Preceptive Consumer Behavioral Modeling

Brand Strategy Today

If your goal is to increase consumer preference and grow your market share, it is important to know that brand strategy and marketing strategy today should go well beyond theory. It should be more closely aligned with brand anthropology than it is with traditional marketing science.  If you are trying to influence human behavior and increase market share you need to better understand the human condition and you need to see it in the context of a broader palate instead of just the palate of your category.

If your desire, therefore, is brand positioning to influence the preference choice and increase market share, then it is a given that you must have a better understanding of your target audiences.  It is not enough to understand their usage and attitudes as it relates to your product, service or category.  You also need to know what your target audience believes to be true about their life, values, aspirations and goals.  You need to better understand the belief triggers that guide their lives and direct their purchase decisions.

Traditional Brand Strategy Will Fail

As a premier global brand company, Stealing Share has come to understand that consumer preference is based more on highly held customer beliefs than they are on customer purposes.  This means that while traditional advertising messages and corporate branding seek to exploit a unique selling proposition that satisfies a purpose (i.e. get whiter whites with a laundry soap powder), if your brand needs to be more important to the customer’s sense of self.  It needs to reflect the belief systems that command the customer, for example, to want or need a better laundry result.

Our brand company conduct a Preceptive Behavioral Modeling session at Stealing Share to provide the basis for our brand research into the belief systems of the target audience that your brand strategy is meant to influence.  Our brand consultants call these beliefs “precepts” and they command the actions of your target audience.  There is a one-to-one causal relationship between what the customer believes to be true about the world in which they live and the purposes (and purchases) that they seek to fulfill in their daily life.

Represent What They Will Covet

Human beings naturally seek stasis and your brand needs to use this naturally occurring power.  Your customer naturally gravitates away from conflict and towards an internal sense of harmony.  This means that in everything they do and in all of the purchase decisions they make, they seek to diffuse any conflicts that exist between their actions and their belief systems.  It comes down to simple physics in the end — what they believe to be true about the world in general creates the purposes they seek to satisfy in specific purchase categories.

At the end of the day, brand strategy is all about permissions.  Brand permissions arise from the precepts of your target audience and the purposes that your brand satisfies. Understanding the ruling precepts when developing brand strategy is every bit as important as understanding regional and cultural differences when marketing your product or service.