Welcome back to part 2 of my 12 week series on my studies in The CXL Institute’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion program (link to the course here), an excellent program reviewing how to use concepts from the academic fields of psychology and neuroscience in order to increase your persuasive power, whether you run a non-profit, business, or pretty much any other entity.
This week, I will review what I’ve learned so far again. In Roger Dooley’s intro to neuromarketing course, he gives a quick introduction to neuromarketing. He also talks about the persuasion slide. The persuasion slide is his model for persuasion. The persuasion slide consists of the following items: gravity, nudge, angle, and friction. Nudge means getting attention and starting to persuade. This is what will “nudge” them down the slide. By gravity, the instructor means your customer’s initial motivation. This can help you or hurt you in your marketing. The angle on the slide is the motivation you provide, both conscious and non-conscious. It is helpful to persuade at both a conscious and non-conscious level. The friction part of the slide is difficulty, both real and perceived difficulty. The more friction there is, the harder it will be for you to persuade. This part of the program made me consider more highly Mr. Dooley’s new book, friction.
In Andre Morys’ Applied Neuromarketing course, he covers brain fundamentals. He talks about the brain stem, also known as the old brain. This part of the brain controls a lot automatic stuff in your brain. The cerebellum brain is also related to automatic stuff. The limbic system controls emotional stuff. The amygdala is part of this. So is the thalamus and hypothalamus. He details how what separates us as humans is our cerebral cortex, also known as the new brain. It helps us do complex things like math problems, accounting, rocket science, and etc. He also details Kahneman’s system 1 and system 2 model. System 1 is basically the old brain. It requires little effort. System 2 is the one related to your new brain. It requires effort to use system 2, so your brain often tries to avoid using it. Marketers must keep this in mind. He brings up another number. I think he said processing in the limbic system is several factors faster than the new brain. This is one reason why implicit codes are important in marketing. He gives a few examples with BMW. I’ve learned that a lot of luxury brands use implicit stuff in their marketing. Morys also talked about how showing a website very, very quickly can help you understand what people think about your website. He recommended running a five second test, where you show someone your website and have them give you their opinion on the website in just five seconds. This is because the amount of time you have to influence someone about your web design is very limited.
In his “Control the Attention” video, he teaches how to control your audience’s attention. To do this, you must understand how people perceive websites. You must understand that customer experience (which happens in the mind of your customer) leads to growth). Customer experience does not need to be great, cool, or fancy. Instead, it is imperative that it is relevant! You only have about 50ms to prove you are relevant, according to the instructor. He also shows the limbic map. The limbic mad consists of dominance, balance, and stimulant. He mentions how the color black is an implicit code for black. An “unfriendly face” is also a commonly used implicit code for high fashion. The unfriendly face is intended to be implicit for someone who is so awesome that they basically don’t even need to be friendly. He also shows a graphic on why communication often fails. He also shows the result of a few eye tracking studies. One cool eye tracking study showed that the direction in which people are looking on a graphic has a highly significant effect on where people will look. The second part to controlling attention is that you need to have contrast. If you have a messy website, people have no idea where to look. The instructor then gives 7 awesome principles to control attention that I have never seen anywhere else, and I’ve been studying this for a while. I will outline the seven principles below.
The seven principles are: contrast, space, people / faces, movement, breaking rules, directional cues, and person’s name / their own face. It is important to operationalize this process in your marketing. I think I will do this by reflecting on this model and creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) out of this. I think I will be able to get a lot out of this model. I definitely wrote this principle down in my external notes on this course I am keeping in the app EverNote. You must understand the customer experience leads to behavior, which leads to results. No perception, no impact. If you are using cognitive biases, this will help you. Accordingly, you will be using proven strategies, which will increase your odds of success. He recommends using cognitive bias lists in your heuristic evaluation. He gives another model for thinking about persuasion. SOR. SOR is an acronym that stands for stimulus, organism, and reaction. The letter R in SOR may also be ROI, for marketers.
In the emotional resonance part of the “Applied Neuromarketing” course, Andre Morys talks about the importance of emotional resonance. He details how a small movement can create some big effects. The attention is something that you, as the marketer or designer can control. He details how most personas don’t help. He says that in his experience, 80-90% of personas do not work. He says personas are not usually precise enough. I agree with this, most stuff I’ve read on personas has read like it’s farce. Anyways, he recommends mapping indicators from your persona to the limbic map. Based on that stuff, make one word about the persona. Honestly, I still think there’s a better way to make personas. Probably something that involves algorithms and / or machine learning. A good, data based strategy he recommended for making personas was using search engine results page. I think I will try this using keyword research with the tool ubsersuggest one day. He also said some research showed that just changing the copy of your Google ad would change the type of people you attract. The importance of this is clear. The type of “net” you use, so to speak, will control what you will be able to capture/
