“The sea, once it casts it’s spell, hold one in its net of wonder forever.” -Jacques Yves Cousteau

Building your brand’s equity is one of the most important marketing objectives that your marketing efforts go to. In building your brand’s equity, you will increase the amount of differentiation that you possess versus your competitors. Brand equity and management is extremely important, especially with SEO and content marketing, and ignoring where your company’s brand stands in the market could be very detrimental to your bottom line. When thinking about your brand’s equity, ask yourself this question:

How much is my brand worth?

Psychology and marketing often goes hand in hand. Early on in my studies, I would be asked by my primarily engineering major friends, “What is marketing anyway?” My response would always be something like, “It’s sort of like commercially applied psychology.” I stand by what I’ve said then; marketing communicates a product/service’s value with a customer, operating with an understanding of how people behave, interact, and think about things to most effectively deliver that message.

By applying theories of psychology, we can better understand consumer behavior and deliver more targeted and meaningful communications to our target audiences, and have a greater understanding of why we, as marketers, employ different marketing tactics to reach them. One of the most widely known theories that marketers know is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In this article, I’ll explain what that theory entails and how we can (and in some cases, already often are), apply this theory to our marketing practice.