Applied Neuromarketing Review!

If you look at what allows companies to grow, it’s the customer experience, which really separates them from others. Some examples include Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon, Uber etc. All these companies solved a problem but more importantly added to the ease of use. The ease with which people used to buy things before amazon wasn’t that much. They had to go out of the house, drive to a supermarket or a relevant store, look for it, go to the counter, stand in a queue, pay for the items, take the parcel, drive back to home and all the non-relevant steps. Now, it’s just a tap of a button. If you think of it, you’ll realise how our user experience has completely been reinvented after amazon was started. This is exactly what drives growth.

If you see why most people buy a product, that’s because it either satisfies their implicit values or explicit values. Implicit values include feeling important, having a high status quo, social belonging, etc. Most of the times, the impact of these implicit values in buying decisions is huge. Take a look at iPhones by Apple. In India, people don’t really buy iPhones for security reasons but for the status that comes with having an iPhone. Human beings are not rational, if you realise. Their decisions are based on emotion and then to have a logical basis, they post-rationalise their decisions.

In a world, where there is so much information, products and choices, it becomes very hard and crucial at the same time to control people’s attention. If you don’t have their attention in the right manner, they are not going to buy from you. A lot of people do A/B testing as a measure of conversion rate. That really doesn’t give us precise information. Rather A/B tests are more a measure of change in behaviour of people with the changes we’ve made in the user experience.

CX>Brain>Growth

What this means is that everything that we test should be relevant to the user. This can include a lot of things:

-???????Content

-???????Value Proposition

-???????Implicit Codes (like the colour schemes, spaces, elements etc)

-???????Emotional Relevance = Resonance

People don’t see all of this separately, but the entire thing constitutes as one user experience. And that UX determines how people are going to respond to your website. If you show your website for 50 ms. to someone, and if they are able to tell you what your website is about and that matches with what you want them to know, then you are using right implicit codes. We don’t realise how important these implicit codes are and understanding what your websites conveys subliminally becomes very important.

A reason why communication fails is:

-???????100% à This is what we want to say.

-???????20% à This is what customers perceive.

-???????5% à This is what their interpretation is.

What we mean might not be how it’s perceived as. This different creates a communication gap and oftentimes people misunderstand what your website is for. And these statistics are when the customer knows what your product is about. It gets when they don’t know what your product is about and is clearly reflected as:

-???????100% à This is what you should say.

-???????20% à This is what you actually say.

-???????5% à This is what customers perceive it as.

-???????1% à This is what their interpretation is.

This means what people perceive is very different from what we want to convey. To make these numbers work for you, you need to gain their attention the right way so they perceive it as how you want them to see it as.

So, how do you control attention? Eyes are our main sense organ that we use when we are looking at the website and there different ways we can get their attention:

1.?????Contrast: If there is contrast, we naturally see it. If there is a small ball alongside a big ball, we tend to see that very clearly and notice that too.

2.?????Space: Whenever things are too crowded, or too spaced out, that’s when we see it. Space works out really well to gauge our attention. The clever use of negative space can lead your web design to be very effective.

3.?????People/Faces: We tend to recognise and look at people and their faces. Our immediate attention goes to that person. We can also use faces and people as directional cues, if they are looking or pointing in a certain direction.

4.?????Movement: Our eyes catch movement really fast. This happens as we have evolved to see animals running around us, so we can hide and protect ourselves.

5.?????Breaking Rules: If everything is going in one direction, use another direction to gauge their attention.

6.??????Direction Cues: We can use these to point and lead the user in a particular direction or towards a call to action. This can include arrows and people as well.

7.?????Use their name: People respond fairly well to their own name, as it’s relevant and important to them. Using their name will allow you to gauge their attention and interest.

These are some of the ways in which you can gauge people’s attention. Working on these factors and using them to convey what you want them to know about you can be powerful.

‘90% of the experiments fail because the change never reached the customer’s mind.’

That is why it’s very important to keep our changes relevant to our customers. There are some checkpoints that will allow you to make sure you’re gauging interest and reaching customer’s mind:

-???????Perception? If they don’t see the change you made, it’s not going to change anything. Make sure whatever you’re changing is visible and perceived by the users.

-???????Relevance? If it’s not relevant to them, they are not going to see it. Emotional relevance is a huge factor why people stick to some websites more than others.

-???????Traffic? If people aren’t visiting your website, then it’s no use. Who are you even making these changes for?

-???????Cognitive Biases? There are numerous of biases that we can make use of while creating the customer experience for our users.

Using these checkpoints, you’ll be able to see if the user experience you’ve created is changing their behaviour or not. This article is a part of CLX’s mini-degree and covers week 6 now. If you like what you just read, feel free to share it with your colleagues and friends.?