Aberrant Advice

It’s easy to get sucked into “best practice” blogs and tip lists hoping to find that little gem to really revolutionize your business. With busy schedules, active personal lives and an urge to participate in our communities the temptation to take short cuts is an ever present thorn.

Unfortunately our very cognitive structure means we lack objectivity when approaching this kind of information on the web. Savvy website designers have a bag of neuroactive grifter’s tricks that would make Felix the Cat blush. While looking for “best practices” we often end up filling our head with the run off content from someone’s marketing campaign. Content created to lure web-crawlers usually has little to do with providing real value and all too often in our search we’re subjected to a mélange of unexpected psychological cons.

Smiling Faces Tell Lies

One of the most prevalent tricks is as simple as a smile. Images of smiling faces tap into “mirror neurons” tricking our brains into an immediate sense of camaraderie and emotional well being. This mirror effect works best in face to face meetings, but remains successful even when still images or representational forms are used.

Easy Curves

Another trick relies on easy curves. Our ability to recognize a pleasing image is related to how that image is processed in our brain. Crisp, professionally finished websites provide the round curves and image abstraction that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and cognitive philosopher William Hirstein posited are necessary for our brains to quickly process visual information. ( See their article: The Artful Brain )

By using this fact in strategic design, websites can lead the viewer to another automatic neurologically based form of engagement. These processes are keyed to such clearly identified brain traits that they don’t need to be artful in their execution to be effective.

The Dreaded Wheel

The most subtle is something we all learned in grade school art class. That long forgotten friend the Color Wheel is a psychological tool kit often overlooked due to its inconspicuous nature. Within this humble wheel lies the key to evoking everything from a sense of nausea to salivating desire depending on the conditioning of the subject. Seems silly but research suggests more than gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s our psyches that are tied to the board by those 24 chromatic con-men.

The Mark Inside

You may think yourself a well tenured professional immune to such paltry parlor fair, but as W.S. Burroughs, American Academy of Arts and Letters, pointed out: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark that you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

We’re betrayed by our own brain’s functionality into concessions we might not otherwise actively decide to make. Even when designers aren’t fiddling with Photoshop color enhancement to stimulate your occipital lobe, low tech bait and switch still works the crowd like magic. For a few cobbled tidbits strung together to bait web crawlers we often sacrifice our innate ability to develop viable strategies.

If you’re truly searching for “best practices” Burroughs has some additional insight that might help: “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

Good business doesn’t come from cookie cutter solutions. You’re the only one who knows what your business does best and it’s going to be you who develops the solutions that bring it to the next level.

Resources:

Wikipedia: Neuromarketing

Neuroscience Marketing Blog - Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet

Neuromarketing: The New Science of Marketing Without Marketing (YouTube)

Andre Marquis - Google Tech Talks - Links Between Biometric Measures and Consumer Response to Media