The Final Review Of Digital Psychology And Persuasion Mini Degree
The past few months have been a fulfilling and aha moment taking a course in Digital Psychology and Persuasion with CXL Institute. It has availed me the opportunity to gain new perspectives on a wide variety of things such as copy/content writing, behavioural design for web and sales page, and digital marketing. The new perspective armed with a deeper understanding of the conglomeration of these fields of study; neuroscience, psychology, and behaviour science regarding the scientific analysis of brain functionality concerning decision making and purchase.
Different analyses, overviews, and evaluations of human behaviour, using eye tracking, facial coding theory, and many more are instrumental to the existence of Digital Psychology and Persuasion.
So, this week’s article will be the wrap-up of the lessons learned in the past few months as Digital Psychology and Persuasion is concerned. More than fifty lessons were taken alongside numerous recommended a variety of articles, textbooks like ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel, and ‘Brainfluence’ by Roger Dooley.
Starting from the first week of Digital Psychology and Persuasion class, where I was introduced to a course in psychology, ‘People and Psychology’ and this course contains numerous lessons but I will only be permitted to summarise an infinitesimal part of the whole lessons. Cialdini 7 principles of persuasion are Reciprocity, Commitment/Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity, Unity – Value Perception, Persuasive Techniques, and Fogg Behavioural Model. Copy and product massaging applied neuromarketing,
The Cialdini principles express the psychological values that are capable to activate the emotional response in humans toward a particular goal. Each principle highlighted is critical of human reaction to a stimulus. For instance, the reciprocity idea – that human hate being indebted so they feel obliged to provide either discounts or concessions to others if they’ve received favors from those others is instrumental to a marketing strategy or idea to provide freemium for customers as to return for purchase. In the same vein, Social proof and authority influence buyer’s decision having done a review or reading testimonies of people who have purchased the same product or perhaps reading about a specialist who is well respected accredited certain products make it easy to sway toward making a belief. Other Cialdini principles are congruent with marketing strategies, for either online platform or direct marketing.
Value perception is also a relevant lesson that analyzes user perception patterns toward the visual perception of the product page. An empirical evaluation of a product page to deduce user’s value perception revealed that the size of the product can contextually increase value perception. What does that mean? Individual product has a peculiar size that increases value perception. However, value perception is a process of persuasive technique.
Persuasive techniques help the tons of trigger and button in human brain pushes to work for powerful outcome. The progenitors, which Robert Cialdini was one, have over the years studied human behaviour and cause of behavioural change, and these are put together to make persuasive techniques lessons. But I will mention two to three of these techniques: Focus Effect – analyzes human attention about the event, and visual existence evaluation concerning individualized perception bias. So the context product page, focusing on the unique value proposition and fewer benefits to enjoy when a purchase is made will attract prospect attention better than stringing a page up with much information than necessary. Context-Dependent Memory – it is a response to the forgetfulness of human nature outside the context of its previous experience of an event. So, context-dependent memory is technically meant to reproduce an environment similar to the previous experience to trigger an association capable of bringing back to existence. It is congruent with the sales page. To achieve in the marketing context, try to create a consistent context in your online presence across platforms and sites using the same contextual cues – SEO, SEA, display, sites, to applications and social media. And lastly, is self-generated affect effect – by nature every human wants relevancy or being part of the decision making directly or indirectly. This technique leverage the veracity of human nature to win his heart toward making a certain decision. Because of the self-generation effect, we become overly committed to our ideas. So if you want your customer to remember and like your product, an effective strategy might be to have him generate the information himself (or parts of it).
Neuromarketing opens up with the analysis and functionality of human brains. Each layer has its functions: the “New Brain” thinks, the “Middle Brain” feels and the “Old Brain” decides – it reviews input from the other two brains and controls the decision-making process.
Neuroscientists have demonstrated that the Old Brain is responsible for releasing all of our decisions. So, it is seen as a part of the brain which is an ancient and primitive part of the brain. Also, it’s called the Reptilian Brain. We share it with reptiles and all other vertebrates, which is mostly concerned with survival. Consequently, applied neuromarketing experts leverage the functionalities of these brain coupled with behaviour science research to harness these to marketing ideologies. And this stretches beyond direct marketing or evaluation of human decisions based on hypothesis and empirical analysis, web page and sales page have the beneficiary of this researches. However, from Cialdini principles to Fogg Behavioural model are born out of the brain’s evaluation and their functionalities.
Dr. BJ Fogg from the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University has done some amazing research on credibility and behavioural design. His model for driving behavioural changes – called The Fogg Behaviour Model – explains that three elements must come together at the same time for behaviour to occur: motivation, ability, and trigger. When behaviour does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. These elements are contextually marketing behavioural elements, most especially wed-driven. This model is instrumental in copywriting for sales pages and content marketing.
Every technique and behavioural model as expressed in Digital Psychology and Persuasion is intertwined and intersected. On many occasions, five techniques can be used in designing for behavioural change on a sales page. For instance, in the case of website building for a sales page or product sales, two of Cialdini principles, value perception, visual hierarchy, and Fogg Behavioural model can be used relatively. And in most cases, Fogg Behavioural Model, as far as the sales page is concerned, its usage is consistent and so many others.
From Joanna Wiebe, the Original Conversion Copywriter, she once said it best, instead of writing your message on a blank page, just steal it. Steal it directly from the mouths of your prospects. Because the reality is, most of the time, the customer is way more effective at recognizing and explaining what the value of your product or solution is than you are. Because they’re the ones who use it and they’re the ones who justified paying money for it. They also speak a common language with your market. So they sound very authentic and they naturally filter their comments about products related to specific motivations and value in their lives. ‘That is a problem that we tend to have as marketers when we write copy, is that we get way to inward, we’re thinking way too much about the specifics of our product in terms of its features, how it compares to competitors, and we neglect to talk about what the value is, what the big overarching day-to-day benefit is of using the product. To put it in perspective, she simply advocated ‘Behavioural Design’ which is marketing relevant. The MEClab’s Conversion Sequence Heuristics also takes a different stride in designing for behaviour.
Behavioural design still boils down to the analysis of the persuasive techniques. While MEClab’s conversion sequence heuristics analyses likely buyer’s journey of purchase, raising questions that may arise along the purchase journey and it can be solved using the message-mining method. This makes it possible to have buyers’ positions and leverage the opinion to either a copy embedded with a value proposition or otherwise. Moreover, it’s worthy of note to state categorically that visual hierarchy is imperatively contingent on any behavioural design that can convert.
However, there are many approaches to behaviour change and we have so many different terms for them but at the end of the day, there’s some psychological ingredient that people have figured out often through pure, brute force or trial and error. In the words of Dr. Brian Cugelman, ‘I can educate people on websites on apps, in online ads you know with the web I can use anything. I can educate people with graffiti if I like. You know if people understood drumming I could do that there are ancient drumming communication networks and I used to be a drummer so I’m sure(drumming) I can now find my way to communicate through like a mass communication networks of drumming if that’s what it takes for mass communication and there were old historical techniques for that.’ What that connotes is that it is necessary to develop or adopt certain techniques based on whom the message is directed to and that buttresses the expediency of behaviour design for easy conversion.
In a nutshell, Digital Psychology and Persuasion are basically about neuroscience, psychology, and industry lingo analysis of human relation to digital worlds and how these are tapped into to expatiate further its relevance to behavioural design toward behaviour change concerning online marketing.
There are many perspectives on behavior design. The psychological perspective that stretches concern with how people feel and think but more at a conceptual level, what drives behaviour, what shapes emotions, and how people interact, It allows us to predict how people are. The neuroscience perspective is very different. So that’s where we go into an area of science that looks at the actual mechanisms that drive behavior: the ways that emotions operate specifically. And what neuroscience does is it gives an extremely detailed view of how people are. It helps to understand behaviour from, a more mechanistic perspective that’s very descriptive.
