Ever wondered how using psychology could supercharge your marketing? Let’s talk about heuristics.
Heuristics are mental short-cuts or cognitive biases that help us to stay sane in a world that’s saturated with information. They reduce the amount of thinking we have to do when we’re making decisions, and being aware of how to leverage them is a godsend if you want to influence action in your marketing.
Here are the key techniques to master…
Anchoring bias
In brief
Nudge the audience towards a preferred option by suggesting a radical alternative.
When to use it
Pitching products or services.
The lowdown
The anchoring cognitive bias is a strategic way of presenting information in a certain order so that you can influence the decision-making process. It comes into its own when offering the customer a range of different options while trying to steer them towards one in particular.
This hack is all about comparative analysis. If you feel that your company’s preferred product or service is going to be too expensive or too revolutionary for the client, create an even more radical option – this is the anchor – and put that forward first. The shock of the initial proposal will put the preferred option into context and make it seem less unreasonable. It’s a technique that also works in pricing; more on that later.
The decoy effect
In brief
Influencing the audience to choose a favoured option by throwing in a trivial one.
When to use it
Pricing products or services.
The lowdown
A psy ops strategy that’s similar to anchoring (above), the decoy effect is about throwing in an irrelevant option to make the other choices more fitting in comparison. The technical term for this is asymmetric dominance.
Take an ad for a magazine subscription, for example. It has three options, an online subscription for £15 per month, a paper subscription for £25 or both the paper and online subscription for £26. No one would opt for JUST the paper option as it’s only £1 less than getting both the paper and online access. But it’s there to drive people towards option three. Option two – the decoy – becomes an inferior alternative and makes the other options more appealing in comparison. While the decoy seems trivial, without it, the result changes drastically – if you only have £15 versus £26 as options, more people will tend towards the cheaper online subscription.
Extremeness aversion
In brief
Structure your choices to ensure your middle option is what you want the client to go with.
When to use it
Pricing and pitching products or services.
The lowdown
Extremeness aversion is a cognitive bias based on the precedent that people often want to choose the most extreme option in decision making but ultimately tend to retreat to a safe middle position.
Say you’re putting forward three different options to a client, if you anticipate that they’ll most likely go with the middle option, be sure to architect your choices so that the middle one is what you want them to go with. Especially if your preferred option is perhaps too cutting-edge for the client. This also builds on the anchor bias and the decoy effect. The highest price is really the anchor / a decoy / an option that is extreme or irrelevant. Lead with the cheapest/safest option, then the middle, then the most expensive/out there choice. The middle option seems risky enough but not too extreme in this context. It’s highly likely that the client will be interested by this third but then opt for the middle to play it ‘safe’ in comparison.
The bandwagon effect
In brief
Leverage people’s instinct to choose the same option as everyone else.
When to use it
Pricing and pitching products or services.
The lowdown
We’ve all heard the idiom ‘jumping on the bandwagon,’ this is precisely what this cognitive bias leverages; people’s tendency to choose the option that most people choose.
For example, when putting forward options to a client, point out your preferred choice and say, ‘most of our clients hire us for this,’ or, ‘almost all of our clients choose to hire us for execution as well as strategy’ (for example). By bringing other people into the conversation this implies that these people know something your client doesn’t and therefore that this must be a sound choice. We’ve all seen the little sticker saying ‘most popular’ or ‘best seller’ when online shopping – this is the item that the company wants you to buy, and it reassures you when deciding between products to be told that others chose it.
The framing effect
In brief
Strategically positioning the information so you highlight the positives and overlook the negatives.
When to use it
Pitching products or services.
The lowdown
The framing effect is less about what is being said and more about how it’s being said. It’s a cognitive bias that hinges on presenting the information with positive rather than negative connotations, for example, as a loss versus as a gain. People often avoid a risk when the option is framed negatively but will overlook the risk when the option is framed more positively.
For example, you’re looking for hand sanitiser, one product claims to kill 95% of the germs while another claims that 5% of the germs survive. Which one do you choose?
It’s the same information but by emphasising the desired effect (killing most of the germs) rather than highlighting that a few of the germs will survive, this makes for a far more convincing angle when your goal is to make sales.
Hopefully you’re feeling psyched about these psychological tricks, but if you’d like some agency input on influencing action in your marketing, then get in touch today! sim@sim7creative.co.uk