with the Voice of Customer guide.
If you’re a DIY kind of human, you can review them manually yourself with our guide here.
You can collect more data with customer interviews at any stage of business.
Start with open ended questions, keep your interviews direct and short and focus on the best, most positive customer experiences.
I invite you to partner with Vox Verba for scientifically proven facilitated interviews.
I relate personally with the lover archetype. I love gifts, intimate moments and words of affirmation.
If you’re curious which archetype you relate to personally, take the super fun and quick celebrity archetype quiz on the Vox Verba homepage.
Much love, beauty and intimate moments,
Andrya