A Light in the Rain

In part one, we discussed the idea of memes and the idea of humans having a need for belongingness.

Knowing these two concepts, we can extrapolate a wide array of marketing techniques to take advantage of them.  Further, we can use memes to determine what is culturally relevant without costly marketing experiments and surveys.

To begin with, we can try to understand the relevance of group identity.  As discussed in part one, people generally have a desire to belong.  In the real world this often drives them to identify with multiple groups.  Most individuals identify with a series of different groups, some of which overlap and some of which are are separate from each other.

For example, a 20 year old male born in Canada may identify with a group we will call “Canadians,” as well as “Indians” and “Italians” (which we will say are where his parents are from).  Further, if his father was from Milan, he might identify with a group that supports Milan’s soccer team, A.C. Milan.  Next, he may be a political liberal, and thus identify with a group that might contain young liberals.  Further, he may be attending a university, and as such identify with those attending university in the west between the ages of 18 and 25. Next, he might identify with a sub-culture of fashion called “goth”, as well as a group of people that listen to “cybergoth” music. Further, he might identify with a group of young men who play x-box games, and a group of people who enjoy looking at youtube videos and funny pictures.  Lastly he might consider himself a 90′s kid, and identify with individuals who shared the same 90′s cultural experiences such as the Spice Girls.

That may sound like a lot of groups, but the thing is that a lot of them overlap, and a lot of them are very specific.  When marketing to this individual, you need only target one of the groups he identifies with in order to set yourself apart in his mind from the competition.  For example, lets say you used advertisement-targeting software and determined this young man enjoys video games, visiting websites with funny pictures, and considers himself a 90′s kid.  You could have an advertisement that uses references to memes from the late 90′s that have to do with video games.  You might think this sounds silly, but many corporations use these tactics.  For example Mountain Dew, World of Warcraft, Mike Huckabee (when running for republican nominee), and T-mobile in the Czech Republic all had commercials with Chuck Norris in them, referencing a very famous internet meme (google Chuck Norris Facts if you have not heard of it).  By using memes, you can make your business or product seem more down-to-earth and in-touch with the average customer (assuming they are aware of the memes).  These days, most people who use Facebook are very in touch with the most popular internet memes, and thus memes are especially useful in e-marketing campaigns.

How do you determine what an individual likes?
Simple. You use tracking software or use services offered by websites like Facebook, which let you target demographics, specific networks, people who have liked certain pages, etc.  You can essentially target advertisements at people who like certain things, or ensure your meme-based advertisement shows up on a page related to the meme.  For example, if you wanted to target the hypothesized 20 year old male above, you may want to post a 90′s video game meme based advertisement on a video game site popular with his demographic.

Aside from advertising and e-marketing, memes can be used to generate research on current trends and societal attitudes.  For example, as of right now My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, a Hasbro inc tv show directed at young girls, is extremely popular with males between ages 13 and 35.  As such, My Little Pony has become a meme, males and females who have past puberty that watch the show label themselves as “Bronys,” and a great deal of My Little Pony merchandise has been targeted towards teen and young adult males.  Art sites devoted to My Little Pony have reached 500,000+ visits per day, and thousands of fan-made videos have appeared on youtube.  To the average person, a bunch of teen and adult males and females becoming obsessed with a show designed for little girls might sound ridiculous.  But to us, it is a vast source of cultural information.  A Light in the Rain ltd can help you determine how to utilize memes and group identities in order to maximize your profits and out-compete your rivals.  We can also help you discover the vast amount of information that memes tell us about marketing and social trends.

Examples

In order to give you an example of memes, we will now discuss the 6 memes that were posted in part 1.  Some of these are no longer popular and outdated, while other are very relevant and dominant in internet culture at this moment.  All of these memes however have been internet phenomenons and are widely recognized and referenced.

Meme 1: All your Base

All your base are belong to us, is an internet meme that started on a website called Something Awful.  It was an animated picture depicting  a 1991 sega video game`s (Zero Wing) opening cut scene.  The entertaining part about the animated image (.gif) was that the text was all in horrible broken English (as those translating the game most likely did not have English as their first language).  The meme came to prominence in late 2000 when a Dj created a techno remix based on the opening cutscene, accompanied by a flash video.   It is considered to be one of the very first internet mass-memes before the internet had become popular.  Since the meme has come to popularity it has been used as April fools jokes, referenced in multiple tv shows, used in towns around America, referenced in many video games and more. There are also many alterations of it.  If you would like to see it try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano or search for “All your base are belong to us original” on google or youtube.

Meme 2: o rly? owl

The o rly owl started appearing around 2003 based on a photo by the nature photographer John White which he posted to a newsgroup.  Someone added the o rly caption to the picture, as that’s what it looked like the owl was saying.  People then began to post it as a sarcastic response on messages boards.  For example someone might post “People are starving in Africa” and then in response someone would post the picture.  The meme evolved to include owls (or the same owl) with the captions “ya rly!” “no wai!” “srsly?” and numerous other sarcastic remarks.  The meme has been incorporated into numerous video games, has been part of a virus, and has appeared on numerous tv shows.

Meme 3: Rick Roll

Rick Rolls began in 2007 on an online imageboard, where individuals posted a link to a trailer of Grand Theft Auto IV (an upcoming video game) that instead directed the person clicking to a video of Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”  They were actually an evolution of a previous meme where individuals would post a link to a news article or picture, that would send those clicking to a picture of a duck on wheels (called a duck roll).  Rick Rolling people (essentially tricking them into seeing the video) became incredibly popular online by 2008 expanding off the internet.  People rigged votes to Rick Roll people at baseball games, youtube linked all its videos on the home page to a Rick Roll video as an April fools joke.  American political blogs linked to what they claimed was a racist rant by Michelle Obama, but was really a Rick Roll. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the US had the real Rick Astley interrupt a song and sing Never Gonna Give You Up. And many more instances of Rick Rolling occurred around the world.  As of now, Rick Rolling is no longer as popular as it once was.  But it has left its mark on internet culture, and is widely recognized around the world.

Meme 4: Condescending Wonka / Creepy Wonka

In 2011 people started posting pictures of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with  sexual double entendre captions.  After a few months this “creepy wonka” meme soon changed to the “condescending wonka” meme, when an image captioned with “Oh, you just graduated? …. You must know everything” gained popularity on Reddit. The condescending wonka meme is essentially a sarcastic condescending remark captioned onto the image. Since its inception, it has gained a lot of popularity with university students and hipsters (especially on Tumblr) resulting in 1000s of variants.

Meme 5: Nyan Cat

On April 5th 2011 a girl took a Vocaloid (audio mixing program) song, and played it on top of an animation created by a bored comic artist, uploading it to Youtube.  The result was the Nyan cat phenomena, eventually being watched by over 70 million people.  If you’d like to see the video just search for Nyan cat on Youtube, or try this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4
Nyan cat has spurred hundreds of spin-offs, and become a marketable product world wide, appearing in numerous different stores.

Meme 6: My Little Pony

Do you know what any of the above pictures are?  Are you familiar with what they represent, where they came from, and why people spread them across the internet?

All the pictures you see here are internet Memes. Popular cultural ideas which change and evolve over time.

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary [see Definition...], a Meme is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”  The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.

Essentially a meme is a unit, such as a picture or a fashion-style, which can be used to spread a cultural idea.  As the meme is spread, it evolves and changes, much like genes do.  Many argue that memes evolve in a similar way to biological evolution through natural selection, being subjected to competition, mutations, variation, and inheritance.  On the internet, most memes are spread by pictures, video, or text. However something like a fashion-style or activity can be a meme (such as Jersey Shore’s “Gym, Tan, Laundry” concept).

Why Memes Matter

Memes create an opportunity for you to play on the human desire to belong to a group.  This desire in incredibly strong, and by taking advantage of it you can generate numerous benefits.  For example, if an individual sees you as a member of their group, they are more likely to trust you, will choose you over competitors, will promote your product and tell their friends, will remember your business/brand name better, and much more.  To begin with I will simplify the psychology and neuroscience behind the idea of belongingness.  In part 2, I will discuss how to use memes to appeal to a very large cultural group on the internet containing the majority of individuals under 28 years old.

Group Psychology/Neuroscience

Baumeister and Leary did a number of studies in the mid 1990s [see The Need to Belong....] to see if the need to belong is a powerful and pervasive motivation of human activity, and necessary for emotional happiness and well being.  This idea, that people need to form interpersonal bonds with others has been around since Freud in the 1930s, and has existed as an idea outside of psychology prior to that.

Baumeister and Leary suggest that belongingness could be as important a need as food is to humans, and that there are a lot of social pressures to condition people for belongingness.  In order to demonstrate this, they cover a wide variety of evidence both from the field of psychology (and partly neuroscience) as well as from other fields such as history and anthropology.  Rather than type out 5000 words to explain this very important concept, I will just cover some of the basics.

Baumeister and Leary find a great deal of evidence that social bonds form easily, and are a universal part of humanity.  They show that humans tend to have a group-mentality and can quickly form new group loyalties.  They go on to show that being distressed over the end of a relationship is also a universal part of humanity, occurring in all cultures in all parts of the world, at all ages.  Further, they discuss how studies have shown that people classify those outside of their “group” in attribute categories like traits, duties, etc (this is where racism would fit in), whereas they think about those inside of their social group in a more personal sense.  Put another way, people’s brains processes information about people who they feel they have a connection with differently than people who are strangers.

Baumeister and Leary also found that changes in one’s status of belongingness resulted in emotional responses.  For example, the phrase “till death do us part” in modern weddings reflects an institutionalized mechanism to commit people to meet their partner’s needs of belongingness.  They also discussed research showing that the lack of close social bonds is correlated to increased unhappiness, depression, and other problems.  Further, they showed general and social depression and anxiety are negatively correlated to a sense of belonging.

Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the reason humans tend to both desire and seek a sense of belongingness is due to the humanity originally functioning best in small groups to help each other survive.  Thus, those people who were able to function better in a group were able to out survive those who tried to go it alone. It took groups of hunters and gatherers to hunt large prey, find enough variety of nutritious foods, and defend from other groups. Ss a result of this, humans became very social. This can be further traced back to certain primates which also display social interactivity and generate benefits from functioning in social groups.

From a neuroscience perspective, social relationships seem to result from the oxytocin/vasopressin system as well as the opioid system (and to a lesser extent dopamine and seratonin) [see The Brain Opioid...].  Machin and Dunbar of the University of Oxford argue that in primates, including humans, opioids play a serious role in creating the complexity around relationships.  This theory is essentially based on the similarities between those in close relationships and those addicted to narcotics. It argues that if people are socially isolated, the lack of endogenous opioids will push them to seek social contact, which results in the release of endogenous opioids.  At this point due to neurochemical processes, they will have to continue to interact with the object of reward (social relationship causing them to produce endogenous opioids)  in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms.

Understanding the need for social interaction and the reasons why individuals seek association within a group (which provides them with the close relationships they need) is incredibly important when marketing a product online.  By connecting to a group through the use of memes, you can take advantage of unique neurological information processing and decision making.

Put in much simpler terms, if you incorporate memes in your advertisements and marketing strategies, you will make many younger individuals relate to your business, and thus create numerous benefits and competitive advantages  increasing your profits and your recognition.  In part 2 I will discuss the different memes shown at the start of this post, and explain how to use memes in your marketing plans.

Definition of Meme – Merriam Webster Dictionary – http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme

The Need to Belong – Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary - http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 (need to purchase)

The Brain Opioid theory of Social Attachment: A Review of the Evidence – A.J. Machin and R. I. M. Dunbar - http://corinto.pucp.edu.pe/menteylenguaje/sites/corinto.pucp.edu.pe.menteylenguaje/files/Machin%20y%20Dunbar_The%20Brain%20Opioid%20Theory%20of%20Social%20Attachment.PDF

One goal of many marketing campaigns is to convince potential customers to either sign up for a service or purchase a product.  If your product is not a “need” like water and food, you are essentially hoping they will “want” it right away.  This is associated with short-term-oriented thinking.

Luckily, it is very easy to convince men to make short-term-oriented decisions.

In almost all animals, there are mechanisms in the brain controlling an individual’s chances of valuing present gains over future gains.  For example when the wings of worker bees wear, or when they get an infectious disease which will lead to death, they begin to take on riskier foraging activities (increasing their value of the present over the future).

Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University recently did a study to see if “pretty women inspire men to discount the future?” [see Do Pretty Women...], much like how a worker bee with worn wings may discount the future more than one with healthy new wings.

Discounting the future essentially means valuing a current good that you can have right now over  future goods (which in many cases may be better).   For example if I offered you a $5000 car today, or told you that if you wait you can get a car in 2 years worth $300,000, you would probably choose to wait.  But if i said the car 2 years down the road would only be worth $5500 ($500 more than what you can get today) you would probably take the car today.

As a result of evolution, men tend to discount the future more than women, as they can get a girl pregnant and leave, passing on there genes more often (a short-term-oriented decision).  While women on the other hand generally had to invest more into the process of birth and taking care of the child (making them less prone to short term decisions).   Put another way, if you took a male and female and offered them both $10 now or $100 in a month, the man would be more likely to take the $10 than the woman.

Knowing this, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly hypothesized that if you got men’s brains to perceive a mating opportunity, they would have a higher discount rate (be willing to give up more in the future, to get more now).  To do this they showed men pictures of attractive women and unattractive women.

They found that the men who were shown images of attractive women had a very sharp rise in their discount rate meaning that they became a lot more short-term-oriented.  This means that men’s purchasing decisions can be influenced by a simple picture of an attractive woman.

Knowing this, when creating a marketing campaign directed towards men, you should determine if you are selling a short-term or long-term oriented product/service.  If short term, you may want to include pictures of attractive women in order to make your target males more impulsive and more likely to purchase.  On the other hand if you are selling a long-term oriented product like investments, you will probably want to avoid any pictures of attractive women.

Sources Cited / Further Research 

Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? – Margo Wilson and Martin Daly - http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/pretty_women.pdf

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2012

This is Calm                   This is Passionate                     This is Forbidding

Do you think the above statements go with the colours they are written in?

Probably not if you are from a Western culture.

If you have read the two previous parts of this 3-part post, you have learned about how our preferences for colour are most likely due to a combination of genetics, life-experience, and culture.  Applying this to your e-marketing campaign can be difficult.

The first thing you need to decide is:
What cultural groups are part of your target market?

Cultural groups will all have predispositions to certain colours and sets of shared colour relations.  For example in some east Asian countries like Japan, purple is associated with death.  However in Canada, purple may be viewed as representing creativity or femininity.  Once you have determined a target culture you need to think about what different colours mean to that culture, what people in that culture may associate colours with, and what modern institutions in that culture use as colours.

The second thing you need to decide is:
What kind of emotions do you want to convey?

A marketing campaign needs to convey feeling as well as information.  For example, if you were a non-profit organization trying to warn people of health risks, putting a warning in faded out purple would probably not convey the feelings you are looking for.  You would probably want to use a colour like bright red, which is associated with passion and may play to our genetic predispositions for danger (as discussed in previous posts). Similarly if you are trying to convince people to make an investment, you would probably want to use a colour associated with wealth, which would be green in North America.  The idea here is to use colours that generate emotions and feelings which are favourable to your marketing goals.

The third thing you will have to decide is:
What kind of colour combinations will benefit your goals?

You can’t make your website or advertisements all one single colour.  So you essentially have to decide what colours to put together, and when to use certain colours.  If you are unsure what colours to use, blue is almost always safe.  As explained in previous posts, all humans have a disposition to blue, possibly due to its relation with clear skies and clean water.  Reds are useful to use when you want to highlight something or make something stand out.  However, red can also make people avoid difficult decisions as explained in part 1, so it should not be used in situations where you want customers to make a difficult choice.  Greens are often good when you want to convince people that your product or service is valuable, or when your product or service is linked to nature.  Yellows, oranges, and bright colours should be avoided unless your product or service is directed towards young children, as they tend not to be associated with professionalism.

Knowing what colours to use can be very complicated, and can have profound effects on the success of your marketing campaign.  A Light in the Rain can help you determine the best colours to use, when to use them, how to combine them, and how to alter them for different target markets. 

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2012

Imagine a nice bottle of dark brown and olive green liquid.
Now imagine a bottle of light blue liquid.

Which would you prefer to drink?

Most people would answer the light blue juice. And in this blog post we will attempt to explain why.

Lets start by asking: What is Colour?

Colour is our brain’s interpretation of light.
Our eyes focus light through the lens onto the retina.
There, rods and cones (light-sensitive photoreceptor cells) absorb the light.
Cones are essentially what perceive colour, and are sensitive to wavelength light which we perceive as red green and blue.
Our neuronal nerve cells (the optic nerve) then make adjustments, compensate for errors, and compare signals before transmitting information to the brain (including information about the amount of green or red, blue or yellow, and brightness).
The optic nerve consists of retinal ganglion cell axons and support cells. Most of the axons go to the lateral geniculate nucleus where the information is then sent to the visual cortex, but other axons go to other parts of the brain such as the pretectal nucleus, and the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Essentially what this means is that the information our eyes generate from light are not only transmitted to the part of the brain that gives us the perception of vision, but are transported to other areas that control things such as sleep cycles, reflexes, and possibly emotion.

So why do people have colour preferences?

One argument for colour preference is biological adaptations due to evolution.  This argument [see Could Sex Difference...]  is based on research that shows men prefer blue and green while women prefer purple, pink and white.  The basic idea here is that humans start with a preference for colours that represent beneficial things to their survival.  Thus humans develop a preference for blue, as it becomes associated with clear skies and clean water.  However, males tend to become hunters, and females become gatherers.  As a result, females develop adaptations to help them find ripe fruit in green foliage.  This results in a preference for purple pink and white and similar colours.

In 2010, Palmer and Schloss of the University of California, Berkeley, take this argument to another level and argue for something called ecological valence theory or EVT [see An Ecological Valence....]. EVT is based on the previously discussed idea that human colour preference is adaptive.  In other words, the ancient humans who were better able to differentiate colours that look good from ones that look bad, were able to survive better.  However, the EVT model does not only look at long-term evolutionary adaptations, but also short term life-time adaptations.  Put another way, EVT argues that our colour preference comes from genetic adaptations over 1000s of years, as well as an individuals life-experiences with colours.  So if a child has good experiences associated with orange, they will have a tendency to prefer orange more than someone who has had no experiences with it.

Palmer and Schloss experiments to demonstrate their EVT theory procured some useful results[see Why We Prefer... for a summary of the experiments] . Dark orange (brown) and dark yellow (olive) were noted to be a lot more disliked by individuals than other oranges and yellows.  Dark greens and dark reds on the other hand were significantly more preferred than other greens and reds.  Further in general, people preferred brightly saturated colours over the same colours muted or in pastel.  These experiments resulted in colour wheel which essentially ranked the average human preference for colours, and showed that we base our valuations of colour on objects associated with them.

Palmer and Schloss’s Ecological Valence Theory is currently the best explanation for our colour preferences. However, it does mean that color-preference is partly based on culture, and thus differs worldwide based on specific colour-associations in specific cultures.  A Light in the Rain can help you apply this theory and utilize techniques developed from it, in order to optimize your e-marketing campaign and website.

Part 3 of 3 will discuss ways to apply these ideas to practical e-marketing.

Sources Cited / Further Research

Could sex difference in color preference and its personality correlates fit into social theories? Let Chinese university students tell you – Wei He, Yingchun Zhang, et al. – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911001693 (requires purchase)

An ecological valence theory of human color preference – Stepehn E. Palmer, Karen B. Schloss – http://www.pnas.org/content/107/19/8877.full.pdf+html

Why We Prefer Certain Colours – R Douglas Fields - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201104/why-we-prefer-certain-colors

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2012

Look at the following three colours and rate from 1-10, where 1 means greatly dislike and 10 means love.

Blue         Green         Yellow        Pink        Purple        Red

Which colours are your favourite? And which don’t you like?

If you did not rate all the colours equally, you now know for sure that colour matters.  Different colours activate different parts of the human brain, and create different emotional experiences.  Knowing what colours are associated with certain emotions, and utilizing them, can give your website and marketing campaign a strategic advantage.

One example demonstrating the effect of colour is a study done by Elliot et al [see The Effect of Red....] published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2007.  It showed that the colour red impaired the performance of students on tests.  The first study looked at 71 college students in the US.  They were first given a practice test based on word problems, and then given a real test with a participant number written on each page in either red, green, or black ink.  The experimenter asked students to check that the number was on each page.  What this study found was that students who had a participant number written in red ink did 20% worse on average than those with a number in green or black ink (who had nearly the same average result).

The researchers then did another study in Germany where they did a similar test but instead of using a participant number, they used a black word in a box that was either red, green or non-existent.  Once again they found that those who had a red box did approximately 20% worse than those with a green or non-existent box.  They then repeated this experiment twice in high school classes and got the same results.

Similarly, multiple studies have been done on the colours people use on their desktops, have around their work areas, etc.  And these studies have nearly all shown that people don’t tend to have the colour red around.

The researchers did not stop there however.  They went on to further test their theory.  In an experiment where high school students were given an IQ test with easy and difficult questions, those who saw a red background on one page rather than a green or grey background ended up choosing significantly more easy questions.  Next they took the same background and gave an on-screen test to 30 college students while measuring brain activity.  What they found was that those who saw the red background had much greater asymmetrical activity in the right frontal cortex (which has long been known to be associated with avoidance).  Those who saw the grey or green background had the same amount of activity.

What this study essentially shows is that red clearly has a specific effect on our brains.  The effect may be due to our association between red and danger (not just in modern society but even in ancient times).  Blood is red, many poisonous animals and fruits are bright red, etc.  However, the study did not necessarily account for culture, the environment, and many other factors.

So what can you learn from this? Most importantly, if you are trying to convince someone to make a risky decision such as hiring you over competitors, avoid using red.  Further, if you are trying to provide information,  try to avoid having red on the page.

Does this mean red is bad? Not at all. Red can also be associated with power,

Andrew Elliot also found that red makes men more attractive towards women, and that even primates associate red with dominance. You can watch a video of him speaking about the colour red here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1rx61XmcDk&feature=player_embedded#!

What this means is that if you want to make your business look like its dominant in its industry, you may want to have small spots of red on the home page or around the banner/logo. In other words, knowing the effects that red has on people you can balance your web pages out so that red is strategically used in some situations and avoided in others.

Another interesting discovery about red was made by Derval Research.  They found that visual acuity determined whether or not individuals were attracted to red [see Refraction Attraction?...].  This research was based on the length of colour waves and refraction, with the finding that people who were far-sighted gravitated towards long-wave colours like red, while those who were short-sighted preferred colours like blue which have shorter waves.

Knowing when to use the colour red can be confusing and difficult if you are not aware of the numerous reports and journal articles on the subject.  A Light in the Rain can help you determine the best ways to utilize  colours, and maximize your success.

Next week we will discuss the remaining colours.

Sources Cited / Further Research

Colour and psychological functioning: The effect of red on performance attainment. – Andrew J Elliot, Markus A Maier, Arlen C Moller, Ron Friedman, Jörg Meinhardt – http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2007-01821-008

[Press Release] Refraction attraction? New science helps firms pick colors most alluring to consumers – Derval Research - http://derval.blogspirit.com/archive/2011/01/27/press-release-refraction-attraction-new-science-helps-firms.html

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2012

Check the first three posts ever made on this blog (the three before this one) and look specifically at the dates.

If you haven’t noticed, up to now all posts are one week apart (each one is on a Monday, seven days after the previous).

But it’s all a lie! All four of these blog posts were made today (Monday December 12th 2011). We altered the dates to create the impression that this blog has already been around for a month.

This gives visitors the impression that we are a professional, regularly updated blog, even though at the moment we are brand new (we promise we will update regularly). This strategy of “framing” your business to look experienced and not brand new relates back to the first blog post titled “Welcome… and prepare to be amazed!“.

We’re sorry we lied about the dates, but we wanted to demonstrate exactly how easy it is to “frame” a business in an alternate way. We hope our practical example has shown you that small changes can effect how customers will perceive your business.

There are many situations where you may want your business to come off as having real-world experience and being well established, even if it is brand new and has no clients. Conversely, you may want your year-old well established business  to look brand new. Context matters a lot, and A Light in the Rain ltd. can help  you determine how to properly frame your business online.

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2011

Most people would have clicked the above button by now.

If you clicked the above button before reading this, you have probably felt the neurological temptation to see what you won.  If not, we hope you can understand that most individuals would feel a need to press the button in the hopes of getting some kind of reward (be it a sensation of winning or a hope for a material prize).

Reward Based Marketing

What is it: Reward Based Marketing is a tactic that utilizes dopamine production and exploits feelings of pleasure in order to generate attention or profits.

Where it works best: It tends to work best for attracting attention to your site by tricking potential customers into clicking an ad through the use of games.  For example you might have a button with the text above it “click 20 times in 10 seconds to win.”

It also works well for generating purchases.  For example stores have scratch-and-save sales where you essentially have a chance at a 10%, 20%, or 100% discount (or something similar).  While 99% of people may only get the 10% discount, many individuals will purchase more in hopes that they will get the 100% one.

This tactic is also useful in maintaining customers via “rewards-point” programs.  Every time a customer makes a purchase you give them rewards points which can be redeemed for prizes or future discounts.

How you can use it: If you have a product or service that is difficult to advertise, you can use a game-based advertisement in order to attract potential customers.  For example, you might have a banner with a ‘pong’ type game that says “first to 3 points wins.”  Many individuals viewing the banner on a site will feel compelled to play the small mini-game in order to receive the psychological reward from winning.  At this point they get sent to your website with a congratulations message and information on your product.

Another method of utilizing this form of marketing is to have luck-based discount events or contests in order to generate profits.  For example you might hold a contest to win a new 3d plasma TV, where every $100 spent gives a customer a ballot in the lottery draw.  This would entice individuals to spend more in hopes that they win the TV.  A real life application of this tactic is McDonalds’ monopoly games.  When you purchase certain foods you get monopoly properties (small pieces of paper), and if you collect sets of them you can turn them in for prizes.  This collection-based method is extremely successful at enticing people to purchase more since they experience part of a win (having 2 out of 3 properties) compelling them to attempt to experience the full win (getting the third property which they often don’t realize is rare).

A third way to use this marketing technique is to offer reward points with every purchase,  and randomly give customers bonus points.  These points will psychologically pressure customers to continue to purchase your products since they feel like if they don’t, their accumulated points will go to waste.  Further, the bonus points generate a feeling of pleasure which customers will want to experience again (see the neuroscience section).

The result: If you mange to successfully utilize reward based marketing you will be able to attract new customers, generate more profits, and retain your customers while creating customer loyalty. A Light in the Rain ltd. can help you maximize the effect of this technique and lead your business to success.

The Neuroscience:

The reason this marketing tactic works is a result of evolutionary stresses.  Reward systems allow for a species to ensure they commit to necessary functions such as eating, drinking, reproduction, competition, etc.   Thus, humans in general want to receive rewards and avoid punishments.  Winning as opposed to losing is a type of reward that often comes with benefits.  The psychological benefit  is largely due to the release of dopamine (a neurotransmitter) which then activates receptors (a type of protein), which interact with parts of the brain creating the emotion of pleasure.  The material benefit is often the acquisition of something of value (e.g. reward money) and further contributes to the psychological benefit.

This reward system is far from simple however.  Wolfram Schultz [See Wolfram Schultz], a neuroscientist at Cambridge University has done various studies in this field and has shown that we learn to predict awards.  He used an experiment with monkeys to demonstrate this, by shining a light at them, waiting a few seconds, and then squirting a few drops of apple juice into their mouth (monkeys apparently love apple juice).  At first, dopamine neurons did not become excited until the reward (apple juice) was given, but overtime as the monkeys learned that the light precedes the award, the neurons began to become excited at the shining of the light rather than the reception of the reward.  Conversely, if a light was shined and no reward received, the monkeys dopamine neurons would stop firing and their expectation of receiving a reward when a light is shined would decrease (and with it the chance of neurons firing prior to the reward).  However,  when monkeys were given a reward randomly and did not expect it, their dopamine neurons fired three to four times more than an expected reward.  Casinos use this knowledge to create gambling games that entice individuals to continue.  You can use this knowledge to attract new customers, increase customer purchases, and retain your customers (as explained in this blog post).

This is a very simplistic explanation and only just touches the surface of reward based marketing.  A Light in the Rain ltd. can use this technique to help you build a brand, ensure people remember your business, convince people that they will be happiest purchasing from you, and increase your success in many other ways.

 Sources Cited / Further Research:

Wolfram Schultz – http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?Schultz (most articles are not free)

Copyright A Light in the Rain Ltd. 2011