Make it about them.

This may seem fairly obvious – after all, it’s common knowledge that marketing a product in ways that relate to a target audience is certainly effective marketing practice.

But why?

The explanation lies in the Self-Reference Effect. The Self–Reference Effect is the tendency for people to remember information about themselves more than information that does not pertain to their needs, interests, or goals. In other words, memories that pertain directly to a person are held the longest and recalled the easiest.^[1] This has substantial implications for corporate website content.

The Layers of the Mind – The Mechanisms Of The Self-Reference Effect

The Self-Reference Effect actually has its roots in the work of researchers Craik and Tulving, who found that people remember (or don’t remember) things based upon how deeply their mind processes information. They explain that memory has layers, and people remember things longer, and recall them easier, when these things are processed at the deepest layer. In contrast, things that are remembered at a shallow level are quickly washed away and forgotten.^[2]

Therefore, in order for your product to be memorable, it must be processed at a deeper level. But how can this can be accomplished through website content?

The “It’s All About Me” Effect

Building upon the work of Craik and Tulving, subsequent researchers have isolated the most effective way to present products in ways that foster deep level processing. More specifically, it seems that personally relevant information is processed at the deepest of levels. The more personally relevant a piece of information, the deeper it will be processed. And the deeper it is processed, the longer it will reside in memory.^[1]

The Self-Reference Effect plays a key role in consumer attitudes toward the products and the marketing techniques that promote them. For example, research shows that an audience relates more to models that are similar in ethnicity.^[3] One study showed that Asian consumers were more likely to purchase non-Asian products when it was endorsed by an Asian model.^[4]

These two examples show the power of audience connection. In order to make a product memorable, then corporations must, above all things, make it relatable. And they can do so through the content of their website.

How To Use Website Content To Boost The Self-Reference Effect

Below are several guidelines that can be applied to website content to enhance the Self-Reference Effect:^[5]

1. Prompting – Prompt readers to think about themselves with statements such as: “Think back to the last time you…” Then follow it with relevant product information. This will generate a connection between product and consumer.
2. Slice-Of-Life Statements – Discuss a problem that is common to your audience. This will pique their interest and solidify a personal connection to your product.
3. Gender Role Portrayals – Determine which gender your product relates to and create content about your product that is tailored to their interests and reading styles.
4. It’s All About ‘You’ – Using the word ‘you’ in online content is surprisingly powerful. Refrain from using the pronoun “I” which detracts the reader’s attention from themselves. Also, writing in second person has been found to be more effective than third-person testimonials.
5. The Power of a Question – Ask the audience a question that links a product benefit to their needs. For example, a milk company may ask: “Are you getting enough calcium in your diet?”

Try implementing these simple techniques into your online content. This can be in the form of blogs, website content, Tweets, posts, etc. Doing so will make your product both memorable and marketable.

References

^[1] Rogers, TP, Kuiper, NA, & Kirker, WS (1977) Self-reference and the encoding of personal information.

^[2] Craik, FIM, Tulving, E (1975) Depth of processing and the retention of words

^[3] Martin, Lee, & Fernandez (2002) Using self referencing to explain the effectiveness of ethnic minority models in advertising

^[4] Martin, Kwai-Choi Lee, & Yang (2006) The influence of ad model ethnicity and self referencing upon attitudes: Evidence from New Zealand

^[5] Debevec, K, Spotts, HE, Kernan, JB (1987) The self-reference effect in persuasion implications for marketing strategy

 5 Proven Ways Content Can Connect With An Online Audience

Once upon a time…more like Once upon a click: video narratives are increasingly the medium in which people choose to tell their brand stories. The power of narrative storytelling transcends different media, but storytelling and video particularly thrive in the digital marketplace. The power of online video as endlessly interactive and shareable content is a no-brainer. Video storytelling is here to stay and here’s why…

Why is telling stories so effective?

Brand analysts have been telling us for years that to engage with our audiences we need to tell stories. Storytelling knows no bounds and transcends industries, from Fortune 500 high-tech companies to pet stores: everyone is doing it. But what makes storytelling such an effective way for brands to interact with consumers? Here’s the lowdown on telling stories:

• Basic instincts: Stories take us back to our primeval roots, to the origins of speech, language and culture. In earliest human societies, bards and storytellers were responsible for weaving everything into comprehensible language. Stories were used to explain everything from the beginning of the Universe to childbirth and the four seasons. Storytelling is hardwired into us.
• Supremely sharable: The story format, with its beginning, middle and end is a format that works. People understand it, they inherently ‘get’ it, so they are happier to share it with friends and family. Which is great news for brands. After all, why spend hours crafting something, only to let it sit in a hidden corner of the internet?
• Emotionally compelling: A story format often makes dull things like data and facts more emotionally compelling. For example, human interest stories are often used to raise awareness and build up a research and development community for a whole range of rare illnesses and conditions. Emotions are a powerful tool, and when there is solid data behind, the possibilities are limitless. Just check out Skype’s emotional video on two girls born with the same congenital condition. Here a branded online video hits all the emotional buttons, as well as educating viewers on a rare congenital condition.

Why is video the perfect medium for storytelling?

Video storytelling success is due to its immediacy, accessibility and endless flexibility. Here are some key reasons why video storytelling works:

• Emotive Medium: Its ability to intimately explore human and animal faces, sounds, and fully immerse the viewer in a specific surrounding, makes video the perfect vehicle for carrying an emotional message. Behavioural psychologist Susan Weinschenk has outlined the main reasons why people emotionally respond to video content:
  1. Human Face – If/when presented by a human face in a video, information becomes more credible.
  2. Human Voice – Hearing a human voice in a video instantly increases the meaningfulness of the content.
  3. Body Language – We are sophisticated interpreters of body language; the right body language helps us create a relationship with the video.
  4. Movement – By engaging our eyes and minds, movement helps to keep our interest levels high.
• Clarity and Directness: It’s not true to say that spoken word is always more simple than text (just ask the Ancient Greek rhetoricians), but there is a level of clarity and directness that comes with spoken language that makes it attractive. As a medium that doesn’t heavily rely on text, video is supremely direct and clear.
• Personal and Accessible: Online video is reaching more people than ever before; in the UK it reaches up to 80% of the population, and it’s almost 75% in the US. Online video has also been adopted by a lot of niche community groups, as well as being part of millenials’ everyday life. Online video is where people go to tell their stories; it’s also a genuine conversation starter- creating new stories all the time.
• Supports Many Characters: Dialogue in written text can be tricky- something even accomplished writers struggle with. In video switching to a new speaker or topic is easier as visuals guide the message. This means a video story can be comprehensive and complex, without being too confusing or the messaging becoming too diffuse.

Video technology and storytelling

One way in which video has the edge over other traditional mediums is its immersive quality. Video’s ability to overlay music, sound, text and integrated motion graphics means that one video can tell many stories at once, weaving different narratives. Animation is also a great way to tell stories that can move between different audiences and industries easily.
Remember, even a very simple story needs a whole raft of technological expertise before it becomes a compelling online video.

Other stories online video can tell

Online hair tutorials, grassroots stop-motion clips, vlogs, gig videos – the ways in which online video can help marketers, people and communities tell stories are endless. Stories aren’t always big and flashy; they can also be fleeting moments of everyday narrative you just have to capture.

***

Hi, I’m Joseph O’Brien, and as a writer the culture of storytelling and its digital afterlives fascinate me.

Find out more about me and my freelance writing on my blog.

 Digital Stories: Unlocking Online Video’s Narrative Power

This 3-word masterpiece proved to be a tremendous for success as McDonald’s first slogan in 1960. Since this time, McDonalds has used over 23 slogans to date, with the most recent being the catchy jingle sung by pop icon Justin Timberlake “I’m Lovin’ It!” which was released in 2003.

This litany of slogans represents changes in consumer demand as well as changes in overall consumer culture. McDonalds claims that all of their commercial campaigns have encompassed the “…overall McDonalds experience,” always portraying …”warmth and a real slice of life.”

More like a real slice of marketing know-how.

For a company that has visited the courtroom hot seat numerous times due to the unhealthy nature of their classic cuisine, their slogans seem to be serving them well. With over 31,000 locations worldwide and still growing, and over 4.3 billion in net income, McDonalds definitely knows the secrets of the slogan. ^[1]

A slogan is a phrase intended to capture the essence of the ideas connected to an organization. It is a short yet powerful way to present product features and benefits using only a few punchy words. The idea is for the slogan to make the consumer feel good when they read it. Slogans may seem to be nothing more than just another marketing approach; in actuality however, a strong current of subconscious activity runs beneath this seeming simplicity.

The importance of priming

Slogans work (or don’t work) due to ‘priming.’ The application of priming is a twofold: to influence subsequent thoughts or actions and to increase the speed at which these subsequent thoughts or actions occur.^[2] The interesting element of priming is that it is almost always a subconscious process – consumers have no idea that their thoughts and actions are being controlled. Almost always…but not always.

While priming typically occurs beneath the consumer’s mental radar, there are instances when they realize they are being manipulated by a slogan. When this awareness occurs, the consumer will automatically and unconsciously react against it, trying to correct the bias that they feel the slogan has forced into their heads. Instead of returning to a neutral attitude towards the product, the consumer’s attitudes quickly heads south as they form a negative appraisal of the product. This process is termed ‘reverse priming’ and its importance is gaining notoriety in the marketing realm.^[3]

In order to understand how a sloppy slogan can create the reverse priming effect, one must understand the psychological processes behind how consumers mentally process a slogan. The Elaboration Likelihood Model, a prominent theory of persuasion, outlines how this processing occurs.^[4] According to ELM, the brand item, which is in symbolic form, is processed unconsciously. The associated slogan, is more complex however, as it is composed of words. Therefore, the slogan requires more complex cognitive processing, providing just enough time to raise suspicion in the mind of the consumer.  Once the consumer becomes suspicious reverse priming occurs, creating the behavioral backlash.

Avoiding reverse priming

Organizations must therefore carefully craft their slogan in a way that makes the consumer feel good as opposed to feeling as if they are being duped. Experts claim slogans that are humorous, creative, and contain entertaining elements are most successful, and will bypass the reverse priming trap. This is due to the psychological rule of reciprocity; when someone does something for us, we return the favor in order to maintain cognitive equilibrium (i.e. avoid guilt). Thus, when the slogan is entertaining, the consumer will forgive the manipulation attempt and reciprocate the provided entertainment by accepting the message, and liking the product.^[3]

Interestingly, both priming and reverse priming are driven by processes that lie completely out of consumer awareness. For example, researchers found that consumers will even unconsciously revolt against mere subliminal exposure to the word ‘slogan’. In one study, when the word ‘slogan’ was flashed on a computer screen without the consumers’ awareness, the consumers reported they were less willing to spend money on the product that was subsequently presented.^[3]

In regards to the implementation of slogans into corporate websites, it is important to not only avoid reverse priming, but to also be conscious of where the slogan is located on the page. Remember, the Internet user scans a web page in an F-shaped pattern, placing most attention to the top left corner of the screen. Therefore, slogans are most effective when placed in this region.^[5]

It seems that in order to avoid the behavioral backlash of reverse priming, and optimize the implementation of your slogan into your website, it is best to place a creative, humorous, or entertaining slogan at the top left corner of your web page. For an example of a well-created, and well-placed slogan, visit the world’s favorite fast food joint http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/home.html.

References

^[1] “McDonalds” by Wikimedia Foundation

^[2] Bargh, John E: What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior.

^[3] Laran, J, Dalton, A. and Andrade, E. The Curious Case of Behavioral Backlash: Why Brands Produce Priming Effects and Slogans Produce Reverse Priming Effects

^[4] Petty, RE, & Cacioppo, JT: Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change.

^[5] O’Connell, Christi: Eyetracking and Web site Design

 The Psychology of a Smart Slogan

• an intelligent and patient collie/lab cross, who can’t resist carrot cake icing (yes, she ate my birthday cake)
• and a ditsy, hyperactive and very needy springer/lab cross, who struggles with anything new or strange.

Our springer cross has a metaphorical emotional sink into which the stresses of her day (people at the door, other dogs across a field, quadbikes passing in the lane, cows looking at her over the fence, the vacuum cleaner, etc) pour like water from a tap.

Luckily, that sink has a (metaphorical) drain which can reduce the level of stress in the sink based on a variety of stress-relieving activities. The problem is that she starts the day with a sink that is already half-full, and a drain that is partially blocked, because she has some physical problems which can cause her pain.

My task is to ensure that her emotional sink drains more quickly than the additional stress pours in. If the level of stress overflows the sink, we are in trouble: stress flooding all over the place, and she doesn’t know how to handle it.

Why is emotional energy relevant to corporate comms?

Think about your website visitor: they arrive with a certain level in their sink—perhaps they’ve had a stressful day at work; perhaps there’s a task that they don’t really want to do; perhaps they’ve struggled to find the right URL for your site in their country; perhaps their mobile is almost out of charge.

In their mind are certain tasks that they have to complete on your site. Maybe they’re looking for a contact number for recruiting, an image for a piece they’re writing, some detail about your finances or for your views on a particular industry hot topic.

What barriers does your site put in their way? Every additional hurdle will increase the level of stress in the sink (and diminish their emotional energy). Consider:

• Problematic navigation (where on earth have they put it?)
• Form filling (why do you need my birthdate and address?)
• No contact number, only a generic contact form (how will I know it will get to the right person? Or even that the form worked at all?)
• The need to register to download an image (more form filling!)
• Inappropriate filters on news items or job listings so it is difficult to find the best match
• Information hidden in PDFs rather than on the page so the task becomes much bigger (why do I have to download everything to look for what I want?)
• Search that doesn’t work effectively (I don’t need all these irrelevant results)
• Design that doesn’t work with the technology she’s using (why is it so slow? Why must I scroll right to see everything? Why won’t the menu work?)

If the sink overflows, you may well lose that visitor. You may not be able to see the stress overflow—because they’re at their desk, not barking and lunging by your side—but it will have an effect on how they think of your company.

And on how she will react next time she comes across your corporate brand.

***

For more on this, read this interesting piece on increasing funnel conversion. Darius is talking about making the sale, rather than about corporate comms, but the point is still relevant.

 Emotional Energy and the Corporate Website

Attention and calm technology

A while ago, a study by Microsoft suggested that the human attention span is now about 8 seconds – shorter than that of a goldfish. Now that grabbed some media attention, even though the study wasn’t necessarily good science.

Is it really true that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter? Certainly we are all busy-busy, and the technology that we’re using tends to interrupt us, disrupting our attention. On the other hand, expert gamers develop extremely high levels of attention to their fast-moving games. At least, that’s what my son tells me, and I can confirm that it is indeed difficult to distract him…

Studies show that in general, we manage not to pay attention to most of the many thousands of things going on around us. We have to deliberately ignore almost everything in our environment, in order to be able to focus on the things that matter, whether these are threats or things of intense interest to us.

One of the problems with some of the technologies we’re using at the moment is that the devices (and the programs that run on them) are trying to attract our attention with incessant audible notifications, designed to interrupt us—and everyone else around us. There are other types of alerts possible (lights or vibrations, for instance) and using these other techniques could help users to keep some of their notifications private.

Designing so that the user could personalise their alert styles to suit their lifestyles might help us all lead a calmer life; of course, everyone would need to take some responsibility for doing this, and the technologies would have to allow it.

This was entertainingly discussed by Amber Case (@caseorganic) at Thinking Digital Manchester (she has a book out called Calm Technology which has gone straight into my wish list and is likely to be well worth reading). If there was an overarching theme to the conference, it was about audience attention—and distraction.

Fascinating.

Attention and tailored media

Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden, BBC R&D) talked about perceptive media: media shaped in real time to suit an individual’s preferences and aspects of their personality, presenting differences in scenes, perspectives, colour and sound-track. At the moment, this is done by the viewer completing a profile, and the data then used to inform which media assets are used in which order, and which effects should be applied when.

And he talked about scalable documentaries, where the extent or depth of the information presented depends on the amount of time available to the listener—that is, how much attention they were able to pay; for example, rather than a podcast of a set 45 minutes on the journey to work, your device could contract or extend that podcast based on the predicted time of that journey on that day (38 minutes…52 minutes etc).

And that’s really interesting.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Star Trek holodeck, where storytelling is immersive, interactive, and tailored to an individual’s preferences and interests.

Attention and the corporate website

One of the lenses that we use to look at website content is to consider the likely attention span and interests of different visitors, which will depend on the intent with which they are visiting the page.

For example, a junior buyer may explore a B2B website in detail, and review a great deal of information in order to collate options for a corporate purchase and make a recommendation; but the senior budget-holder is likely to be interested only in an executive summary, and may have less time available to view it.

Individuals also have different preferences for absorbing information; some prefer information to be graphically presented, while others prefer text or video.

Imagine a website that could dynamically present information to a visitor at different levels of detail, and in different modes, depending on their interests on that visit, and depending on the time they have available on that day—that is, the amount of attention they can afford to pay on that day. Of course, a visitor may come to a website multiple times for different reasons: to investigate products on one day, and as a potential jobseeker the following week.

What do you think? Would that be a convenience, or just another example of a filter bubble?

 Attention, Personalisation and the Holodeck