It's an unfortunate fact that literally billions of dollars are thrown away on advertisements across all industries, including the vended laundry industry, that fail to capture the attention of potential customers or motivate them to act.
Persuasion marketing is all too often a complete waste of both time and money.
You will not get closer to the truth if you develop your advertising using traditional methods.
Only direct measures of how people react to advertisements can begin to shed light on the unconscious mechanisms that can explain and predict the true impact of sales messages on the brain.
Persuasion science, a branch of behavioral economics, is a relatively new field that can provide scientific answers to questions that have stumped advertisers, marketers, and public relations professionals for decades.
A practical persuasion theory has been developed after more than 20 years of research and practice in the field of persuasion science, also known as neuromarketing or consumer neuroscience.
This method can assist business owners in avoiding many pitfalls, such as excessive costs and ineffective results in developing and delivering convincing claims.
Actually, marketers have debated numerous persuasion theories for many years.
Few, however, are based on any measurement of what happens in the brain when people pay attention and experience an emotion related to the ad message, which triggers a decision to buy or not.
However, thanks to the tremendous growth in the field of neuroscience over the last two decades, new answers have emerged to solidify our scientific understanding of how advertisements can either positively influence or be ignored in a matter of seconds.
What psychologists and other researchers have discovered about the relationship between persuasive messages and the brain is summarized here.
Although our brains are made up of two major systems, the primal brain and the rational brain, only one dominates mental processing.
And it's probably not the one you're thinking of.
The primal brain is the oldest system, and it controls critical internal states such as attention and emotional resources.
It controls the processing of all persuasive messages below our conscious level.
To be PERSUASIVE, your messaging must appeal to the customer's primal brain.
Having said that, there are six persuasion stimuli that cause immediate primal brain responses:
1. Make your message Personal.
This is due to the primal brain's lack of patience and empathy for anything unrelated to its own survival.
2. Make your proof Tangible.
Because the primal brain is constantly looking for what is familiar and friendly, as well as what can be recognized quickly, it requires tangible input.
Without a lot of effort and skepticism, the primal brain cannot process complexity.
It values simple, straightforward, concrete ideas.
3. Make your story Memorable.
The primal brain retains very little information.
It is essential to place the majority of the important content at the beginning and to repeat it at the end.
Furthermore, the primal brain adores stories.
4. Make your points visually appealing.
This is due to the primal brain's visual sensory channel.
The optic nerve connects to the primal brain and is at least 25 times faster than the auditory (hearing) nerve.
There is no other sense that is more dominant than the visual sense.
It's your advertising and marketing messages' superhighway.
5. Make an emotional Impact.
Emotions have a strong impact on the primal brain.
Emotions in your advertisement cause chemical events in the brain that have a direct impact on how people process and memorize information.
In fact, without emotion, no decisions are made.
6. Make your messages Contrastable.
Before/after, risky/safe, with/without, and slow/fast are all examples of solid contrasts that the primal brain is sensitive to.
Contrast allows for quick and risk-free decisions.
Without contrast, the brain enters a state of confusion, which delays or, worse, halts decision-making entirely.
Learning to speak the language of the six primal brain stimuli is a good start, but your message must also address three critical questions:
First, what are your target audience's primary "pains"?
Diagnosing pains allows you to identify the most important decision-makers that influence your customers' behavior.
Our primal instinct is to pay attention to advertising messages that arouse our fears.
This is why a product, service, or solution that can clearly articulate which pains it can alleviate first will garner more attention and create a greater urgency to act.
Second, what are your three distinguishing claims?
Convert the top three reasons why customers should patronize your company into short, simple words that are easy to pronounce and information that is clearly organized under a maximum of three arguments.
To appeal to the primal brain, your messages must also be easy to read, with fonts that are processed with maximum fluency.
Third, what proof do you have of your gain?
Your demonstration of value must be understood by the primal brain, which does not understand the future by physiological design.
Create "lightbulb moments" for your potential customers by using customer testimonials or simple demonstrations.
Remember to keep your value demonstration simple enough that a non-expert can grasp and understand it right away.
That's all there is to it! Remember the 6 persuasion elements!
These are the most recent neuroscience research findings on creating effective advertising messages - and how these new discoveries can help you grow your business.
If you truly want to create economically sound, highly effective advertising that works, learning and leveraging the contents of this article will almost certainly help you achieve that goal.
It may require some thought and additional research, but employing these scientific methods will put you far ahead of the competition.
In fact, if you just put a little extra effort into your advertising and marketing programs, you'll soon discover that the extra mile isn't a traffic jam.