The secret to swaying your customer's attention
It’s our final post in a series on neuromarketing: where the human brain meets the profession of marketing.
Need to get caught up on neuromarketing? Here’s what you missed:
In a world where content drives virtually everything, you’ll need to focus on your delivery. How you position your content will effectively dictate its virality. Certain media publications use “sensationalize” news titles to tickle parts of our brain. Today let’s focus on the ways you can improve your positioning using neuromarketing.
Value over comparison
Neuroscientists discovered something very important about the brain’s decision making process. Humans generally find it difficult to evaluate the value of a product or service based on intrinsic worth, which is why it helps to compare it to surrounding options. This is called the “anchoring effect”. Anchoring allows your customers to decide whether a product is a “good buy” or not.
In my college days, I used to live in Kensington Market here in Toronto. In the mid-2000s, there was a pricing war between hot dog vendors at Queen & Spadina (I imagine most of my Toronto friends have probably had a late night dog there before). Traditionally, the two hot dog vendors that shared the intersection sold hot dogs for $2.50. However, the hot dog war began when one of the vendors decided to go fire sale (literally) and dropped the price to $1 per hot dog.
What a deal.
This created an anchoring effect, giving a perceived better value for tourists and late-night drunks looking for street meat. You can imagine the $1 hot dog vendor was killin’ it in sales. To compete, the other vendor was forced to also sell $1 hot dogs, driving down the price of hot dogs in the whole area, which was pretty incredible for me because I was a poor college student. I really don’t think the hot dog war was ever discussed online, but it sure got me eating a lot of hot dogs that year.
The anchoring effect can also be introduced without playing against competitors. By offering bundles and planning individual sales appropriately, your customers will be able to compare your own product/service features against each other, and drive more sales by introducing otherwise unsuspecting value to your customers.
Convenience over security
This was always a hot topic for me. Just 10-15 years ago, none of us would have elected to sacrifice our personal data to companies for them to make money. The idea was preposterous. However in more recent times, major corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and more have been under fire by the SEC for usage of personal data. They discovered that people are totally willing to give up their personal data if offered a highly convenient product or service.
Read it and weep: Humans have an innate nature to offer up their own security in order to have an easier existence.
PayPal also took a page from neuromarketing, and in a study, discovered that commercials focusing on speed and convenience had stimulated a much higher response in the brain versus safety and security functions. Their ad campaigns were adjusted to focus on a fast checkout system, which ultimately drove more online shopping.
It’s probably the reason why it’s easier for people to leave the backdoor unlocked so that you can get in and out of the house faster. Our place in Kensington Market had those same house rules, which didn’t fly so well since our apartment was previously used as an after-hours rave, and we continuously had random people walk into our apartment unannounced. That was super weird.
On a business level, think about how you can offer a more convenient value proposition and simpler sales funnel, and how that can effect the type of information you’re collecting.
On a personal level, consider retaining your personal data and security, even if your brain says it prefers convenience. That’s why I don’t play around with Facebook.
Attention getting with headlines
Clickbaiting is deathly annoying. Plus, it also fuelled a wave of assumptions in our society. Not only are clickbait titles used to drive clicks to articles, but with more people having less time to read articles from content saturation, people are beginning to just trust whatever the headlines says - without clicking the articles. It’s partly the reason why misinformation is spread online.
How you position your message will determine whether your content will be successful or not - whether it’s ad copy, blog posts, or newsletter subject lines.
But what can trigger someone’s attention?
Enter the Hippocampal Headline.
A study performed by researchers at the University College London discovered that when a familiar phrase is slightly adjusted, the brain’s hippocampus is activated, and allowing our attention to be summoned. It’s genius. Take a cliche line, modify it a tiny bit, and you’ve got people’s attention. You can read more about it here.
My go-to website for testing headline copy is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. It’s a little hokey, but it does track the impact of the words you choose, testing it for emotion, skimmability, word count, and more. Hey, it’s something at least.
Well folks, that’s neuromarketing in a really lengthy nutshell. I highly recommend reviewing all of the past case studies that combine brain chemistry and marketing, because not only is it super interesting, but it’ll make you a significantly better marketer.
Marketing is a contest for people's attention.
—Seth Godin, author
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