Focus on improving influence strategies, not end products

Kaptein is interested in persuasion: the field of research that is concerned with factors that influence people in what they do. When applied to businesses, the question we are trying to answer remains: ‘why do people buy the things they buy’? Some might answer this question in terms of the end product, and state that the quality of the end product influences whether a consumer buys. From this a strategy like ‘improve the end product’ could follow. Kaptein started from a different perspective: in his research he formulated factors not concerning the end product, but rather ways to influence the decision process of a consumer.

The different strategies to influence the buying process of a person formulated by Kaptein¹,  are as follows:

• social proof (E.g. ‘all these people have used our products for ages’)
• liking (E.g. ‘410 people liked our product’)
• authority (E.g. ‘this book has won three different literary awards’)
• commitment (E.g. ‘you have recently looked at these products’)
• scarcity (E.g. ‘this hotel only has only 1 double room left’)
• reciprocity (E.g. ‘download the first song of this CD for free’)

Different responses from individuals and groups of individuals

One of the things Kaptein became interested in, is how the effect compared when applying these strategies to individuals or groups. He found that particular individuals did indeed respond differently to the various strategies than the whole group of individuals together. Some strategies that work well on average when applied to a group, can have negative impacts on certain individuals.

Persuasion profiles: targeting specific individuals

Apart from the individual-group differences, there were also differences between individuals. One person might not respond to the social proof strategy at all, but then turn out to be very sensitive to the scarcity strategy, whilst another person could be sensitive to the liking strategy, but not to the reciprocity strategy. In an e-commerce website, one could take these differences into account. It would therefore be sensible to keep profiles of visitors, and apply separate persuasion strategies to each of these ‘persuasion profiles’.

In further research was found that applying multiple strategies rather than just one does not improve the influence on the consumer’s decision. There seemed to be such a thing as a ‘best strategy’: the one that shows the weakest decline over time. Kapitein recommends to always try and select this ‘best strategy’.

Conclusion

Rather than improving end products, we should focus on influencing the decision process that leads a person to buy the end product. The six strategies mentioned earlier can be employed for this purpose, and work best when they are the ‘best strategy’ for a particular person.  This best strategy can be found by establishing persuasion profiles. Persuasion profiles can be improved over time, by measuring changes in how your users respond to different strategies and continuously adapting to these changes.

Further research and concerns

There is still more research necessary to answer questions concerning issues such as context (can we transfer a strategy from e-commerce to politics, how much of a persuasion profile should we disclose to the user), privacy (the current research complies to privacy legislation, is that enough?) and autonomy (does persuasion profiling threaten our decision making?).

¹Caldini, Robert B., Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2006).

In the ever changing media landscape, brand websites have become an important tool for large companiesʼ marketing departments to communicate their brandsʼ values. Brand websites often have a large variety of functionalities. Does all this interactivity on websites have an impact on how consumers perceive a brand?

Interactivity

The key difference between the internet and old fashioned media such as newspapers and television lies in interactivity. In literature, interactivity has been described as ʻThe degree to which two or more communicating parties can act on each other, on the communication medium, and on the messages and the degree to which such influences are synchronizedʼ (Liu & Shrum, 2002). From this definition, three dimensions of interactivity can be deduced: two-way communication, active control and synchronity.

Actual interactivity vs perceived interactivity

Interactivity on a website is good for persuasion, yet it is not merely the technical aspect of interactivity that encourages persuasion. When measuring interactivity, we should make a distinction between, on the one hand, technical or actual interactivity obtained by counting the number of interactive elements on a website, and, on the other hand, perceived interactivity. Hilde investigated the relation between these types of interactivity.

Methods of research

To measure actual interactivity on the websites, a two-level deep content analysis of 66 Dutch and 66 American websites has been conducted. Example elements of actual interactivity include online chatting and feedback mechanisms (two-way communications), skip intro and live customer service (synchronicity) and choice of language and choice of language (active control). To measure perceived interactivity, the team held a survey amongst students about the same test websites.

All of this had to happen in a rather small timespan, to avoid websites changing in the middle of the research. It has been conducted on ʻbusiness to consumerʼ websites only, excluding all applications with user generated content, e-commerce websites and search engines.

Conclusion

The research proved that there is indeed incongruence between actual interactivity and perceived interactivity. The respondents that were questioned called websites, that were just little interactive in the technical sense of the word, very interactive. Simply adding interactive features does thus not guarantee a high level of perceived interactivity.

Someone in the audience wondered whether there is a relationship between people liking a particular brand and people perceiving a brands website as interactive. Hilde explained that the literature on the subject suggests it is actually the other way around.

Thanks to Hilde for the presentation and we are looking forward to the next edition of UX University.

PS: You can still participate in Hilde’s research by filling out her questionnaire.

What is subliminal priming?

Subliminal priming describes the activation of existing knowledge concepts in the brain, through unconscious primes in the environment. Subliminal messages are used everywhere, from advertisement over the presidential election campaign in the USA to self-help tapes.
Subliminal – below the treshold of consciousness.This means that people are not consciously aware of a cue or prime and/or they are not aware of the behavior that is caused by it.
Martijn Veltkamp defines three stages of unconsciousness.

The extreme case – People are neither aware of the prime, nor of their behavior because of it.
Moderate case – This case is the most common one; people are not aware of the prime but well aware of their behavior.
Mild case – People are aware of the prime as well as their behavior because but they do not see the connection. This case can be found in product placement.
The ideomotor principle, an idea from William James (19th century), sais that people imitate other people’s behavior in order to learn. It is Neurologically proven that people understand for e.g. a movement by repeating the movement themselves. Even words related to an action increase the possibility that people follow that action.

This ideomotor principle or priming effect was first shown in a study by American priming researcher Chen Bargh. Interviewed people would imitate a certain behavior of their opposite, like rubbing their nose or tipping their foot. When asked after the test, no one was consciously aware to have performed those specific movements.

What is a prime?

A prime can be anything in the environment that activates inactive knowledge. A prime can be a table, a cup, a person’s behavior, etc.. Knowledge is part of a connected network in the brain. By activating such a network, it is likely to also activate connected knowledge and this way trigger a certain behavior.

Creating subliminal primes is not as easy as it might seem. Martijn Veltkamp points out three important issues that need to be considered. First of all the information being primed needs to be simple. Whole sentences or even videos as used for self-help tapes in the 50th century don’t work. Second, there is a method called Masking. Through masking, primes can be hidden within different information and therefore become subliminal. Last but not least primes have to be chosen carefully. Not all primes work for everyone the same way.

Cues & primes used in research

There is a wide range of different priming effects proven in research. So showed Chen Bargh 1996, that certain content, people are confronted with, can have influence on their behavior. In his experiment, two groups of people were asked to built grammatically correct sentences, using a range of given words. One group was given words mainly referring to elderly people and one group was given neutral words. Afterwards, the pace in which the participants walked back to the elevator was measured. It was significant that those participants given words referring to the elderly, walked slower that the othe rparticipants. There are other interesting experiments showing the priming effect of direct and indirect wordings, odors, brands, symbols and colors.

When is subliminal priming effective?

In his own research, Martijn Veltkamp showed that subliminal priming is not always effective. He found out that the priming effect depends of one of the three following conditions. The priming effect increases if the behavioral prime motivates to do something, if the primed behavior is positive or has a positive effect or if the priming matches a specific need.

An experiment showed, that neutral behavior can be primed with positive associations. If for e.g. a neutral behavior as gardening is primed with something positive as friendship, objects that refer directly to gardening appear to be bigger than they actually are.

We thank Martijn for the interesting presentation and are looking forward to the upcoming UX University.