3 persuasive concepts to connect with your users!

3 persuasive concepts that you can apply today!

1.Focusing effect

“We can only pay attention to a few things”

We have a tendency to only focus on a few commercial choices. Those that have noticeable differences. This unequal focus on aspects is called the focusing effect (the focusing effect is closely related to the attentional bias).

Which city do we think that has a happier life? Beach city? or a Forest city?

Well, what happens is that we focus on and overweight typical differences like sunny weather and the easy-going stereotype.

Whereas in reality, there is a huge number of aspects that are often even more important influencers of happiness (crime rates, for one).

Online persuasion tips:

• Put the focus on only a few (a max of three) USP’s.
• Emphasize our most unique USP so intensely that our customers lose focus on less favorable aspects.
• Don’t just focus on our best aspects, but also on those that differ significantly from your competitors.
• Also, emphasize the huge change that happens the moment people buy your product or use your service (before/after).

2.Context Dependent Memory

We tend to forget things when we’re out of context

Cue-dependent forgetting and remembering; it is our tendency to forget things which are out of context and to recall information more easily when the original contextual cues are present.

Take for example retargeting: Someone visited our website and looked at a product. Now we recognize this person elsewhere on the web and promote the same product again in a banner. Since the person is on a totally different website, a lot of the cues are gone. Cue-dependent forgetting tells us that it helps to include original elements of our site in the banner (colors, logos, icons, etc). We might even show the banner that’s already on our site so that people will recognize the banner easily somewhere else.

Using the same contextual cues (coloring, content, pictures, etc.) across media will facilitate the recall of our brand and products more easily and thus increase the likelihood that people will at least browse our product item catalog.

Scientific research example:

Assuming all other factors are equal, we’ll remember more when the recall session occurs under water, and we’ll remember better when asked ‘on land’. Changing the cues and context between encoding and retrieval reduces our ability to recall.

Moreover, all sorts of contextual cues influence our memory, such as body position or emotional states. The latter we call “

State-dependent memory”. It tells us for example that, if we were drunk while learning something, we’d actually better be off being equally inebriated when trying to recall what we learned.

Online persuasion tips:

• In general: Try to create a consistent context in our online presence across platforms and sites using the same contextual cues (from SEO, SEA, display, sites, to apps and social media, etc.).
• When we want a visitor to remember us or our offer at some point, prime them with contextual cues that will be present in the situation where we want them to remember us.
• When we have a recurring visitor, use cues from their previous visit to help them remember that visit.

And apart from contextual cues, do the same for other types of cues like bodily positions, emotional states etc.

3.Self-generation affect effect

“If we figured it out ourselves, we like it better

The self-generation affect effect (or the ‘not invented here – bias) is the cognitive version of the physical labor-love effect (also termed the IKEA effect). 

Not only does physical effort increase liking, but it also works just as well for cognitive effort… We tend to like ideas and information better when they’ve been generated by our own mind (instead of ideas that we read or hear from someone else). 

Even if people invest just a small amount of cognitive energy in an idea or solution, they like it much more. Not only do we like our own ideas better, but we remember them better too, see: self-generation memory effect.

Because of the self-generation affect effect, we become overly committed to our own ideas. So if we want your customer to remember and like our product, an effective strategy might be to have him generate the information himself (or parts of it).

Lego very successfully employs this tactic with their LEGO ideas product line.

Scientific research example:

Imagine that we’re thinking about solutions to the problem of water waste, specifically how communities can reduce the amount of water they use. Suddenly, Dan Ariely materializes out of thin air. He’s here to help us. He hands us a paper with 50 words, and we’re instructed to combine these words to come up with a solution. We tried it, and it works! We came up with the following idea: ‘Water lawns using recycled water recovered from household drains’.

In reality, this is the one and only solution we can create from the 50 words (in that sense it’s not our idea, it’s Dan’s idea that we pieced together). Will this cognitive effort boost our liking for this solution?

 We’ll like this idea more than other ideas simply because our brain generated it and put effort in it (Dan even found that just giving us the 10 words to form the sentence already boosts our liking for the idea).

Online persuasion tips:

Make people think about our product or service (“play hard to get”):

• Ask questions in our content.
• Ask for answers in a proactive way (i.e. by means of a feedback tool).
• Why they’re considering our offer?
• Why did they buy the product when they did?
• Try not to just provide our USP’s, but ask our customer to think of one or two himself.
• Allow people to tailor our product. Not just to satisfy individual preferences, but also to invest cognitive effort and thereby liking (we might even allow our customers to create and design their own products).