Do you know 95% of new products fail?
And e-commerce brands lose $18 billion each year because of cart abandonment?
And don’t forget about the money that went into attracting traffic through PPC ads, SEO, content marketing, and website designs. But this all goes to waste. Why?
Because of POOR CONSUMER EXPERIENCE.
So much effort spent in bringing the customer to the purchasing point but failing to close the deal.
Gerald Zultman of Harvard said that 95% of our decisions are nonconscious. So, as marketers, we need to question ourselves: how much of our customers’ brains are we marketing to? Is this the little 5% conscious mind or 95% unconscious mind?
That is why we need a “MARKETING REVOLUTION.” We need to understand the brains of our consumers. We need to know how it works and what factors impact nonconscious decision-making. So we can implement this knowledge in our marketing efforts.
The key is to focus on the part that makes decisions – the subconscious mind, instead of focusing on the whole brain of your consumer or user (as conventional marketing does).
Table of Contents
Schools of Thought in Neuromarketing
The marketing world is divided into two spectra. One is based on neuromarketing science, where you see what brain areas are activating to predict behavior.
The other is the behavior end, where people aren’t concerned with what’s going on in the brain; instead, they look at how people behave in the real world.
We need to apply the knowledge gained from both to do effective marketing. That includes understanding the process of decision making, influence science, and persuasion techniques.
There’s no one way to understand behavior. Hence, you will see many schools of thought in behavioral psychology and neuromarketing. For effective marketing, you need to focus on your main problem or goal and see which school of thought’s principles or techniques can bring your customer around the desired behavior.
Let’s look at different schools of thought in neuromarketing.
Daniel Kahneman: System 1 & System 2
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman gave the concept of 2 part brain. According to him, our brain has two thought systems: System 1 and System 2.
System 1 is the old brain that is fast, emotional, unconscious, and inefficient. Whereas System 2 is logical and rational – the part that thinks.
Our brain always defaults to System 1. It is unconscious and the center of our decisions (more than 95% of our decisions are unconscious, as André Morys has said). Most marketers tend to ignore that fact.
Geoffrey Miller: Evolutionary Psychology
In his famous book Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behaviour, Geoffrey Miller said that today’s modern consumer is still driven by the internal programs set up tens of thousands of years ago in our hunter-gatherer days.
According to Miller, we buy what we buy to signal our 6 universal human personality traits that have been hardwired into our brains for millennia. They are general intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
In other words, consumer behavior can be understood as a signaling strategy to communicate our personality to others. Quoting Miller from his book:
“…basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.”
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consuemr Behaviour by Geoffrey Miller
Hence, effective marketing attempts to fulfill human desires by producing products and services that people will buy.
BJ Fogs: Behavioral Model
According to BJ Fog, a behavior occurs when three things are aligned with each other. He presents this in the form of a mathematical equation.
Don’t get confused about the mathematical representation of this model. It simply says that you need 3 things for a behavior to occur:
- Motivation: The person should be sufficiently motivated to perform the behavior.
- Ability: The person has the ability to perform the behavior. In other words, it should lack difficulty.
- Triggers: The person has to be triggered to perform that behavior. Without it, the behavior will not occur even if both motivation and ability are high. Triggers can be anything that nudges the person to do the task. For instance, an alarm, SMS, an announcement of a sale, or a CTA pop-up asking you to sign up for the newsletter.
Robert Cialdini: Six Principles of Influence
I discussed Cialdini’s 6 principles of influence in this article. You can read about them in detail there.
One principle is “Social Proof,” which says you are more likely to do something when you see others doing it. Another principle is “Reciprocation,” which states that you are more likely to do something for me if I do something for you first without any return expectations.
Roger Dooley’s Persuasion Slide Model
Roger Dooley’s presented a simple framework to increase conversion on your site by increasing motivation, reducing friction, and creating nudges. It is called the “Persuasion Slide Model.” This comprehensive framework incorporates various conscious and subconscious factors.
There are four simple elements (both conscious and nonconscious) in this model. Let’s look at them in detail.
Gravity
The first component is Gravity. It makes the slide work. It is the initial motivation with which your customers come to your site or store. It can be their desires, wants, or needs.
To get the most out of it, you need to align your messaging or offer with your customer’s wants, desires, goals, and needs. It is quite easy to say “Fill in the form” in a CTA. But your customers are not interested in your form or the possible spam that will follow if they give up their email address.
They came to your site with a purpose or goal. Talk to that goal! That’s why a CTA with “Get a Diet Plan Now!” or “Get Shipping Quotes” works best.
Nudge
To move down the slide, you need to propel yourself forward a little bit. This is the “nudge” in the persuasion slide model. It is basically what you do to attract your customer’s attention. To be effective, a nudge has to be seen or detected by the customer to begin the next element.
It can take many shapes, e.g., an email, a bright-colored sale sign in a retail store, a huge “BUY NOW” button, or any CTA that attracts your customer’s attention.
Angle
It is the sloppy side of the slide. It is a very critical element. It is the motivation that you provide to your customers. The steeper it is, the more the customer is motivated to act. Otherwise, she will stop in the middle.
Motivation is of 2 types:
- Conscious
- Nonconscious
Conscious motivators can be benefits, features, discounts, sales, etc. These appeal to System 2 (as Kahneman called it) or rational decision-making of your customer’s brain.
Nonconscious motivators are the elements of your offer or product that target the emotions of your customers. Principles like Cialdini’s six persuasion factors (social proof, likeability, reciprocity, authority), Millers’ Central Six Instincts, and BJ Fog’s Behavioral Model—all fall into this category.
Many other psychological factors like the FOMO effect or fear of missing out and our brain’s ability to averse from loss and difficult to understand things also fall into this category.
You need both conscious and nonconscious elements to create a steep angle and a good slide.
Friction
If the slide isn’t slippery enough, it creates friction. Friction refers to the difficulty during the process or the customer’s journey. $18 Billion is lost each year in shopping cart abandonment. Why? Because of friction during the checkout process.
Friction can be real or perceived, or imaginary. Real difficulties can be extra long forms, confusing payment methods, and poor and confusing user interface (UI). Other than that, complicated password requirements, automated logouts, and captchas make the process difficult for the customer.
Perceived friction is when a user sees some disfluent design during a task or process and considers it difficult. For example, difficult-to-read fonts and color schemes, hard-to-say names, etc.
You can view a side-by-side comparison of Bodoni Font and Arial Font below:
Amazon is the best retailer in terms of reducing friction. With just a click, a user can buy whenever he wants, and he doesn’t have to fill in details again and again. And the good thing is that Amazon always keeps the user logged in.
As Jeff Bezos said:
“When you reduce friction, when you make it easy, people will do more of it.”
Remember, nonconscious motivators are always cheaper than conscious motivators like sales, discounts, etc. So, you better start working on it. Just make the whole user experience as easy as possible, and you will see an increasing number of happier customers. 🙂
Do you have any other ideas about conscious or nonconscious motivators you use on your website or maybe, have seen on another website?
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