Science: How we Don’t Understand our Audience
In building a brand or marketing strategy it is important to understand your audience. Then we can speak with them in the same language, satisfy their needs, and solve their problems.
But when we think about our audience we might get trapped into a trick that our brain and psychology naturally uses. Usually, if you hear someone asking a statement like “Nobody reads nowadays…”, or “everyone is so and so…”, then it is very clearly the person who makes such statements that is more likely in a particular trap of their own mind.
The following are 3 theories to know and pay attention to when we define our audience.
在建立品牌或营销策略时，了解你的受众是很重要的。这样我们就可以用同一种语言和他们交谈，满足他们的需要，解决他们的问题。
但当我们想到我们的受众时，我们可能会被大脑和心理自然使用的一种伎俩所迷惑。通常，如果你听到有人说“现在没人读……”或“每个人都是如何如何……”这样的话，那么很明显，做出这种陈述的人更有可能陷入自己的思维陷阱。
以下是我们定义受众时可了解和关注的3个理论。
This is one of the most commonly used traps of our brain. Martha Beck best explains this concept: ‘Everybody’s Everybody is composed of just a few key people. Our social nature makes us long to fit in with a large group, but it’s difficult to hold the tastes and opinions of more than five or six individuals in your mind. So the resourceful social self creates a kind of shorthand: It picks up on a few people’s attitudes, emblazons them on your brain, and extrapolates this image until it covers the entire known universe. The vague compilation of folks you call ‘Everybody’ is what psychologists term the generalized others. As our social self wants to fit into a certain group and social brood, it is also very lazy. You can make an exercise to see that your ‘Everybody’ is even less than 6 people; usually it is around 3. Write down a statement that you have that contain “everybody” and write a list of the people who think or do as you are saying. This list may start easily at 1, 2, or 3, but then after some time and struggle you may finish it with 6, perhaps even not.
But even if you managed somehow to think about more people, this clearly is another limitation of our brain.
这是我们大脑中最常用的陷阱之一。玛莎·贝克相当好地解释了这个概念：“每个人心目中的“每个人”是仅由几个关键人物组成的。我们的社交天性使我们渴望融入一个庞大的群体，但将五六个以上的人的品味和意见牢记在心却是很难。因此，我们足智多谋的社会自我创造了一种捷径：它收集几个人的态度，把它们印在你的头脑里，然后推断出一个图像，直到图像覆盖了整个已知的宇宙。你称之为“所有人”的模糊集合就是心理学家所称的“广义他人”。当我们的社会自我想要融入某个群体和社会群体时，它也非常懒惰。你可以做一个练习，然后发现你的“每个人”可能甚至少于6人；通常是3人左右。写下一份你自己的代表“所有人”的陈述，并列出那些按照你所说的去思考或行动的人。这个列表可能很容易从1、2或3开始，但经过一段时间的努力，你可能会用6来完成，甚至可能不会。
但即使你设法去想更多的人，下面提到的却显然是我们大脑的另一个局限。
Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posited that the usual person (and/or monkey) can remember and keep in mind around 150 people. By remembering it is meant that you can recall their names, what they look like, and what some of their relationships to other members in your 150 person group are.
We develop such capacity because originally we use to live around a group of people of this size. We needed to remember them, interact with them, and share responsibilities with them. Therefore, we needed to remember what each of them was doing and how they could help, or who to avoid. To encode them in memory was crucial for our survival. Consequently, this capacity is still in use, as we see in monkeys. They also know every member of their brood.
So, every time you think about defining people and categorizing them, you usually go into the trap of referring to some of these 150 people in your brain. It is easier to recall people you know than to people you have never met.
When we are doing marketing strategy and researching our audience, it important to be open-minded and allow new people who can be suitable for your business to enter your mind and define them as potential customers.
进化心理学家罗宾·邓巴（Robin Dunbar）认为，普通人（和/或猴子）大约可以记住150个人。记住这意味着你可以回忆起他们的名字，他们的长相，以及他们与150人小组中其他成员的关系。
我们发展这样的能力，是因为我们最初生活在这样规模的群体周围。我们需要记住他们，与他们互动，并与他们分担责任。因此，我们需要记住他们每个人都在做什么，他们可以如何提供帮助，或者应该避开谁。在记忆中对它们进行编码对我们的生存至关重要。因此，这种能力至今仍被使用着，正如我们在猴子身上看到的那样。他们也认识他们家族的每一个成员。
所以，每次你想给人下定义并给他们分类时，你通常会陷入这样一个陷阱：参考在你的大脑中的这150个人中的一些人。回忆你认识的人要比你从未见过的人容易。
当我们在做营销策略和研究我们的受众时，很重要的一点是，保持开放的心态，让那些适合你的业务的新人进入你的大脑，并将他们定义为潜在客户。
Lewin’s Field Theory is pretty complex and contains a combination of psychology, physics, and biology. Some parts of it can explain how we attract or focus on things in our mental field (mind, belief or any way we can name it).
An example of how it works can be witnessed in the process of choosing a car. When you decide to buy a car of a certain model and color, you may be all excited and have a special feeling. However, once you bought it or started to think about it, you suddenly may start to recognize that ‘everyone’ is driving the same car. The truth is that no more or fewer people have started to have such a car; the market didn’t change because of your decision. But because of your focus, you somehow mentally start to pick up on that information from the world around you.
Therefore, even if we killed ignorance and decided to research our audience, looking into what they like and what biases they share, it is easy to find something that is not simply explanatory but rather a transfer of your ideas and beliefs. Paying attention only to it might lead to missing out on something more important.
勒温的场理论相当复杂，包含了心理学、物理学和生物学的结合，它的某些部分可以解释我们如何吸引或关注我们心理领域中的事物（思想、信仰或任何我们可以命名的方式）。
选择汽车的过程可以作为该理论的例子。当你决定购买某种型号和颜色的汽车时，你可能会兴奋不已，有一种特别的感觉。然而，一旦你买了它或开始考虑它，你可能会突然发现“每个人”都在开这款车。事实上，没有多少人开始拥有这样的车；市场并没有因为你的决定而改变。但由于你的专注，你的心理领域开始从你周围的世界里捕捉到相关信息。
因此，即使我们消除了无知，决定研究我们的受众，调查他们喜欢什么，他们有什么偏见，也会很容易找到一些不仅是简单的解释，更是你个人的想法和信仰的转移的东西。把注意力仅放在某件事情上，可能只会让你忽略一些更重要的东西。
Because it not that easy to be open-minded, sometimes the best way to create a winning product or strategy is when you are creating it for yourself and people like you. But even people who are similar to you might still like to have different things. Therefore it is crucially important to keep in mind that people are all different. Before developing a good brand strategy for your branding, product, or PR strategies, it is important to research the market.
Even if you have been in the market for 150 years, it is good to remember the limited capacity of the brain.
因为心胸开阔并不是那么容易的，有时候创造一个成功的产品或策略的最好方法，出现在当为你自己和像你这样的人创造它的时候。但即使是和你相似的人也可能喜欢有不同的东西。因此，切记每个人都是不同的，这一点至关重要。在为你的品牌、产品或公关策略制定一个好的品牌战略之前，做市场调研是很重要的。
即便你已经在市场上存在了150年，请记住大脑的容量是有限的。