Response rates sinking like a stone?
The DEEP reveals why:
Marketing is the discipline of getting people to act in certain commercial ways. And marketing is built on the foundation of psychology, sociology, and economics.
What are psychology, sociology, and economics?
They look at why we do what we do as individuals (psychology) and as groups (sociology), and how we make our choices under conditions of scarcity (economics).
Today, we look at the psychology of repeating your messages.
Specifically, why can some businesses repeat their messages with great results, while messages from other businessess simply get ignored?
Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?
Why do people respond in lower numbers?
Let’s look at two psychological areas: sensory awareness and cultural conditioning:
1. Sensory Awareness:
Our body’s biology and behavior have built up certain hard-wired sensory responses over the over millions of years of evolution in order to continue the human species.
We constantly scan our environment for opportunities (like delicious food or beautiful guy or gal) and threats (like powerful lions, tigers, and bears). This is why we use the appeals like: “NEW AND IMPROVED!” and “WARNING! Your portfolio may be at risk!”
If we repeatedly present the exact same message like a parrot, our audience quickly learns to categorize them as “Opportunity: yes/no” or “Threat: yes/no.”
It was new and improved the first couple of times they saw it, but it gets old and unimproved after that. It was a valid warning at first, but they checked and saw they didn’t own any foreign currencies (or whatever is at risk) in their portfolio.
Now, I’m not merely talking about email messages and mental stimulation. This goes to the core of our senses. Let’s look at hearing:
In loud industrial settings (such as noisy factories or jack hammering on roads), too much intensity for too long leads people to become literally deaf in those ranges, creating what are called “tonal islands” and “tonal gaps.” They cannot hear in those ranges of sounds matching those industrial noises.
Perhaps you’ve experienced a mild form yourself, with an office or home near a busy street or noisy school. After a while, you don’t hear the cars or kids, while your guests are astonished you can put up with all the racket.
The reason for this?
The factory worker’s hearing is not damaged like a punctured ear drum. It’s because their nerves stop alerting their brains to the sound — like muting the sound on your iPod headphones or earbuds. Your headphones or earbuds work just fine, but the mute has filtered out the music from your iPod.
So, some of your messages are not getting through because of your audience’s hard-wired biological filtering. They don’t see or hear them anymore.
But not everything is due to unchangeable biology. Some is due to:
2. Cultural Conditioning:
Perhaps you’ve seen optical illusions in images like these before:
They’re fascinating because we realize our mind plays tricks on us: the lines in each of these is straight or parallel rather than curved — and in the last one, the three lines are the same length!
Yet, people in cultures who live entirely in nature don’t experience the illusions. Their minds do NOT play tricks on them. Why us and not them?
Our lifetime in a highly structured environment conditions our perception mechanism to find order, angle, and precision wherever it can.
We have a lot coming at us and in order to sort through the opportunities and threats, our minds use shortcuts to quickly categorize everything.
And it works fine most of the time. But when there’s a conflict — like in each of the optical illusions — our minds do the best they can to find that order, angle, and precision.
So, we’re hard-wired to block out messages that repeat exactly the same — even becoming deaf and blind to them.
And our mind plays tricks on us because of our highly structured culture.
TODAY’S TIP: You can keep the same consistent format of your messages while adding variety to it. (Psychologically, your consistency changes into dependability and trust — as you learned in Mass Persuasion — while the variety gives your audience something “new” to experience.)
If I were spending $0.50 on each direct mail piece, I spend $0.02 more and insert a different second piece in it each time.
I saw a Honolulu newscaster take his 6pm news to the #1 spot by doing this. Their news and reporting was the same as the other stations. But he ended each show with a 60-second segment that started, “Did you ever notice?” People watched the entire 30 minutes just to hear those 60 seconds.
NEXT TIME: We continue to dig deeper into the psychology of getting your messages across instead of having them blocked like some psychological spam filter …
As we look at the Law of Association and how memory, recall, and repetition work.
Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.
In DEEP MARKETING.
Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
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2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)
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