Elicit real feedback with neuromarketing
Neuromarketing: where the human brain meets marketing.
We’re on post #3 in our neuromarketing series. If you need to get caught up, here’s where we left off:
Today we’ll track down what your customers actually want. Surveys, tweets, website behaviour only paint a vain picture of what your customers aspire of themselves, not what they rightfully perceive of themselves.
Where the eye leads
The eye says everything, as they say. It’s no secret that eye tracking software has helped advertisers with choosing better images and copy. In an ad experiment involving a baby looking at the camera vs. looking to the right, eye tracking software was able to show better responses when the baby was facing to the right: directly at the headline copy that the advertiser is hoping that you’ll read.
While most people may find it hard to get their customers to allow access to their, you know, eyes, you could use the next closest thing: their mouse cursor. Heat maps such as Hotjar allow you to see where their cursor spends most of their time, and even a short screen capture of where their cursor most likely travelled. Creepy, I know.
Discovering hidden responses
Human beings have two perspectives of themselves: the internal and the external. Our external perspective is one that we sometimes aspire to be like, while our internal perspective is who we actually are.
An external perspective would be how we want others to perceive us to be. A decade ago, I unknowingly pushed an external narrative under my pen name “Reggie Ramone”. I had a gentleman’s bio that stated: Floating somewhere between Cary Grant's ease, James Dean's cool factor & Dean Martin's consumptions. I unceremoniously wanted my personal brand to be associated to those three recognizable pillars: Grant’s impeccably classic style, which I actually wore more trendy outfits than classic; Dean’s cool factor, which I spent more time chasing being cool than actually being comfortable in my own skin; and Martin’s consumptions - well, that was kind of spot on.
My internal perspective is who I actually was. In hindsight, Reggie Ramone was really just putting on a show. I was far from a supposed “gentleman” in the way that I acted or communicated with people, to the point of personal embarrassment in retrospect. However I wanted people to see a perspective of myself that mostly fed my insecurities. It took years of self-reflection and guidance to eliminate those childish and hideous personality traits.
If you sent my old-self a survey or put me through a customer interview, and I would’ve given you my external perspective. If you followed my intoxicating behaviour, you would have seen a completely different me.
One example comes from Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, co-founder of dating site OKCupid. Described throughout most of the book, each person has two types of persons: one that puts on their bio who they want people to believe about them, and another that, through data science, actually describes opposite behaviours. Sometimes data, especially in large data sets, can expose an ugly perspective of not only people, but of an entire culture. I highly recommend reading it as there are fantastic synergies between marketing and data science.
Fear of missing out (FOMO)
Most of you already know what FOMO is, but I’d like to point out two important factors that actually drive FOMO.
FOMO begins with framing
FOMO focuses on loss aversion
A classic example of loss aversion comes from an experiment that offered the choice of gambling or not to the participant. After receiving $50, Group A was asked to choose between “keeping $30” or gambling it, while Group B was asked to “lose $20” or gamble it. Group B chose to gamble more than Group A, a 44% increase in the number of people avoiding “loss”. People straight up fear loss.
If you want to create FOMO, optimize your copy to spark loss aversion. Create A/B testing experiments to maximize efficiency. You want people to fear missing out.
On Friday, we’ll wrap up the neuromarketing series with a focus on product positioning. See you then!
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
—Pema Chödrön, author
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Your Investments 🚀
Welcome to red week! Tech stocks and cryptocurrencies not named Dogecoin are down - although the recovery has begun to take place. To the smart investor, means fire sale. Don’t take my advice though, make sure you do your diligence before diving into the next red hot stock or cryptocurrency.
This week, the talk of the market is on earning reports. Snap Inc. (SNAP) is expected to report earnings tomorrow after market close, while Netflix (NFLX) posted company’s revenue grew 24% year-over-year in their report yesterday, but fell flat in reaching their target number of subscribers, dropping share price after hours. Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) earnings were mixed, sending the stock down as F-35 sales are down.
For the meme stock investors, GameStop’s (GME) CEO George Sherman has stepped down, although the news barely moved the stock price needle.
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Get granular with your customers,
Reggie