Check out this TED talk ran by Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University who also introduced the idea of human “Mindsets” which is the core theme of today’s blog.

When building marketing strategy, segmentation is a critical steps to divide different customers into various sub-groups for developing the most effective and accurate marketing activities to targeted customers. The four dimensions of segmentation included Demographic, Geographic, Behavioural, and Psychographics. And today, I would like to talk about the most implicit, hard defined, and hidden aspect – The Psychological Segmentation. Basically, this dimension focus on distinguishing consumers’ attitude, perception, personality etc. But what I want to emphasises in this blog is the fundamental customers “Mind-set” which is more like the oriental value and beliefs that drive the way customer think and perceive, also known as the Implicit theories of intelligence (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Dweck, Chiu & Hong, 1995). 

 

The Implicit theories

Basically, this theory suggest two types of “Mind-set” in human nature to perceive their own intelligence. With a fixed mindset, people believe their intelligence and ability are fixed that tend to adopt the performance goal to either gain positive or avoid negative judgements of your competences. That means, if you think you are good at somethings in a particular field, you are more likely to seek challenge to accomplish yourself in this area (A Mastery Oriented Behaviour); on the other hand, if you think you are weak at something, you are more likely to avoid challenge and escape from this area (A Helpless Oriented Behaviour), an extreme mindsets. In contrast, people who subscribe a growth mind-set tend to acquire a learning oriented thinking no mater at what situations. The goal is to improve knowledge and increase competences rather than surrounding their “Fixed ability” and find a way to satisfy themselves.

impact-contentSouse: MindsetWorks 

Why Implicit theories?

In Carol’s latest research “Mindsets shape consumer behavior“, she indicated that the differences in consumer’s Mindset could influence their perception and attitude towards various business concepts such as the product preferences, acceptance of brand extension, and consumption experience (Dweck, 2016). But what most interested me is the way how a “Fixed mindset” or “Growth mindset” could affect consumer’s interpretation of marketing messages that form their favourable/non-favourable attitude. For example, consumer with a Fix mindset are positively interact with the message such as “Show off your ability, Effortless, Use your strengths, Shortcut to escape etc.” which focus on stimulating their internal ability by either complementing their strengths or help avoiding their perceived pain and efforts due to their lack of ability. On the other hand, consumer with a Growth mindset feel more related and positive to the message such as “Self-improvement, learning, acquiring new knowledge, development etc.” which emphasise the benefits of boosting their competences.

Little conclusion

How a customer perceives a brand and their relationship with a brand are significant. Because most of the time, people will not buy anything from a brand where they don’t even agree with their core value, not just rationally, but also emotionally. Simply like a brand slogan or product statement, if it match the customer’s mindset and related to their self-identity, it should be more appealing to the customer and they are more likely to purchase this product (Park & John, 2012). Therefore, when we are doing customer segmentation or developing further marketing activities, it is necessary to consider what types of “Mindset” your customers have, because an individuals’ mindset determine the way they perceive.

 

References

Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C. Y., & Hong, Y. Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological inquiry, 6(4), 267-285.

Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological review, 95(2), 256.

Murphy, M. C., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindsets shape consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(1), 127-136.

Park, J. K., & John, D. R. (2012). Capitalizing on brand personalities in advertising: The influence of implicit self-theories on ad appeal effectiveness. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 424-432.