Use these phrases and techniques to take advantage of your customers’ purchasing bias.
People buy with emotion and justify with logic. In fact, neuroscience suggests that most purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, actually outside the buyer’s rational control.
Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95 percent of our purchasing decisions are made unconsciously and that our conscious mind actually creates reasons to justify them.
Big brands like McDonalds, Burger King and Pizza Hut have taken advantage of these strange brain biases, for example by choosing a color scheme known to stimulate hunger. It’s not something customers consciously think about, but it has a subtle influence on them.
What does all this mean to you? Using certain phrases in your marketing can help you stand out and convert customers in a way that doesn’t compromise integrity, but also doesn’t leave money on the table.
Do you want to know how to repel people? Use the word “distribute” in a sentence. Decades of shoddy sales tactics have ruined this word forever. You could say: «“I have a lot for you”. People hear: «Do you want to make a deal with the devil?«
It’s okay, not everything is bad. It’s not like you have to ban the word from your vocabulary. It has certainly found its way into popular game shows like Deal or No Deal. But there are better ways to express it.
Instead, use words like save or save. Because? People love it a lot. They just don’t want to call it that. There’s nothing like a sale to attract customers. If they feel like they have saved money and time, then they are more willing to spend.
Pro tip: You don’t need to cut prices. If you are offering more value than they are spending, that already counts as savings.
Have you ever been to a furniture showroom? They don’t just show you sofas, chairs and tables. They take the time to set a background, throw some pillows, and add decorations. No one is going to spend thousands on a new sofa if they can’t imagine it inside their homes.
The same is true for travel industries. Airlines would go bankrupt if they advertised small seats, long flights and expensive tickets. What they are really selling are the destinations and the experiences.
Words like imagine, photograph, and imagine have a powerful impact on people. People aren’t just looking to spend money on products. What they really want is transformation.
Pro tip: Subtly guide your prospect’s imagination by using “pre-emptive” tactics. In his fantastic book Pre-suasionRobert Cialdini, an authority on persuasion and influence, takes it a step further: pay attention to everything that happens to your customer before making a purchasing decision.
A furniture site conducted tests and found that those shown sofas on a site with fluffy clouds as a background image were more likely to use comfort as a filter for their search and purchasing decisions. Those shown a floating coin fund used price as their primary metric for both browsing and buying. It turns out that the devil really is in the details.
Where is the line drawn between investments and liabilities? You could say that a car starts losing value the second you drive it off the dealership. But it can also be a vital tool for a person’s livelihood (driving to and from work) and for creating cherished memories, creating access, etc.
That fancy new phone won’t stay shiny forever and people have a feeling that with planned obsolescence, they’ll be slapping their credit card in the next 2-3 years, if not sooner. But they will justify it because the phone is much more than a shiny little computer. It is a tool for connection, self-promotion, productivity, personal and business optimization, and more. So that becomes what you ask them to invest in.
