When was the last time you went clothes shopping?  Try and remember what it was like.  Think about that favorite item you purchased. When you saw that blouse/shirt/dress/skirt/coat/hat, did you find a way to “rationalize” the price?  Were you emotionally moved enough to buy the item even though under normal circumstances it was probably more than you should have spent?  The more you love that clothing item, the less likely price was an issue right?  In fact, with brand labels, we automatically rationalize the price in advance of even entering the mall so price isn’t really an issue.

So why do you think price isn’t always a factor?  Well, what happened was that you bought the “opportunity” or chance to feel great about owning/wearing that clothing item.  How you felt trying/owning the clothing item was more important given a certain price.

Big Ticket Items

Now think about a larger ticket item like a car or home. Even stronger emotions were likely triggered before you committed to purchasing and owning that house or car. You might think at first glance that price was the only factor, but truthfully, in most cases, it wasn’t. Think about it. Did you rationalize the price after committing emotionally?

Did you say to yourself “It’s OK, I deserve it.. I don’t mind paying extra cause the view is great.. or the seats are so soft, or it’s a sexy car…or the house is beatiful”. With these big ticket items would you still have purchased if you weren’t emotionally committed?

Small Ticket Items

Now let’s look at the other end of the pricing spectrum: a toothbrush. Were strong emotions triggered before you committed to purchasing a toothbrush? Probably not. In fact, price likely played a significant role. Much more so than buying a house or car or that favorite clothing item.

You don’t need an emotional state change to buy a toothbrush because the monetary value is insignificant.  The simple want/need in you was enough and the toothbrush company didn’t really have to do much to sell you a toothbrush (secretly I think the fancy colors and features are there because toothbrush marketing executives are bored)

So when was the last time you saw a TV ad for a regular toothbrush?  Hmmmm

So What’s really going on?

Well, you see in all purchases – whether its buying toothbrushes, cars, houses, shoes, dinner, groceries – there is a minimum level of satisfaction or happiness we are paying for in advance. Sometimes, like with Insurance we are purchasing the avoidance of future pain as well.

The higher the price of the item (relative to your income bracket), the more important an emotional committment will help push you into a purchase. You can see the power of emotional selling with homes very clearly with a popular TV show called “Sell my house”. The show demonstrates how a well-staged home can sell much more easily than a poorly-staged home. The emotional state change is the key driver in changing people’s perceptions about the house for sale.

The best ads and marketing campaigns leverage every possible emotion (pain and pleasure) they can in making you want to buy..

Tips for Marketers

As a business owner or marketing executive, understanding the importance of price and emotions during a transaction must be part of your marketing program.  Tony Robbins says it well in his learning series The Power of Persuasion: “People don’t buy products and services, they buy emotional states”.  If you can trigger an emotional state (either pain or pleasure and preferably both at the same time), you have a greater chance of closing the sale.

Some of the best marketing is done with cars.  A significant committment is required for most buyers and so a strong emotional committment to avoid pain (like maintenance after ownership) and gain pleasure (the feeling of a brand new car) is leveraged.  The best ads on TV mix both pain avoidance and gaining pleasure.  In fact, if you can remember some recent car advertisements, its likely an emotional state change is behind that thought.

In business you can leverage everything I have mentioned so far by ensuring your marketing ads follows these simple rules:

1. The higher the purchase price relative to your target market’s income, the more you need to leverage an emotional committment
2. In advertising, try to trigger a want/need in your target customer by changing their emotional state
3. If your product/service is designed to solve pain, leverage that
4. If your product/service is low-priced, associate the product/service to something more expensive and significant.
5. Start your advertising with pain and end with pleasure

Good luck and remember: Sell emotions, not products and services!

See me live!

December 6th, come and meet me at Eco-Vista West Realty.  I will be speaking as a guest speaker about emotional selling and why home-staging is so important.

Eco-Vista West Realty
4658 Hastings Street
Burnaby, BC
604-298-2111

1-2pm Jim Small Reliable Home Inspection “How to make your home more energy efficient this winter”
2-3pm Paul Makortoff BC Mortgage Source “Home financing”
3-4pm Me speaking about “Emotional Selling”

Download ad in PDF format

No, not my brain people..everyone’s brain! So what does the brain have to do with web design?  Everything actually!  You see, people deal with all the information coming to them in different ways.  Some prefer reading, while others prefer watching.  Some like detail and precision while others like pictures and examples.

Being a designer myself, it’s no surprise that I prefer pictures/videos/audio when I want to learn or read something interesting.  I have a strong affinity for video, pictures, and audiobooks – thats just how I like to be entertained. I have friends and clients, on the other hand, that prefer reading/writing and seeing detail and precision. They don’t mind wading through graphs, bar charts, and lots of detail – it makes their brain juices flow.  That would drive me nuts after a while, but for them, they are like a pig in mud (or like a fat kit on a Smartie).  I just don’t like detail, minutae, and reading bland text when I am trying to learn or entertain myself (thats probably why I never did well in languages/science and school in general).

As you might predict, the focus this newsletter is a bit of a departure from the standard.  I am going to show you how to take advantage of this knowledge and create content on your site that appeals to both “lefties” and “righties” and everyone in between.

Brains and Web Design

For you, how you prefer to read and learn is unique to you. Creating a web site only from your point of view is a mistake – there is a good chance your site won’t fullfill the needs of all of your visitors. Everyone reads information in different ways and so your web site should cater to all audiences equally.  I often see this with clients where some are lefties and love detail and writing and don’t care much for pictures/video (often labeled “rich content” by the righties), while others are righties and want video/sound/pictures and usually scan web pages rather than reading every paragraph in full. Once you understand that everyone reads in different ways, you can take advantage of this and create content that serves both brains equally.

As a good starting point, every web page of your site should have at minimum:

• Summary and Detail for the Lefties (thats all they need)
• At least one picture (for the Righties)
• Bonus if you can: Video of something relevant
• Super Bonus if you can: Audio narration of the web page by the author
• Super Duper Bonus if you can: Video narration of the web page by the author

I recommend to clients that they add audio narrations of the web page because there are always a few creatives in the audience that will prefer to have content read to them.

Brains and Your Typical Visitor

We can go a step further and propose that the type of audience visiting your site can pre-determine the type of content you should offer.

For example, if you sell custom-made jewellery, its safe to assume that most of your customers lean to the right.  As a result, you will see sales increase if you have big pictures, audio and video and focus on satiating the needs of the right-brain. If you own the jewellery store but are a natural leftie, it becomes even more imperative that you depart from your focus on detailed writing and trust that less words and more pictures will work.  A lot of the cloting retailers have picked up on this technique, like LandsEnd, Gap, and Mexx.  In fact, LandsEnd starts every major category on their site with pictures and no written content at all which tells me the design team (righties) are running the show there.

Another example is Real Estate agents.  Here you could get brains from all walks of life and so you need to be cautious not to focus too much on written content (as a lefty) or too little written content (as a righty).  You need to satisfy both brain types. Knowing, however, the type of brain you are dealing with as a real estate agent could help you sell more homes.  If you are dealing with a right brain, go for the virtual gallery and big photos.  If you are dealing with the right brain, make your first contact a detailed financial comparison of homes in the area.

Tickle all brains equally

The best way to see the results of ensuring your site serves all audiences is by example.  I am going to use a Business Consultant and show how a site map might look like.

The Left brain site owner might create a site map that looks like this:

Home
Coaching
- Coaching Program
- Coaching FAQ
- Coaching Fact Sheet
Packages
- Startup
- Small Business
- Established Enterprise
Client List
Contact

The right brain might create a site map that looks like this:

Home
Coaching
- How I coach
- Coaching Videos and Audio
- Coaching FAQ
- Coaching Events and Training
Client
- Case Studies
Contact Me
- Chat Live

In both examples thus far, neither web site map is complete.  When you combine the two, you get :

Home
Coaching
- Coaching Program
- FAQ
- Video/Audio clips
- Coaching Fact Sheet
- Coaching Events and Training
Packages
- Startup
- Small Business
- Established Enterprise
Client List
- Happy Clients
- Case Studies
Contact
-  Chat Live

See how combining the two is much more complete and seems to serve all brains equally?

Obama vs McCain

OK, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon and contribute my piece on these two future world leaders (eyes rolling).  Here we go!

Studies seem to show that when speaking, lefties are more planned and consistent and don’t use hand gestures or body signs to convey their message. Righties are more intuitive, think on their feet, use their hands often, and sometimes are looking into the distance to help visualize.  Lefties are more likely to be concerned about the content of a speech while righties put energy into the style and emotion in which the speech is given.

Based on this alone, I would venture to guess that McCain is slightly more left brain oriented.  He has stated that he doesn’t enjoy public speaking and usually ends up with a “monotone” and bland or forced speech style.  He has proven that he isn’t comfortable winging it and making it up creatively as he goes along.  Obama, on the other hand seems more right brain oriented (a more natural public speaker). You can see this in action when Obama is interviewed where he will use hand gestures and is able to answer random questions with ease.  He has a more natural style of communicating.  I would say its no accident that he leads in initial polls – its not his political campaign but his brain thats doing all the winning

Fortunately for the lefties that have watched the candidates, both have superb speech writers that ensure the left-brain oriented message content is communicated clearly and precisely.

Still Struggling?

If you aren’t sure about what kind of visitor comes to your site, or would like more precision (lefty eh?) on your site content strategy, feel free to shoot me an email and I can help you out with more in depth info.  Don’t forget as well, to visit my links on the right hand side for quizzes and questionnaires that can help you identify your brain type.

Links for Righties

Ah.. my confidants.. my friends.. I am just like you!

• Joost – Watch great movies in high definition online
• Ted – Amazing videos from the world’s best in academia and design
• Cooliris - Great way to search for images online
• WindowShop – Shop at Amazon with Pictures and Audio (NEW!)
• Reuters, CNN, and CBC -  watch the news, don’t read it
• BlinkX – search ALL online video here
• TVTonic – Software to watch TV online

Links for Lefties

Sorry lefties.. you are on your own. I just don’t have links that are specific to your brain type.  How about a change of scene and see what the righties like above eh?

• The client should write this..I don’t know anything about blue widgets
• Who cares!  If the design is great, people will buy cause they love the image dropshadows!
• We just love designing, don’t ask me about content.. ugh!
• Maybe I should hire an SEO from India/China and outsource this..hrm.. or that fat guy with a beard
• Call to Action is so 2001..it’s old… I make web2.0 sites now
• I just build it man, I don’t put you at the top of Google.
• Client’s won’t pay me to write

To all designers: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  Don’t be a wimp.  Guess what though?  Call to Action should NOT be the ultimate goal – even though our clients think so.   Instead, we should focus on understanding the sales process and how people buy, and put that into simple terms for our clients. We need to teach clients about the fundamentals of selling.  I know what you are thinking: “Oh god, ONE more thing…”. Don’t worry.  I am going to make this easy for you.

I have been listening to an Anthony Robbins product called Power to Influence recently and I believe if you teach clients some of these basics of selling, the “call to action” becomes self-evident:

• Create a want
• Buying means pleasure
• Not buying means pain
• An undisturbed web site visitor will NOT be persuaded to a call to action
• Persuasion is the process of getting your customer to clearly associate their most desired feelings or emotional states to your product or service
• People don’t buy products, they buy an “emotional state”
• People do more to avoid pain then they ever do for gaining pleasure
• People buy for emotional reasons, and rationalize with logical reasons
• Ask for a committment using positive and negative motivation (everyone thinks differently)
• Ask for a committment
• Get commitments throughout the sales process

See whats happening?  Don’t just think about the “call to action”.  Instead, realize that if you clearly understand the sales process, you won’t even need a fancy “call to action” at all.  In other words, If your website is written properly and the content is thought through, visitors will be ready to buy, even before they see the “Buy Now!” button.

In simple terms, the way you can integrate this into your business is to do this:

1. Identify the top 10 pains you can remove for your customer
2. Identify the top 10 pleasures you can provide for your customer
3. Write all the areas of your site to ENGAGE customers with text, audio, and video
4. Ensure you have a smooth commerce/subscribe process.  Remember: keep the barriers low.

Don’t just put calls to action on your home page either.  Think where your web sites visitors might be:

1. Home page because thats always a key starting point from new visitors
2. Your Services/Products page because customers want to learn more
3. Your Contact page because some customers are at least ready to commit a little time
4. Your FAQ page because some clients want more detail
5. Your Portfolio page because some clients like to think in pictures/video
6. Your Testimonials page because some clients like to know others are happy
7. Your Case Studies page focusing on specific problems/solutions and pain/pleasure

The call to action is always an important part of your Sales and Marketing program.  It’s even more important online:

1. Customers can leave your site easily
2. The more your product/service is like a commodity, the greater the available choice online
3. Entry costs for your competitors are getting lower
4. Most web sites don’t think about this, so thats an advantage for you

How about designing your web site to create customer interaction or tiny committments throughout each page/area of the site?  When you involve/engage the web site visitor, you create committment. For example:

• Create an interactive “pain-picker” or “pleasure-picker”
• Give more content as customers give more personal info
• Let customers profile themselves with rich/photo/video web forms
• Satiate the customer appetite with some initial feedback or product sample
• Integrate video and audio into your commerce cart
• Provide a 30-second video at the end of your commerce/questionnaire process

Need more info?  I highly recommend that you absolutely read or listen to Anthony Robbins Power to Influence.

Good luck and remember: Call to Action is King!

Harper needs Reality TV

Liberals should just talk about the Issues!

Green “Shaft” plan

Jack Layton’s first message

Elizabeth May and the Taxi

I’m putting together a mockup for a client at the moment and was looking for some design ideas and inspiration for colors, palettes, tones, etc.  The client is a dentist and I really want to create an amazing design for the dentist this time.  Here are my criteria:

• Pastel, Spa, Water colors
• Clean un-cluttered design
• Healthy feeling
• Clean/Crisp
• Well placed content

http://kara.allthingsd.com

http://www.spainteractive.com/web_design.htm

http://www.oasisdentalspa.net

http://www.hemmingwaymd.com

http://www.goodmanmd.com

http://www.cliftonsmiles.com

http://www.drgerbercosmetic.com

http://www.perrydentalhealth.com

http://www.serenedentalcenter.com

http://www.myfamilydds.com

Need more insipiration?  the designs at Tyson Steele really are very good!  I really love his work.