Why Study Psychology?

I've been reading up on psychology lately, and have been asked the question "why?"   My sense is that even to ask this question shows a lack of understanding of customer experience, which is in fact a profession to which the theories of psychology (along with other studies of human behavior) are critical to success.   I'll try to explain some of the reasons for those who don't make the connection:

Of particular importance is that people are the most important contributor of an organization's success.   That statement is too often regarded as a trite platitude by managers, but if they should ignore it entirely they will be chagrinned by the results: the equipment, facilities, and capital resources of a corporation are of no use whatsoever without the people to put them to work.   That is all the more true for knowledge workers than those who perform routine tasks, and it is especially true of customers, who are even more important to success than employees.

More specifically, it is the actions that people take that cause organizations to succeed or fail - whether it's performing routine tasks or contributing the ideas that shape the future of a firm, all value derives from the employees' behavior.   For the customers it is (our ought to be) even more self-evident that the actions that they take in purchasing, using, and recommending to others are critical to the success of the firm.  And it is for this reason that understanding human behavior is critical to successfully managing a business.

For simple work, like carrying things from one place to another or pressing the buttons on a factory line, it is sufficient to teach behavior and demand that the workers replicated it with precision and speed.   Complex work, like developing strategy or designing products, cannot be modeled - you cannot show someone how to write a brilliant plan, because to do so would be to write the plan yourself. As such, deriving profit from knowledge workers is not a matter of showing them what to do, but giving them motivation to do what they are capable of doing, in situations in which you are not capable of doing it yourself and know only what the outcome ought to be like.   You have to understand psychology.

For the customer, it is all the more obvious that their behavior is the result of their perception, interpretation, and motivation - and there is no shortcut to influencing these things.   With employees, an inept manager can always fall back on the ability to threaten their job, which is to threaten their income and the well-being of their family, in order to compel them to do what is needed for the firm to be profitable.   With customers, firms can make no such threats, and must be all the more cautious of the way they attempt to influence their behavior.

The human mind is a very complex machine and highly idiosyncratic.  While it is possible to group people into categories and stereotypes, this must always be done with the acknowledgement that you are making generalizations that are so simplified that they are deleterious.   There can be no simple formula for motivating human behavior.   At best, we can understand the underlying theories that enable us to create a game plan for motivating a specific individual in a specific situation - which is to say a specific target market for a specific solution to a specific need.

For example, we understand that different customers have different needs.   At the lowest level, all human beings have a similar need for food, water, shelter, and aid in times of emergency - but most consumer products do not address those needs directly or primarily.   Instead, most products deal with the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where there is less clarity and certainty about which needs are prioritized and what exactly will meet them.

We can understand that a customer seeks to "have security" and "experience a sense of personal growth" and "feel confident in their decisions" and to some degree all people have such needs.    But which of these is most important, how it can be fulfilled, and what trade-offs a person is willing to make to have one at the cost of the others, is highly subjective.   In that regards, different people will make different decisions, and even one person will make different decisions at different times - so there is constant need for investigation and fine tuning that makes a product successful to different people at different times.

And this, I think, may be the beginning of an explanation of the reason that the teachings of psychology are extremely valuable to customer experience practitioners, and the commercial world in general.   Because of the complexity variability, it's unlikely a single blog post, book, or even a library could provide a complete answer that is broadly applicable - but it's a guidepost on the way to success.