You don’t really realise it, but almost everyone is exposed to thousands of brands throughout their daily lives, via TV ad’s, Youtube videos, billboards, t-shirts, retail signage, and so on. Because you’re literally inundated with advertisements, smart agencies stay on the ball by keeping up to date with the cutting edge of psychological research. My agency utilises psych tricks throughout any creative process – whether that be copy on a website or visuals for an online ad – to which we owe great success. I’ve detailed three quick and easy concepts here, so go ahead and keep them in the back of your mind!
1. Illusions of Truth
The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe information to be correct because we are exposed to it more times. It helps our brain make decisions throughout the day, acting as a shortcut for the decision-making process so that our brains don’t get overloaded.
This psychological tactic gives weight to concepts and ideas that we hear over and over again. Thus, repeated ideas = greater accuracy, more truth.
Researchers conducted a survey that asked participants to rate how much they trusted a statement. Some statements were repeated multiple times, while others were stated only once. The study found that people consistently rated the repeated statements as more trustworthy in comparison to statements that were not.
Now this doesn’t take much thinking to implement – Most commonly we will serve a variation of the same ad on multiple platforms targeting the same audience, thus exposing them to it multiple times.
2. Serial Position Effect
Let’s be honest here; when you open an article online or scroll a news feed you’re not reading every single item of text, right? The most immediate way to combat the way that consumers scan over content is to shorten it up, utilise bullet points/lists, or surmise it into it’s essential details.
The thing is, it’s where the essential details are positioned within the content is what matters.
Two words to know, Primacy and Recency. Psychologists that have studied the serial position effect found that when participants hear a list of words and recall them immediately, they have higher accuracy with the words at the beginning (Primacy) and end (Recency) of a series in comparison to those mid-list.
When creating or writing copy, place the ideas you most care about the consumer remembering at the beginning and end of a piece. Within an email context, this means your opening line and closing line are the two most valuable pieces of real estate. Easy, eh?!
3. Adjectives
Conceptual metaphor theory suggests that knowledge/reception to information is structured around metaphorical mappings derived from physical experiences. Basically, by utilising textural metaphors – things like “He was good” vs. “He was exceptionally well-behaved” – you activate the brain’s sensory areas in very different ways.
Your copy should make good use of textural adjectives in place of commonly used colloquialisms. Think about how you can surprise your readers by inserting a texture-based word where they’re expecting a more bland, texture-less substitute.
This is really a no-brainer, but you would be surprised at exactly how much creative content doesn’t include spiced-up adjectives.
Try it out
The purpose here is to change up your content with the goal of making it more conversion-oriented. Even changing up a single word within a headline makes all the difference!
Sources
1 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3318916/
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1904/01/the-psychology-of-advertising/303465/
3 https://content.buysellads.com/articles/the-sneaky-psychology-of-advertising/
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