People often choose to believe in things that are just not true.
The Great Wall is the only human made object viewable from space. All Vikings helmets had horns. Vaccines cause Autism. 5G causes causes cancer. You get the idea.
Here are 11 things that a lot of us in marketing believe, but shouldn’t.
When it comes to subscription product pricing, you’re not just guessing, are you?
Marketers are intimately familiar with their industry and product. But that familiarity isn’t always an advantage.
Persuading completely rational people to make a rational decision or take a rational action would be easy. Unfortunately, you’re stuck dealing with irrational thinking, fueled by cognitive biases and emotions.
So, how do you persuade effectively when people are so heavily influenced by subjective (and contextual) factors?
Most businesses struggle with their product pricing strategies. Are you charging too much or too little? What’s the right price to charge so you can grow your bottom line?
More choice equals freedom, right?
Well, yes, but there’s a good body of evidence that the more choices presented to us, the less happy we are with the one we make.
What does that mean for conversions? Or retention? Or revenue?
As the marketing industry developed, researchers dove deeper into buying behavior and buyers’ minds. One early researcher was Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—who coined the term “public relations.”
Bernays believed that people could be influenced via crowd psychology and psychoanalysis. His “Torches of Freedom” campaign in the 1920s promoted smoking among women as a symbol of liberation, opening a new market to cigarette companies.
Decades later, in 2002, Dutch marketing professor Ale Smidts coined the term “neuromarketing.” Neuromarketing maps neural activity to consumer behavior to help marketers craft more valuable, science-based campaigns.
Testimonials and word of mouth are the driving force behind 20–50% of all purchasing decisions, and yet only about one-third of businesses actively seek and collect customer reviews on an ongoing basis.
If you’re not investing in testimonials right now, you need to read this.
There’s a fine line between online persuasion and manipulation.
The carefully evasive proposal included intriguing tidbits: Jeff Bezos laughed when Mr. Kamen assembled an It for him [. . .] The proposal also included proclamations from tech-world celebrities like Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, that the device might change urban life and could be as significant as the development of the personal computer.
The New York Times, January 2001
Dean Kamen’s code name for the project was “Ginger.” That was all most people knew. But few could wait to learn more. Deprived of source material, journalists wrote articles about articles. Finally, in December 2001, came the big reveal: Ginger was the Segway.