In this lesson Shaun Whynacht of Blue Cow Marketing explains the psychology behind purchasing decisions and shows how marketers can use that knowledge to improve copy, campaigns, and customer segmentation. He first outlines seven core buyer motivators—safety, adventure, significance, relationships, health & wellness, success/purpose, and growth/education—illustrating each with everyday product examples. He then introduces three buying triggers—personal gain, fear, and logic—explaining how each can be leveraged in headlines and messaging and how different prospects may respond to different triggers. Next, he describes three learning pathways—cognitive (reading, listening), constructivist (visualizing the product in one’s life, e.g., IKEA AR), and experiential (hands‑on testing, dealership visits)—and links them to the three stages of the buyer pathway: awareness, consideration, and decision. Shaun emphasizes that marketing systems should address all triggers and learning styles because individual buyers may be motivated by any of them, and that tracking which trigger led to a purchase enables more targeted follow‑up. Throughout, he provides concrete examples (homeowners insurance, ATVs, coffee shop loyalty, gyms, courses, vehicle shopping) to illustrate each concept and to demonstrate how to craft copy that speaks to safety, adventure, significance, etc. The lesson concludes with a call to integrate these psychological insights into marketing strategy to increase sales.
Chapters
Hey, while you're there, I want to talk to you about why people buy. I'm Shaun Whynacht with Blue Cow Marketing, and this is one of the lessons in our Digital Marketing 360 course, and I wanted to share it with you today. You know, people buy for multiple reasons, and we've narrowed it down that it's really coming down to about 7 different categories or motivators why people make a purchase. So let's go through some of those. Number 1 being safety. We make a purchase because it makes us feel safe, or it makes us our family feel safer, those around us feel safe. Homeowners insurance, you know, if you didn't have it and your house burnt down, you're gonna lose everything. So, you know what, it makes us feel safe to have it. Adventure being the next one. I mean, I love ATVing, being outside, off-roading, right? I don't buy it because it makes me feel safe. I buy it because it's a sense of adventure. So that's one of the reasons why people make a purchase. Significance. We all want to search for that real feeling of significance in our life, and that's one of the big motivators in making people buy is because buying that purchase of that product, you know, whatever it is, you know, it could be a vacation, it could be a boat, a car, you know, a piece of jewelry, clothing, it makes us feel significant. Relationships, right? We buy because of the relationship that we have with the business. Think about your favorite coffee shop or restaurant. If you go in there frequently, you're becoming part of that whole ecosystem, and they're going to start to know who you are. You feel that there is a relationship there, and that's what keeps driving you to go back, even though there's probably other coffee in your area. There might even be food that's even better than the one you go to, but because there's a relationship there, you buy from that person or that business. Then there's health and wellness, right? We're going to buy because that product or service is going to make us healthier, it's going to make us feel well, right? Gyms, those type of things, it's under health or wellness. And then we've got success or a sense of purpose, right? We want to feel that, that what we're doing gives us that sense of purpose in life. And you know, that can be around different courses or programs that you buy, or it could be, you know, adventures. So maybe you're going to go on an exchange or a trade mission things of that nature. It gives you a sense of purpose and you feel successful. Or only people that reach a certain level of success could buy this thing that you're looking at buying, or this adventure, or whatever it is. And if we buy it, we're obviously at that level of success, which kind of falls into the whole growth and education side. There are people out there who absolutely love educating themselves, growing, expanding their mind, learning new things. And when we grow as a human being, as we grow our mind, that is something that really we're searching to keep buying more, you know, experiencing more, you know, going back to school, taking courses, continually educating yourself about what's going on so that you can be the best that you can be at what you do and ultimately have growth in education. So when we look at, at that, I mean, those are 7 different areas that people buy categorized under those. But now, when do people actually make the decision to purchase? Right, there's 3 different things that people will buy. These are called triggers, buying triggers, and they've been categorized into these 3 different categories. The first being gain, personal gain. So when we think about that, what are we going to gain from this purchase? And it could be that it's going to put us in a better place. You know, it could be, hey, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna pave our driveway because for years it was dirt and now we're gonna pave it, right? Our personal gain behind that is that we're gonna have a nice smooth driveway. It's gonna be easy to to move snow. It's going to be fun in the summer. The kids can play hockey, play basketball on it, right? It's those type of things. What are those personal gain elements? And those are usually towards purchases, right? You know, you don't necessarily buy life insurance for personal gain, right? It just— it's not going to happen. So we need to look and categorize what we're going to do with that. Next is fear, right? We buy because of fear. Let's go back to that insurance Example, you're going to buy house insurance because what if the house burns down, right? That fear of what if, what if something happens that's going to cause that issue to be painful and, and really traumatic in your life. Or maybe we're going to buy the best helmet possible because we have a fear that if we get in an accident, right, our little noodle head up here is going to be hurt. So we want to make sure we got the best one. And You've got the fear of missing out, you've got the fear of social shaming, and not in a negative way, but you know what, why do we buy the latest iPhones that are out there? And this isn't the latest one, this is an 8, but still, you know what, you could buy this for gain, personal gain, right? Or you can buy it because you fear that your buddy's gonna have the new one and you're gonna feel subpar because you don't, right? And that happens a lot in buying products. And lastly, not least in here is our little blue friend, logic, right? We make purchases based on the logical decision. So why am I showing you these 3 different elements here? Gain, fear, and logic, because these will help you build better headlines in your copy. These will help you build better sales copy, build better product videos, because you can talk to them and talk to your prospects and your potential customers about these things. And there are certain products and services out there where you could take it and you could spin that copy and talk on a gain point, talk on a fear point, talk on a logic point. And the, the cool thing about this, if you find the psychology really cool, is that you can take a product and you can show it to a group of like 100 people that are going to buy, and each of them are going to buy for a different reason. So Some will buy for gain, some will buy for fear, some will buy for logic, some won't buy for fear but they'll buy for gain, right? So there's interchangeability there. And one of the things that you gotta make sure is that any of the marketing systems or campaigns that you build will touch on these different elements because you don't know what their main buying point is initially. Once they buy on one of these, you can have your system set up to say this is a gain purchaser, this is a fear purchaser. So now the next product that comes out, we can go right to the main one and hit them with that, right? And that's gonna be very beneficial in that. Now, let's talk about the learning pathway. How do we learn about different products and services? And there's really 3 different ways that we learn. There's cognitive learning, and that is the reading, the listening, the watching, right? These are using our senses to learn about different products that are out there. And then we've got the constructivist learning side of it. And that's where once you become aware of a product or service, your brain, if you're that interested in it, will start to place that product or service in your life. You're starting to think, oh, where would that go? Or, or how would our life be with that? And one way that IKEA has done this with their app using augmented reality is they have the ability to take a product on their mobile app, a sofa, a bed, or whatever it is, and using augmented reality, be able to turn on your camera and place where you want it to be and position it so now you're seeing their product in your life, right? Using that constructivist learning. And last but not least in this is experiential. And this comes into wanting to try something out, right? Think about a vehicle. You've got your cognitive learning side of it is, okay, You know what, our little coupe isn't doing so well, right? We should really upgrade, get a new vehicle. What should we get? Do we get another car? Do we get a van? We got some kids. Do we get an SUV? Do we get a truck, right? So you're starting to read what is the best type of vehicle for your situation, right? You're using your cognitive learning. So once you decide on that, right, then you're getting into that constructivist side. So you decide, okay, we're gonna go the road of an SUV. And then you're starting to see it in your life. You're starting to see, hey, how would we use this? And well, what if we got friends of our kids coming? We might need a third row. Well then, what versions of an SUV offer a third fold-down row? Well, there's only a couple models that you could go with. So you narrow it down to that. And now we go to the experiential side of it. Now we say, okay, we've got 3 different dealerships that we're gonna go with for this to look. We're gonna go out and we're gonna start to experience it, right? Not only are we just experiencing the vehicle itself— how does it fit, how does it drive, what's the space, that type of thing— but we're starting to experience the business. How well are they treating us? How informative are they in answering our questions, right? How open are they to our requirements, our decisions? Are they on our agenda, or are we having to be on their agenda, right? Those are going to be contributing factors in your business as people need to start to to experience you before they actually make that decision. And the cool thing about this is when you take these 3 different areas and we shrink 'em up and we bring in that buyer pathway that we talked about, the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. And I know you guys haven't seen this because this is in a previous lesson of the course, but this is the buyer pathway here that we go from awareness of awareness of a problem to then considering how they are going to solve that problem with the products or services that you offer, and then making a decision, right? This whole pathway very much falls in line perfectly with cognitive, constructivist, and experiential learning. So think about that in your business. Those elements, how people learn, the game-theoretic logic, the different ways that people buy, why they buy, It's not just a random guess. There are motivating factors that come into play with everything that every person buys every day of their life.
