CXL Course Week №4

Topics Covered on Week 2 Day №2:

After I was done with Track 1 of the course, I then went on to the First Course of Track 2 i.e. Introduction to Neuromarketing. This part of the course had an overall 13 sub-sections and each of those are described below:

1. About Your Instructor — Roger Dooley: This section was completely for the Introduction of our Instructor i.e. Roger Dooley. Roger Dooley is a successful neuro marketer of our age who have founded/co-founded several companies in his lifetime. He started his career as an Engineer but was very much interested in Psychology & Advertising from a young age. Hence, during his 30s he left the corporate world and completely focused on the Advertising side of the business. He is also the founder of NeuroScienceMarketing.com. All in all, Roger is a great neuro marketer who is experienced in his field and knows what he’s doing.

1. It’s time for a marketing revolution:

Roger Dooley, in this section of the course, discussed why marketing needs a new revolution. He gave some of the statistics related to People’s/CEO’s view on Marketers. And the statistics showed that most of the people & CEO’s don’t trust & believe Marketing & Sales People. However, the main reason being is that most of the marketing & sales money gets wasted completely due to lots of testing and hypothesis. According to the stats, about 85% of the new products fail & about 98% of the business email don’t convert. This is why marketing needs a revolution. And thereafter, Roger went on to relate this with the Centre of the Earth and Conscious/Non-Conscious Brain. Also, according to the stats, only 5% of the human’s brain is conscious whereas the other 95% of it is completely unconscious. Therefore, us as a marketer should know and focus on which part of the brain are we trying to derive attention and emotion and should also focus on that 95% of the brain since this Emotional & Non-Conscious factor hijack our brains completely. Thereafter, he went on to show some of the examples related to Walt-Disney Characters.

3. School of Thought:

In this section, Roger Dooley gave a school of thought on Marketing & Neuroscience as a whole. He briefly mentioned the similarity between Digital Marketers & Neuro Marketers and how both of them can learn important factors from one another. He explained this by relating to the 2 spectra of Neuromarketing. Therefore, marketers can apply crucial knowledge from behaviour and neuroscience in their marketing aspect to get some significant results. Thereafter, Roger went on two discuss some of the Principles of Marketing such as the Fogg Behaviour Model, 7 Principles of Influence (both of them already discussed in previous classes) etc. and suggested using the best principle that makes sense for our business. Also, currently, there are 1000s of experiments going on across the world related to Consumer Psychology, Spending Psychology, Neuromarketing etc. that can come in handy for our business & marketing as a whole.

4. EEG, Biometrics, Eye tracking, Facial Coding:

In this section, Roger went on to explain some of the technologies that are being used by the companies to determine their marketing & advertising analytics.

Firstly, EEG is an extremely heavy & expensive machine that’s used on the human’s brain to track & measure important concepts like decision making etc. Next is Biometrics which is used to measure Heart-rate, Breathe-rate etc. However, nowadays, we can even use Apple Watches, Fitbit etc. to track heart & breathe rate. Roger then went on to give us an example of Superbowl where they conduct tests each year to analyse which of their advertisement engages the most out of all (by using these machines & instruments). Then, facial coding is the analysis of facial expressions to determine human thought. In previous days, facial coding was done through skilled professionals, but in the current era, It can be easily done through machines & instruments like webcam etc.

To Conclude, it is important to know that the best practice for companies is to not only focus on one technology but to rather combine these crucial technologies to get the best result.

5. How do I know this isn’t bullshit:

In this section of the course, Roger mentioned that a few years ago, many scientists had concluded Neuromarketing being complete bullshit (i.e. Bogus). Also, currently, lots and lots of famous & respected scientists work have been questioned as to if it works or not. Even more, lots of scientists have even come out saying their work doesn’t work anymore and hence requested to not follow it at all. Therefore, we as a marketer should only use established science which has already been replicated and proven time and again of it working so that we know its already been tested multiple time and hence isn’t bogus. Also, coming to the part of Neuromarketing being bogus, recently, a very renowned university named Temple University concluded that Neuromarketing is very much effective if used/done properly and hence, it isn’t bogus.

6. Event Video: Five Neuromarketing Hacks to completely dominate the market:

This section of the course was taught by Andre Morys where he gave us 5 crucial neuromarketing hacks to dominate our market. All 5 hacks are described below:

1. The first thing Andre taught was to never trust AB Testing to its maximum. These tests only show a part of the truth and are never completely true. Without it working continuously for years to come, then it’s just untrustworthy.
2. Second thing is to test concepts and hypothesis that dares to completely change the human behaviour.
3. The third thing is to never stop testing until you reach 95& the level of significance. Therefore, for this, we need a large sample size to validate that test is actually correct & working effectively.
4. The fourth thing is to understand the cognitive biases of our customers so that we can make our web page more effective & efficient that could convert a larger portion of the audience. Therefore, we should go through all the lists of cognitive biases to understand what it is at the first place.

7. The Persuasion Slide: Overview:

In this part of the course, Roger showed us his Persuasion Slide, which Is a Children Playbook that attempts to incorporate some of the sales & persuasion psychology. There are 4 particular parts in the persuasion slide and they are a) Gravity, b) Nudge, c) Angle, d) Friction. All 4 of the components are described in the further portion of the course. Also, it is important to keep in mind that each of the 4 components has both Conscious and Non-Conscious component.

8. Gravity:

Gravity is the first component of the persuasion slide. It is mostly associated with the initial motivation, needs, wants, & goals of the customers. This is the reason why customers know & signed up for our brand in the first place. Therefore, we have to clarify to our customers that we will help them & therefore should edit our websites and funnels in a way that resonates with our customers so that they can take action and move to the next step. Thereafter, Roger went on to explain the Conscious and Non-Conscious factors associated with Gravity by giving examples of a Car & B2B Business.

9. Nudge:

Nudge is the second component of the persuasion slide and it is mostly associated with getting attention from the customers and start persuading them for that initial push. A Nudge generally includes things like Email, Phone Call, Pop up, Newsletter etc. Thereafter, Roger showed us an example of both ineffective and effective nudge related to the newsletter of a blog and gave a sensible reason as to why a nudge was ineffective while the other was effective. He made it clear that we should focus on customers and give customers what they came for in the first place. Therefore, a Nudge must be seen on the website clearly and should give an initial push to the customers. After this, Roger showed a LinkedIn nudge which was quite ineffective and also showed a way it could be effective.

10. Angle:

Angle is the third component of the persuasion slide that involves motivation that we provide to our potential customers, both in a conscious and non-conscious way. Some of the examples of conscious motivators include benefits, features, pricing, discounts, gifts etc. whereas some of the examples of non-conscious motivators include emotions, psychology, biases etc. We as a marketer should use both of these motivators to motivate our customers significantly to take certain actions we want them to take. Thereafter, Roger went to show some examples of websites using these motivators in an effective as well as non-effective manner. One of the examples includes a retailer who tried to stop a conscious motivator in their store that resulted in an extreme drop in sales to their website. Therefore, Conscious motivators are extremely important. However, they’re expensive as well as it mostly includes discounts and lowering our prices which directly impacts our overall margins. Hence, we as a marketer should also focus on having extremely effective non-conscious motivators as it is mostly free and only involved in making our website, messaging, product copy etc. more strong than usual.

11. Friction:

Friction is the final element of the Persuasion slide. It is associated with the level of difficulty our website creates to the customers while they’re taking a certain action, and hence, if the friction is high in our website, the majority of the people opt out and vice-versa. After this, Roger went on to show some of the examples of high friction created by different websites and how Amazon tried to make their friction extremely less and therefore, due to this reason, Amazon is one of the most successful companies of all time. Hence, the key lesson to learn is that, when we create minimum friction, more and more customers will purchase from us and the participation rate will be relatively higher.

12. Friction Part 2:

In this section, Roger went more deeply on some unnecessary frictions that business use that is completely preventing customers to take action. One of his examples included the switches of the hotels that he was staying in. He had to figure out all the switches and their use manually which created unnecessary friction. Also, another example includes the Chili’s Autofill disabled which is unnecessary and created more friction in the customers and result in an increased opt-out rate. Some other examples included difficult password, difficult Captcha etc. Therefore, we as a marketer should check our whole website & its components to find out and remove these unnecessary frictions and make the overall process simpler.

13. Friction Part 3:

In this section, Roger went deeply discussing some of the Perceived and Imaginary Frictions that might hold customers down and hence don’t take a certain action. He then went on to show some of the examples of perceived friction related to Drugs name, Amusement Park Name, Confession site & Phones. All in all, what Roger meant to say is that we should craft our website with simple fonts, short texts and easy to read designs if we want to reduce the perceived friction of our customers on the landing page.

This is the end of the course for Week 4 specifically.

Also, if anyone wants to hop on the course (which I absolutely recommend), here is the link:

https://cxl.com/institute/programs/digital-psychology-persuasion-training/