To celebrate 4 years of Engage Magazine- The new marketing game we have a gift for you with articles on social media marketing, consumer behavior, NeuroMarketing and much more.
Read the full edition here:
NeuroMarketing tip: Creating contrast in the Market
You need to create contrast between you and your competition. You also need to be approachable and not too serious.
Here is an example on achieving the 3 points above. It is a bank in Australia on their about us page
Consumer Behavior: Tell Them What They Should Do
Most of the times websites are complicated, full of text and don’t think about customer experience or NeuroMarketing basics.
This is a good example of how a website should be. Has a strong emotional promise. (attention to the word “Power” ), it is clean, which allows the eyes to rest and tells right away what you should be doing.
NeuroMarketing: Why Women Are Better than Men at Recognizing Faces
When women were shown images of unfamiliar people, eye-tracking technology showed that they fixed upon the faces 10% to 40% more times than men did, suggesting that women’s ability to gather more visual information is what gives them a better memory for faces, says a team from McMaster University in Canada led by Jennifer J. Heisz. In learning new faces, females seem more likely to direct their gaze to highly informative regions, such as the eyes. Past studies have shown that women typically perform better than men in facial-recognition tests.
Do you work while you eat?
You can say, besides a marketing tip this is also a weight loss tip:
People who were making and tasting lemonade while memorizing a seven-digit number ended up with a 50% higher sugar concentration in the drink than people who were memorizing just one number, say Reine C. van der Wal of Radboud University Nijmegen and Lotte F. van Dillen of Leiden University, both in the Netherlands. This and other experiments suggest that dealing with a cognitive load dulls the experience of taste (not just sweet but also salty and sour), leading people to drink or eat more in order to obtain a pleasurable experience. Abstaining from cognitive activities during meals may enhance taste perception and limit over consumption, the researchers say.
NeuroMarketing and Website Navigation
Do you often ask why people don’t take action on your website?
Let’s take a look at NeuroMarketing:
Our reptilian brain only cares about keeping us alive, asking questions like:
- “Is this familiar?”
- “Am I safe?”
- “Can I see it?”
- “Do I need to act now?”
- (Also: “Can I eat it?” … But that’s for another time)
Only when our reptilian brain is assured that we’ll survive will the emotional and rationale thinking then kick in. The way the brain behaves can have a fascinating impact on how we design websites and online experiences in order to get people to act a certain way. How does your website answer the following instinctual questions from your visitors and potential customers?
“Is this familiar?” The reptilian brain is designed for efficiency and likes things that are familiar and easily recognizable. Encounter something new, and it’s hard-wired to assess for danger, potentially resulting in a less-than-seamless experience.
“Am I safe?” Our brain is programmed to notice differences and changes in our environment; it’s a survival technique. Things that interrupt an expected pattern are like huge flashing red alerts to our reptilian brain.
Does your page layout and website navigation follow an expected pattern? Navigation accounts for 60 percent of online success, and for mobile sites it accounts for 80 percent. There’s a reason why most company logos appear on the upper left hand side. Do you have call-to-actionbuttons? How many? Where? How about a perpetual cart/lead form? Do these take your visitors where they want and expect to go?
Can I see it?” About 50 percent of the brain is dedicated to processing visuals. You only think that you think; you really just see. And once you see something, you can’t “unsee” it.
People understand things much faster when they visualize them. Do you use plenty of visuals on your website? If you sell products, do you have lots of product photos in environments that your visitors can relate or aspire to? If you sell a service, do you show photos of your employees providing the service?
“Do I need to act now?” People like what’s first and what they can get now; the fear of loss overrides the possibility of later gain. Are you asking your website visitors to act now? Are you asking enough? Do you have an email opt-in form on every page? Your website should present the most important, most popular and most actionable things first, because by the time readers scroll all the way to the bottom, or click through to the third or fourth page, they’ve lost interest. Is 90 percent of your effort focused on selling through the top 10 percent best-performing products or services?
Buying and Selling Seasonal Goods
When it comes to buying and selling goods with a limited life cycle—such as fashion apparel, concert tickets, and holiday merchandise—shoppers and retailers face different dilemmas. Shoppers must decide whether to buy early in the season at a higher price or later in the season after a markdown. Buying later poses a trade-off because while the product will be cheaper, shoppers will have less time to use it. Meanwhile, sellers must decide how much to order, how to get the shoppers to buy at higher prices, and when and by how much to mark products down.
In a study by Lakshman Krishnamurthi it was found that By slightly reducing their inventory—thereby creating a sense of urgency for shoppers to buy earlier in the season—the retailer would be able to increase the number of sales taking place at higher prices.
Additional experimental scenarios revealed that the retailer was better off offering smaller markdowns earlier in the season rather than large markdowns late in the season. The experiments showed that when small markdowns were offered earlier, strategic buyers caused, on average, a 9 percent dip in sales revenue if there was a risk of stock running out. But this dip was as high as 35 percent of the sales revenue if large markdowns were offered a little later in the season and there was no risk of stock running out.
Why Women Should Ask Auto-Repair Shops for Discounts
Women who called auto-repair shops to inquire about getting a new radiator were quoted prices that averaged 6% higher than those offered to men, according to an experiment led by Meghan Busse of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Yet female callers who requested a price reduction were successful about 35% of the time, compared with just 25% for men. Shops may be caught off guard when women ask for discounts on car repairs, the researchers say.
Cosmetic Surgery Is Fueled by a Fear of Dying
People who were instructed to think about their own mortality were more receptive to the idea of having cosmetic surgery than those who weren’t (3.57 versus 2.96 on a seven-point scale), suggesting that fear of death is a motivator behind patients’ decisions to have tummy tucks, says Kim-Pong Tam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. When people experience unconscious death terror, they tend to engage in behaviors that maintain their sense of symbolic immortality, even though cosmetic surgery itself can threaten people’s health or even their lives, he writes.
SOURCE: Existential motive underlying cosmetic surgery: A terror management analysis
Consumer Behavior: Prices in Red Affect Men but Not Women
Men who saw red discount prices for toasters and microwaves agreed more strongly that they’d save “a lot of money” than men who saw black prices (4.26 versus 2.56 on a seven-point scale), says a team led by Nancy M. Puccinelli of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. But this didn’t happen when the research subjects were induced to think carefully about the prices, suggesting that red’s happiness-inducing effect sways men’s perception of discounts only when they’re not paying close attention. Women were unaffected by the prices’ color, perhaps because they were already paying closer attention than the men to the discounts, the researchers say.
