In this episode, I’m going to unpack 15 different psychological triggers and cognitive biases that we, as marketers, use on a pretty much daily basis to help influence and persuade and guide people in the direction that we want, which is typically to buy stuff. Now, if you have a business and want to get more customers, more clients, and more sales, these will help. And if you work for a business and want to get them more customers, more clients, and more sales, well, these will help. And if you’ve ever shopped at a business, well, these cognitive biases and psychological triggers are important for you to know so you can arm yourself against unethical and unscrupulous marketers trying to sell you things you just don’t need.

But I must say these principles, these psychological triggers and these cognitive biases are so powerful that even when you know they’re actively being used against you, you still can’t stop ’em, like some kind of weird marketing magnet that just draws you in and takes all your money. All right, so let’s get to it. All right, so the first psychological trigger cognitive bias that you need to be aware of is something known as the halo effect. Essentially, the halo effect is really just a fancy term for that first impression bias, or the fact that the first impression that you have with a brand or a business or a person, well, it’s going to influence all of your future interactions with that brand or person or business, and is going to influence them a lot.

Basically, that first impression, that first exposure to a message or a person or a brand or a business is so heavily weighted that it’s going to color and influence and really direct all of your attitudes and beliefs and understandings about this person and about this business moving forward and well into the future even, even if they’re wrong. This is why as marketers, it is incredibly important to really make sure that you’re evaluating all of your marketing, specifically those first touch points, those first interactions that someone could have with your brand or with your business and really make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward. But there’s another advantage as well to really making sure that you’re making a positive first impression with someone, and that is that it’s going to buffer against any future possible negative experiences. And really that’s where a lot of brand loyalty comes in, is that if you’re able to get the relationship started on a really solid foundation and really get it started on that right foot, well, it’s going to help protect if something just doesn’t go quite right, moving forward.

Your client, your customer, are still going to perceive you and your brand and your business as more positive overall if that first impression worked out well. Thank you, halo effect. All right, and while on the topic of first impressions, the next cognitive bias we need to take a look at is the serial position effect. The serial position effect essentially just says that the very first piece of information and the very last piece of information are going to be taken and remembered and viewed as far more important than basically everything else in the middle. This is why as a marketer, I’m so obsessive about the customer journey and about the marketing funnel and really dialing in not just every step, but specifically that first step where we’re putting our foot forward, a lot of stuff about feet today, and introducing ourselves in the best way possible with a strong message and a really clear call to action, as well as that final piece of the puzzle, that final call to action that gets them to essentially take some kind of purchasing or buying decision or whatever it is that’s in your conversion funnel.

In fact, I’m using the serial position effect right now. It’s the reason that I started out this video with the halo effect because I know that it’s an important one for you to remember, and it’s going to help to guide you and sort of push you in the direction of prioritizing your marketing, really making sure it’s dialed in, and then I’m going to wrap it all up with what I believe is one of the most important things that you need to be aware of as well so that it sticks in your memory. And on the topic of creating memorable experiences and things that are actually going to stick with and resonate with your clients.

Well, it leads us to the next psychological trigger, or cognitive bias known as the recency effect. The recency effect essentially just says that we as humans, well, we tend to give higher weight or more authority or more importance to the most recent bit of information that we’ve received rather than all the stuff we’ve heard before. This is the reason that one of the core strategies or core principles behind pretty much everything I do when I’m creating strategic marketing campaigns comes down to ways of increasing frequency and increasing touch points, and essentially increasing the recency or how recently someone saw or heard or engaged with some kind of marketing content. To put this in perspective, let’s just say that we’re thinking about your client or your customer out there living their lives doing their thing, and you’ve got your business and your competitor’s business both trying to get in front of them, both trying to win their business.

Well, if one of you is going to be creating more content, more marketing, and more messages, there’s a higher chance that they’re going to see these things more recently, which is going to impact their decision making and essentially evaluate the information they get more recently as more valuable. I think that all made sense. Basically, if they see your stuff most recently, they’re going to think it’s more important, but there’s another way that you can take advantage of that cognitive bias and turn it up a notch, making it even more effective with our next psychological trigger known as the mere exposure effect. Essentially, what the mere exposure effect says is that the more somebody sees something, the more familiar they are with it, the more often you’re appearing in front of your clients and in front of your customers, well, the more they’re going to naturally like you and trust you, both of which are unsurprisingly incredibly important to build a solid and sustainable business. So by trying to appear more often in front of your customers and in front of your clients, you kind of get to kill two birds with one stone.

What a terribly morbid analogy.

You get to show up more recently, meaning that they’re going to trust your message and view it as more important and holding more weight, and you’re also going to take advantage of the mere exposure effect by showing up more often, which naturally leads to an increase in likability and trust. This is why when it comes to marketing, more really is more, especially if we’re trying to increase frequency and increase touch points. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to create completely unique content across all of the different platforms.

You can reshare and recycle and take away pieces from different parts and share it on different networks and automate the entire process so the whole thing happens on autopilot behind the scenes, but you do need to do it, and this means a little bit of groundwork right up front to set up the whole system, and then it can serve you for weeks, months, and maybe even years to come. All right, now let’s hit our next one, which is all about loss aversion. This one is relatively simple and should come as no surprise that people hate missing out on stuff. FOMO, or the fear of missing out, that’s real. This is why one of the most important and one of the most valuable tools that you have at your disposal as a business owner, an entrepreneur or a marketer, is using some form of scarcity or urgency or essentially some kind of incentive that’s going to disappear if they don’t take action and take action soon.

What this means is setting some kind of deadline or some kind of limited supply. Obviously, make it real, make it genuine, make it authentic. There’s no room for fake deadline timers or any of that nonsense here but given the option of taking action now or putting it off until later, most people put it off until later and typically later means never.

All right, next, let’s take a look at the compromise effect. Now, the compromise effect essentially just says that well, people are busy and got a lot of decisions to make, and often it’s hard, if not impossible to evaluate all kinds of different selections and options and criteria, so if given the choice, they’ll tend to compromise. What this means for you is that if you have a product or a service or something you’re trying to sell, well, you’re typically better to break it into two or three different options, maybe a low-priced option, a middle-priced option, and then a high-priced option. The key here is to put the one that you want to sell most in the middle as the compromise option essentially, because this is the one that’s going to get the most clicks, the most traction, and the most sales. There’s an added bonus as well in that by having a higher priced option, well, you’re going to capture 10 to 20% of the market that always wants the premium option and 10 to 20% of the market that always wants the budget friendly or more economical option, and there’s a way you can make that middle option, the compromise option, even more appealing simply by labeling it most popular, which takes advantage of the bandwagon effect, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’ll get to that in just a second. The other way to make that middle price option seems that much more valuable and that much more of a good deal is by putting that higher priced option, well quite a bit higher and taking advantage of a principle known as anchoring. Essentially, what anchoring does is it takes advantage of the first piece of information or the first price that someone sees as kind of a mental anchor that they’re going to use to compare all future prices or future options against. This is why if the first price that you can present to someone is incredibly high or incredibly expensive, well, everything that comes after that is going to seem a whole lot more budget friendly, a whole lot more approachable. Plus, when comparing things side by side, let’s say you do have those three different priced options, and the high-priced option, which was anchored first is just incredibly high priced, well, it’ll make that compromise option seems like a really, really good deal.

Plus anchoring like most of the psychological triggers and cognitive biases I’m sharing with you here today, well, there’s a little bit of overlap between the serial position effect, which gives more weight to the first and last pieces of information someone sees, as well as the recency effect, which is the most recent piece of information that someone’s heard. Basically, with anchoring, like with the serial position, or with the recency effect, people tend to be a little over reliant on this kind of information, which again, biases their future decision making. Okay, let’s move on to the next one, which is all about choice overload. So, in the previous couple examples, we talked about three different options, low price, middle price, high price, but what if you winna go more? What if you want all the prices, all the choices, all the options? Well, you may be shooting yourself in the foot.

This is because when we have too many choices, well, essentially, we limit the odds or the chances of someone doing any of them at all, and if they do take action, it’s more likely they’re going to be disappointed with the choice that they made. It’s the ultimate lose-lose where they’re unlikely to make a choice, and if they do make a choice, they just ain’t happy. Now, there are a number of studies that go over this. The most famous one is the jam tasting study where they laid out a ton of different jams and they laid out just a few different jams, and when they laid out all of the choices, very few people bought, and when they laid out just a few different kinds of jams many people bought.

As a marketer, your job is to eliminate the confusion, to simplify things for your customer and for your client, not because they’re not smart and unable to do the thinking for themselves, but because they are smart and the way that their brains naturally work will be to overanalyze and over process things, which will often lead to inaction. So that’s where you step in. You design a customer journey, you think through the process, through the choices they would need to have, the information they need to receive at every stage, and then you design the marketing funnel, or the sales funnel or the customer journey to help walk them through every single step. All right, next up, we have the framing effect. This, I guess like all of them, is kind of another favorite and one that I use pretty much every single day, which is essentially just framing or positioning your offer or your message in a way that makes it more attractive to the person that you’re trying to talk to. Here’s the classic example that’s often used to describe the framing effect. Let’s imagine for a second that you’ve recently been diagnosed with a terrible medical condition.

Sorry to hear. This isn’t a very fun exercise.

And two doctors come to sort of lay out the options and let you know what the odds of success are for a couple different kinds of treatments. Doctor A says, well, with proper treatment, you have an 80% chance of recovery, going on to live a happy, normal life. Doctor B comes in and says, there’s a 20% chance that it’s not gonna work out so well for you, and we better start making final plans.

Now, here’s the thing. Both of these pretty much said the exact same thing, 80% chance of recovery or a 20% chance of death, and yet because they were framed in the possibility of a recovery versus being framed as a very negative outcome, well, most people, like lot of most people, well, they went with Dra. This is why it’s important when you’re creating your marketing message that you’re framing things appropriately in a way that connects with your clients and with your customers, and yes, of course talks about their problems and their pains and their frustrations, but also frames them in a way, kind of spins and positions them in a way where success and a solution is possible and is possible for them.

After all, one of the biggest and most important lessons in all of marketing is that it’s always about the client. It’s always about the customer. It’s always about who you’re speaking to, what their needs are, what their pains are, what their frustrations are, and how you can communicate the solution to them, and on the topic of them and the people you’re trying to serve, we’ll move on to the next cognitive bias, which is the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is an amazing phenomenon where essentially people just value things more when they get to play a part in its creation. The classic study that was done on this is they had a group of participants built a bunch of little Lego creatures, little biconical. Anyway, people built these things and then were asked to assign of value to them, and unsurprisingly, they assigned value to the ones that they created as worth more money. Essentially, the mere fact that they spent time, they spent energy, they were now a part of this process, made them perceive that these little Lego creatures were worth more than they actually were.

Now, the marketing key here is to incorporate and to include elements of engagement and connection and including your clients and your customers and your audience and the people you seek to serve in as much of the creation process as you possibly can. This is why I’m such a big fan of asking for feedback and asking for comments, and asking for surveys and guidance and advice, and anything I can do to keep the conversation going. On that note, be a perfect time to ask you to smash that thumbs up button and make sure to leave me a comment below this video with what your biggest takeaway is so far from all of the different cognitive biases that we’ve talked about. And just for doing that, I want to thank you in advance because you’re such a smart and capable and amazing person. Now, of course, I believe that. I know you’re smart.

I know you’re amazing, and I know you’re capable, but what I also just did there was take advantage of a cognitive bias known as the Pygmalion effect, so let’s talk about that now.

The Pygmalion effect, also known as the Rosenthal Effect, is essentially the cognitive bias, psychological trigger where high expectations lead to better performance and better results. Basically, when you put higher expectations on the people that you serve, on your clients, on your customers, as well as on your friends and family, well, the result tends to be higher performance. This is why treating your clients and customers as smart and capable and respectable people, well, it’s not just kind of common sense, but it actually turns out to be pretty good business practice as well, because in return, they’re more likely to act smarter and more capable and more respectable, which is good for you, good for them, good for everyone. But you already know that, right, and that leads us perfectly to our next cognitive bias, confirmation bias.

What the confirmation bias says is that we as humans, when we receive new information, well, we tend to run it through a certain kind of filter where it confirms and sort of affirms the beliefs and the identity that we already have.

Basically, if you read something that’s relatively neutral, doesn’t take a position one way or another, well, you’re more likely to view it as taking your position and supporting your views, whereas someone else who has the complete opposite mindset or complete opposite beliefs provided that article or that piece of content is relatively neutral, well, they’re gonna believe that it supports their views and their beliefs.

Understanding this, and you can really start to see how people get into such hot water with different views and different beliefs. Now, the key here and the way to tap into confirmation bias is to first really understand your ideal target market, that person that you wanna serve and that really wants to do business with you and understand what makes them tick, what do they believe, who do they feel they are, what do they want and what do they not want? When you do this, you’re able to frame pretty much all of your future content and really allow them to just start nodding their heads in agreement with everything you say because you’re confirming things that they already believe making you seem more relatable and more authentic and more likable.

When you’re able to confirm someone’s beliefs as right and affirm their identity as right, well, they really start to buy in, and this is powerful stuff. All right, next, let’s talk about the Peltzman effect or risk compensation theory. It’s actually also known as the zero risk bias, but names aren’t important here. What is important is understanding just how much people don’t want to take any risks.

Now, I kind of touched on this when we talked about loss aversion, but this is essentially taking your marketing and your messaging not extra step further, really making sure that your offer, your business is as low risk or no risk as possible.

Basically, if given the choice between a business or an offer that had some element of risk and a business or offer that had basically no risk, well, most people, if not all of them, are gonna go for the no risk one, so how can you overcome this level of risk? Well, the obvious answer is by including some kind of guarantee, money back guarantee, 30 day guarantee, whatever guarantee, but sometimes you’re not in a position to offer a guarantee, in which case you really have to double down on your marketing, specifically the social proof elements, by providing testimonials and case studies and proof of results, and basically just saying that what you’re claiming is true is actually true.

Also, doing your best to establish trust early and often throughout the relationship and taking advantage of that halo effect by making sure that that first impression is a good one by again, putting your best foot forward, again with the feet, with a nice and clean and professional design and message, and essentially presentation to your market. The beauty is, is that when you do this, especially when you’re able to tap into elements of social proof, which is essentially just showing that other people, like the people you’re trying to serve have done this and they’ve been okay, well, you’re also tapping into another psychological trigger known as the bandwagon effect.

The bandwagon effect is all about doing what other people do.

Like my mother used to ask me, if all the cool kids jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge too? And according to the bandwagon effect, yes, yes, I would, and I wouldn’t be alone. Most people would join me if all the cool kids were doing it because that’s what we do as humans. We look to other people, especially people that are like us or that we aspire to be like in order to help us make decisions.

This is why providing elements of social proof and testimonials and showing others who’ve gone before done the same things and had great results from it is such a powerful motivator to get someone to take action.

The more proof that you can show that other people have had success, the better, and the closer that these people match the identities or beliefs or values or appearance of the people you’re trying to reach, well, the better as well. After all, what you’re trying to overcome here is the objection that people like me don’t do that, and if you’re the one that’s able to say, oh, yeah, they do, people like you do that all the time. Your business will grow. All right, next, let’s talk about blind-spot bias, which of all of the biases and psychological triggers we’ve talked about, this one is perhaps my favorite and also the most interesting. Basically, what the blind-spot bias says is that all of the things that I’ve just talked about, including a ton of other cognitive biases and psychological triggers I didn’t have time to get to, while all of them are invisible to the people that you’re trying to talk to.

They don’t know they’re happening. They’re so deeply rooted in our fundamental makeup and are psychology as human beings that we can’t recognize when they’re actively being used against us, even when we’re being told they’re being used against us. Yes, that’s right. Even if someone is to come out and tell you, hey, don’t let anchoring impact your future decision, well, it still seeps in.

This is because our brains are busy, busy places, and we have to rely on these mental shortcuts to quickly evaluate information and help us make decisions.

Now, of course, the best way to use all of the cognitive biases and psychological triggers that I’ve discussed with you here, the best way, and also importantly, the most ethical way, is to make sure that you’re building them on a solid marketing foundation. And this is why the next thing you’re gonna want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here on Introduction to Marketing, so make sure to check that out now, I’ll see you in the next episode. Marketing helps people solve their problems by clearly defining and delivering solutions and really explaining the benefits of those solutions so they can get better results.

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