It's official: we decide as a result of emotion, not reason. Grip your customers by the emotions, as it were, and you're 50% there. How do I know this? From watching "Horizon" on the BBC. In their programme "How To Make Better Decisions" the Horizon team made a number of experiments with the purpose of finding out why we do the things we do. The two experiments that made me sit up and start to make notes were to do with brain electricity and post-decision rationalisation. This is what they did for the first one: Volunteers were hooked up to machines measuring their brain activity, then asked to make simple yes or no decisions. Without exception, every volunteer brain showed increased amygdala (sounds like a Star Wars character) response at the moment decisions were made. The amygdala is thought to be the part of the brain that governs emotions. In a much smaller number of cases, some volunteers also displayed frontal lobe activity at the moment of decision. Frontal lobes are thought to be responsible for human reason and logic - the bits that make humans smarter than apes, you could say. In other words, we make decisions based on what we feel, not what we think. Isn't that a useful fact to know? Here's how they measured post-decision rationalisation: Volunteers were shown sets of cards showing two similar-looking faces at a time and asked to say which face they found more attractive. After they chose, they were passed, face-down, the card they thought they'd chosen. In fact, the card they received was the one they'd just rejected. They'd been tricked. The testers had switched cards on them. They then flipped the card over to look at the face and were asked to describe exactly why they'd chosen that face. Remember, this was the face they hadn't chosen. In every single case, the volunteers not only failed to notice the switch, they all managed to come up with rationalisations as to why they'd chosen that face - the face they hadn't originally chosen! "I thought he had kind eyes", "She's got a cute smile" - that's as maybe, but they didn't think that when they first saw the cards! What does this tell us? It tells us that first we decide, then we find reasons to justify our decisions. Once it's too late to do anything about it, in other words. And it's true! I'm always buying stuff online, then (after completing my purchase checking out review sites to see what people think. And if I'm objective, I know that I filter out the negative stuff and focus on reasons to justify my decision. We all do! What does this mean? It means that when we want to do business successfully, we have to think about our target customers as human beings who have feelings. A certain amount of factual detail on, say, a website is fine, but we have to focus most importantly on grabbing our readers by their emotional lapels and giving them a good shake! If you remember just one thing from this article, remember this: Facts Tell, Stories Sell.
About the Author:
Daniel O`Connor is a top freelance marketing copywriter based in the UK. See his satisfaction-guaranteed site at www.daniboy.com. He`s worked for some of the biggest companies and organisations in the world -- including NTT and Mitsubishi Electric, not to mention the 1998 Olympic Winter Games -- as well as some of the smallest. And he can do a job for you, too. With a language-based background -- he`s fluent in Japanese and French -- Daniel is supremely qualified at explaining complicated things in a simple way. There`s nothing you can throw at him that he won`t have dealt with before. Because it`s all about one thing: the words. The right words for you and your business. Blog articles. SEO for websites. Direct marketing. White papers. Flyer advertising. You want words? Daniel O`Connor has words. Want to try out his writing before getting in touch? Check out his daily business blog at www.daniboy.com/blog/ and sign up for his `Daniboy Writes` ezine. It`s every second Friday, absolutely free, and won`t commit you in any way. See www.daniboy.com/ezine now.
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:53:13 - 100%
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