Harnessing the Power of Human Motivations to Fuel & Grow Your Brand

Never has it been more important to understand how to connect with your consumers in a way that feels intuitive. Being relevant, resonant, and meeting them where they are, on their terms. Finding new ways for your brand to add value and meaning to people’s lives – sometimes in unexpected ways.

Our Motivation 101 Toolkit is designed to help you uncover all the different roles your brand can play, across any number of situations and scenarios. It will enable you and your team to explore, understand, imagine, and plan ways to accelerate the growth of your brand, all from the comfort of your home office.

– Click here to jump to the Motivation 101 Toolkit –

Understanding Human Motivations: What, Why & How

People are multi-faceted. We experience a multitude of different situations every day. And we use different brands and services in each of those situations, driven by our motivations at that moment. Understanding not just what we do, but why we do it is critical to understanding how a brand can be relevant and resonant in each of those moments.

Human motivations are unobservable wants, interests, needs, and desires that energize, direct, and sustain a person’s behaviors. The hidden why behind the what.

The beautiful thing about motivations is that they are human truthsThey transcend people, cultures, situations, and categories. And while our motivations shift in focus and intensity along with our multi-faceted lives, our spectrum of motivations remains stable.

motivations start with people not products

 

What This Means For You Is That Your Brand’s Competition Is No Longer Limited To In-Category

Your brand is competing with something altogether different. Something satisfying the want, interest, need, or desire in a completely different way.

Understanding the many ways people are satisfying a single motivation will equip you with the insight and inspiration to help make your brand more relevant in those moments to connect, triumphing over the competition, whoever, whatever, and wherever they are.

Getting to the truth of motivation isn’t easy. Surface responses and conscious recollection give few clues as to the heart of what drives us. We have to look beyond a product or service, an occasion, task, or activity. We have to dig deep and explore the why behind the what. The motivational drivers behind each product choice in any given situation.

To do this we ask the expected and the unexpected – we explore the full spectrum of human motivations.  And we look at the relative, not just the absolute.

Motivation 101 Toolkit: Overview

To help you start thinking about all the ways your brand can play a role in people’s lives (outside of category and outside of traditional occasions) we’ve put together an exploration toolkit based on our Motivation 101 principles.

A set of exercises to help jump start your thinking, with empathy and a human perspective, using motivations as your foundation.

Each exercise helps you explore a different aspect of human motivations, and their application to brand strategy, positioning, communications, and innovation.

contents and collaboration

 

Motivation 101 Toolkit: Business Outcomes Snapshot

 

  • Understand the role your brand plays in people’s lives and where there are opportunities for growth.
  • Explore new territories for your brand to innovate within.
  • Guide your brand purpose.
  • Make communications more relevant and resonant.
  • Optimize your media strategy to engage in a way that adds value.
  • Optimize your brand portfolio to drive acquisition, share, and long term retention.
  • Learn which competitors people are turning to instead of you. Close in and adjacent.
  • Develop your user experience to be as positive as possible.

 


– Click Here To Download the Motivation 101 Toolkit –


 

Take the next step

We really hope the toolkit will push you to think about your brand in a new way!

Motivations can be even more powerful when we listen to people’s firsthand stories… at scale! And we’d love to chat and find out how you’ve been using the toolkit, and if we can help add depth and color.


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Written By:
The Sound

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