Behaviors

THE MIND MAP

As people, we interpret events in the world we experience and store them as a mental map of our environment. Each experience is filtered and manipulated to fit our values and beliefs.

When a new event is experienced we attempt to identify an appropriate response by referring back to our mental map of the world. If we cannot find a match we then re-analyze the experience with our physical and emotional senses to find the response that best benefits us.

Because none of us experience exactly the same events in the same order all of us store our individual mental map of the world we live in. There is no right or wrong. There are no facts. There is only our own interpretation of our experiences.

When we display web content to people, some of it will fit into people's mind maps and for other's it will be rejected and ignored.

People's beliefs and values are extremely difficult to alter. It takes years of persuasion and personal experience before someone will alter their beliefs and values. They cannot be changed in a 60 second TV commercial.

So why bother persuading people? The answer is not to persuade. Rather alter the way you present what you are offering so it passes through the value and belief judgements people already adhere to. Once what you have overcome the barriers of those filters then you will be accepted into a person's mental map of the world.

CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS

Our brains process events at two levels, the conscious and the subconscious.

The role of the conscious brain is to analyze new events and experiences in order to determine which response is most appropriate. Remember when you were learning to drive. Your conscious brain was using your senses to their maximum to understand how the steering wheel worked, how the brakes worked, what you should be aware of on the road and when you should signal. The conscious brain is trying to figure out how to interpret new experiences and how to respond to them. It will then place these results into the mental mind map.

The subconscious part of our brains provides responses to those events we already have stored in our mental map. We do not need to analyze them since we already have a suitable response stored for such experiences. For example if you are an experienced driver, you may drive from your home to work, and then moments later have almost no recollection of that journey. The subconscious part of your brain has driven you from A to B using responses it has stored from the past. Only when these fail us, as in the case of a car accident, do we then use our conscious brains to re-analyze the events leading up to the accident. If you have complete the same uneventful journey 100 times your mind will only store one version of those 100 journeys. But the day something unusual occurs on that journey, that day will be stored as a separate version in your memory.

With web page content we can communicate to people both consciously and subconsciously at the same time. The visitor's brain processes ALL of the content on a web page that they can see or hear. But they may only be aware of those parts of the content their conscious brain was processing. However the content they were not aware of is still being processed by their subconscious. Text or images you think are being ignored by your visitors are in fact being processed by their subconscious.

COMFORT AND DISCOMFORT

The purpose of the brain in processing an appropriate response to events in the external world has one primary goal. This goal is to decrease DISCOMFORT and raise COMFORT levels for the individual. If someone is feeling psychological discomfort their body will translate this into physical discomfort. They will sweat, shiver, become angry, feel pain, feel cold and even perhaps injure themselves.

When given a choice, people will always choose the decision that makes them feel more comfortable in their environment. Even a polar explorer facing many days of bitter cold would feel more comfortable experiencing these hardships than sitting at home in front of a cosy fire knowing that he had never achieved his goal.

At a less extreme level, almost every action we take from getting out of bed in the morning to going to work and cooking a meal is all designed to increase comfort levels. Lying in bed may be comfortable but not getting to work and earning a living would make us feel very uncomfortable, even if we spent the entire day in bed.

When promoting our service or products on a web page we can express how they raise COMFORT levels and reduce DISCOMFORT. For example, are you a motor mechanic or are you someone who repairs broken car engines? The customer's discomfort is their faulty car engine not the fact whether you call yourself a motor mechanic or not.

RECIPROCATION

We are creatures that have developed the skills to form social groups. One tool we use to aid us in forming social groups is the allocation of duties. So at some stage in our development one individual took up the task of hunting for food whilst the other took over the task of defending the cave. This meant that one individual was reliant upon the actions of the other and this is reciprocation. In effect "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". This is not done merely to form social bonding. It is a necessity to survive in a challenging and dangerous world. No single individual has the the skills and resources to survive alone.

So our evolution has handed down to us the desire to reciprocate to one another. Even enemies will reciprocate assistance to one another. Reciprocation is a tool used in sales where free gifts of little value are handed out to the customers. As long as it appears genuine then the receiver will reciprocate in some form.

A web site can offer a free service to it's visitors. This will increase the chance that the visitor will reciprocate this by taking a step towards the target goal of the web site. For example, many sites offer a free e-book to download or a free month's subscription. But the free offer must appear to have come from a person. If it is not attached to the action of an individual then visitors will view it as though they were finding a free gift on the ground. To them it would merely be an opportunity to take something for nothing. So if you give something away show that it is something that belongs to someone else.

VISITOR PERSONAS

Personas are theoretical models of the type of people that visit your web site. Each model of a person is based upon a particular gender, age, culture, habits, beliefs, values, geographical location and ethnic background. If you have ever played the game The Sims you will have created virtual people with individual characteristics that limit their behavior and response to events in that virtual world. Personas are similar models of a particular individual in the real world.

Many online marketers are now using personas to better judge the type of people who are using their web sites. These translate into the web site's target audience. Creating 5 to 10 personas is felt sufficient for most web sites.

Web site analytical tools can provide some of the information towards creating personas. They can identify the geographical location of the visitors and the type of software and hardware they are using to access the site. More recent operating systems, browser models, faster connection speeds and higher screen resolutions would signify a visitor with more disposable income. The operating system traffic report would also identify how many mobile users are accessing the site.

More in depth information would be available from customer purchasing habits, payment methods and responses to online questionnaires. All of this can be used to help create personas for the web site's core visitors.

Translating web site statistics into genuine personalities makes it easier for the web site to owner to grasp who the people are on the other side of the screen.

IDENTIFYING FRIENDS

The culture to which we feel we comfortably belong to is predominantly the one in which our friends and family reside. For example, if a person has a choice of bars to visit they will inevitably visit the one in which their friends are located, regardless of what they think of the bar itself.

And it is not just other people we identify as friends. Pets, places, celebrities, symbols and inanimate objects are interpreted as friends. There is a simple test to discover if a person recognizes someone or something as a friend. The person will be protective of that other person or object. They may be as protective of their cell phone as a mother is of her baby. And people view celebrities as friends even though this relationship is hardly ever reciprocated. No wonder we see the use of so many movie and pop idols in television commercials.

The loss of a friend is a deep emotional loss. The identification of a friend is a signal to relax and trust the environment in which the friend is located. Though people become irate when one of these friends is used for manipulative purposes such as a politician kissing a baby. The friendship must be shown to be reciprocated.

In web site content you can use images and references to people, animals, symbols and objects that the visitor has already identified as a friend. For example, if you are selling the latest cell phones you may want to include images of the previous generation of cell phones that people have already identified as inanimate friends. The presence of an identifiable friend is evidence that the environment is part of the visitor's culture.

BELONGING TO A CULTURE

A culture is a set of rules that a group of people abide to. The rules are often set by an authority or are formed over time. These rules result in the creation of values, beiefs, fashions and defined processes. People feel most comfortable within the culture to which they feel they belong. They may have aspirations of owning a Ferrari or being an astronaut but their actions will be directed towards the cultural environment that they call home. It is within this culture that they find a comfortable way of living and they will often make great sacrifices in order to maintain that culture.

When people visit your web site they are asking themselves whether your site is fits into THEIR culture. Most corporations go to great lengths to create their own cultures and then offer them to the public through television commercials and promotional material. But people do not want other people's culture. They want their own culture. People might travel on holiday to exotic parts of the world but the vast majority would not want to live in the culture offered by those destinations. Viewing and living are not the same levels of commitment. This is why so many emigrant communities either move to countries very similar to their own or attempt to recreate their existing culture within the foreign country.

A web site should promote the visitor's culture not the culture of the web site owner. If you are selling foreign products they need to be presented and packaged in a manner which is acceptable to the buyer's culture.

NEGOTIATION

The relationship between a buyer and a seller is a negotiation where one of the parties is willing to compromise their demands until an agreement is found. However a willingness to compromise is a sign of weakness. When we feel confident we have no need to negotiate from our position.

Web sites that sell products and services are in a state of negotiation with web site visitors. The online customer will often visit several sites to view the the same product and each web page they see is part of the negotiation between the visitor and the internet as a whole. No single web page is treated in isolation. It is viewed as being one of many proposals during the online negotiation.

Your web page is your proposal to the visitor. Make that proposal appear better than the proposal offered by other web sites but do not compromise your offer. A visitor will identify you and your web site as being in a position of weakness if you are willing to make a compromise. A successful person or business does not need to make compromises during negotiations.

RESPONSIBILITY

The purchase of goods or services between is also a transaction in responsibility. The buyer sells their responsibility to the goods or services they purchase.

For example, when someone buys a toy for their children they are removing the burden of entertaining their child from themselves and placing it upon the toy. When we purchase food from a grocery we sell the responsibility for growing and harvesting our own food.

If we run a retail web site we can promote our products as items that buy responsibility from the buyer. So "this vacuum cleaner will clean your carpets" and "this game will entertain you" or "don't worry we will invest your money wisely". The product or service raises the buyer's comfort levels by reducing their responsibilities.

ACTIONS NOT WORDS

People show us how they behave through their actions not their words. It is not the words being used that signify how someone feels but how they express them. Do they sound angry or amused?

Someone might say they care about poverty in the world. But do they take any action? Do they donate their own money or raise some through a charity event? Do they take a year out in Africa helping to build schools and water facilities? Or do they sit on the beach and read a newspaper about it? People say one thing and do something else.

But people also make the mistake of accepting the words of others are a substitute for their actions. Many believe politicians when they make election claims. Many people believe what is printed in the media. It's in black and white isn't it! It might be black and white but are the politicians and journalists willing to pay compensation to us if they are wrong. You bet not!

Web sites that prove through their actions rather than their words are eventually more successful. Words may initially be believed but unless they are supported by actions their visitors will soon feel cheated and rebel. Similarly, when monitoring your customer's behavior take more notice of their actions than what they say.

CONFIDENCE

When people believe they have an adequate response to an event they will emit signs of confidence. Nervousness or lack of confidence also emits its own signals.

When we are confident :

a. We do not feel we need to justify our actions.
b. We do not feel we need to ask questions.
c. We accelerate our actions.
d. We do not need to negotiate with others.
e. We act rather than consider our options.
f. We do not need to form alliances.
g. We do not hide but make ourselves more visible.
h. We do not use decoration as a means of camouflage.
i. We show we have spare resources to waste or donate freely.

Other people are able to identify signs of confidence and nervousness. Within a social group confidence is seen as a strength and nervousness as a weakness. People are attracted towards confidence because it indicates success. There is also the opportunity for people to unload their responsibilities on to the confident entity.

Your web site should emit signs of confidence not nerves. Who would want to deal with someone who is nervous about their own ability?

AUTHORITY

One powerful social conformity is to respond to authority. An authority is the entity that has the final say or makes the final judgement. As you may know, it is always the victors of a war who write the history books.

Participants in a psychology experiment were willing to torture their fellow participants providing they were given sufficient authority by medical staff to do so. The same acceptance of authority has been shown in both soldiers during war atrocities and by nurses when their doctors prescribed the wrong treatment for a patient. The soldiers and nursing staff did not disobey their superiors and used authority as a reason for not relying upon their own judgements. Authority removes responsibility from the shoulders of the individual.

With web content you can use emblems and symbols of authority to encourage visitors to avoid the responsibility of using their own judgement.

SOCIAL CONFORMITY

When we lack a personal experience to use for making our own judgement we fall back on evidence of social conformity (i.e. the behavior shown by everybody else) to provide clues on how to respond.

When a catastrophe occurs, people show herd behavior. They behave in mass and mimic the behavior of each other. If an individual is attacked on a busy sidewalk, people passing by look at the response of the other people around them. If the other people are taking no action then neither do they.

The group with the least experience are younger people. Natural instinct makes them rebellious against their own family but in reality they are conformists. As new events occur in their world they look to others for signs of how to respond. This is why new fashions and trends amongst the young spread like wild fire as they copy the behavior of each other in their social group.

Your web site can use the dressings of social conformity to encourage visitor's to accept and trust what you say.

DESIRE

The purchase of goods is driven by people's desires. Customers do not visit a web page and suddenly desire the product displayed there. That desire existed before they accessed the site. We can consider what might be the root cause of that desire and design our pages so they are prepared to fulfill it. Below are a number of desires to make a purchase. More than one root cause of the desire may be acting at a time prior to the purchase.

1. To replace the usage of a lost or stolen item. Example: replacing a lost or stolen key.

2. To have an item the customer has wanted on many previous occasions but never been able to afford. Example: a teenager purchasing their first car.

3. To buy an item in order to survive a situation. Example: buying an umbrella on a rainy day.

4. To meet the demands of social conformity. Everyone else has got the item except the customer. Example: buying the shirt of a sporting team or perhaps a fad item such as Rubik cube or Beanie Baby doll.

5. Making a purchase because of a subconscious habit. Example: buying chewing gum and basic foods such as cheese and potatoes.

6. Purchasing an item out of curiosity and a desire to experiment. Example: paying to see a new movie or visit a theme park.

7. Looking for a friend in an inanimate object or food to provide comfort to the customer. Example: buying a chocolate bar or a celebrity magazine.

8. Buying an item because it is a missing component of a larger item. Example: buying a car battery to make the entire car work.

9. Making a purchase to meet an agreement between themselves and other people. Example: buying a bus ticket in exchange for being driven by the bus driver.

10. Buying an item for someone else as a gift to retain a relationship. Example: buying flowers for your mother.

11. Making a purchase following multiple steps at recognizing and mentally evaluating the item on many occassions. Example: seeing a product in a TV commercial one day, then seeing it in a catalogue on another day, seeing it in a store front on another day, seeing it on the internet on another day. A mental recognition is step by step being stored in the customer's mental map.

These are all cases where the customer has a DISCOMFORT they wish to remove from their lives. And that discomfort exists within the culture to which the person feels they belong. For example, a customer living in the culture of a busy city culture suffers no discomfort from not owning an item that exists in a farming culture.

JUSTIFICATION

When we make a purchase we feel we are both gaining something (the item) and losing something (normally money). We have to justify this transaction to ourselves with a reason. If the item is freely available then we would take the item without the need for justifying our commitment.

Justification can also seen as a transfer of responsibility. We place the responsibility for making a decision onto the justification for making the commitment.

The primary justification is Desire. The desire alone can be strong enough to disable the need for any further justification. This is often the case when under the influence of alcohol or drugs. But even when desire is insufficient then the customer will seek other justifications to make a commitment. A number of experiences can be used as justification. These include Evidence, Authority, Survival, Social Conformity and Relationships.

Consider this thought experiment.

1. Kelly is a young lady who has been given the task of finding chocolate hidden in one of two boxes. The other box contains a spider and Kelly detests spiders.

2. In the first experiment she is presented with two white boxes that look no different from another. She has to choose one box to find the chocolate. In this situation she cannot justify which box to open. She takes sole responsibility for making the decision. The responsibility may be so great that she may refuse to choose either box. But if her desire for chocolate is sufficiently strong she will experiment by making a commitment and selecting one of the boxes.

3. In the second experiment she is presented with a red box and a green box. One contains chocolate and the other a spider. But which one. Kelly will attempt to reference the meanings held within the colors. Does green mean spider or green mean chocolate? Is red a warning sign? She chooses the red box** and is horrified to find a spider inside it.

** Primates and birds can see the color red. Horses, dogs and cats cannot. We developed this ability so that we could identify ripened fruit in trees. This is why we are more attracted to red than other colors. In fish and insects, red is used as a warning signal. In mammals, red is not a color used by predators or prey since there is little use in displaying red coloring against green foliage. We use red in traffic signals as a warning sign (wrong) but red lipstick as a sign of healthy youthfulness and sexual encouragement (right).

4. In the third experiment she is once again presented with a red and a green box. She already has evidence that a red box contains a spider. She uses this evidence as justification for her commitment to the green box. She has transferred her responsibility for making the decision onto the evidence of the color of the boxes.

5. In the next experiment Kelly is once again presented with two white boxes. Before she chooses, an adult enters the room and writes "Chocolate" on one box and "Spider" on the other. Kelly accepts that this is an action by an authority figure and uses this as a justification for the selecting the box with the wording "Chocolate". She is quick to transfer the responsibility for the making the decision onto this justification, even though she has no evidence that the adult was telling the truth. Fortunately there was chocolate in the box marked "Chocolate".

6. Once again she is presented with two boxes marked "Chocolate" and "Spider". She opens the box marked "Chocolate" but finds there is both chocolate and a spider in the box. To retrieve the chocolate, she has to pay the price of overcoming her fear of spiders. Is she willing to make this transaction? Where does she place the responsibility for making the decision?

THE MOMENT OF PURCHASE

Most sales people would have us believe that it is necessary to get the customer in an excited state up the point where the customer will make a purchase. Through either their verbal or visual messaging they will keep trying to add electricity to the purchasing process.

But observation of people's actions tells a different story. Though excitable signals may draw attention to the product, the very moment of purchase is made in a state of relaxation by the customer. This is not that moment when they pay for the product, but the moment when they decide to buy it. In that moment, the customer stops thinking about the money it will cost them and their desire for it. Instead they suddenly decide that the product they are holding or viewing BELONGS TO THEM. The product is owned by them even before they have paid for it. It is an act of possession and the product has become personally attached to the customer. They will also pull the product closer to their face to focus their attention on it. This is an attempt to ignore other distractions in the enivronment. When that moment occurs, the customer is completely relaxed about the action they are taking.

For example, in which environment are most people willing to waste their money on extravagant purchases and useless trinkets that they have little need of? It is when they are on vacation or during a holiday period. During these periods people are more relaxed than in their normal busy and stressful environments. The internet has the advantage of being available in the home which is the most relaxing and comfortable environment for customers.

In order to sell products online you may well want to use bright and colorful images and language to initially draw attention to the product. But to encourage the final purchase decision you must allow your customers to be relaxed. Do not shout at them. Do not distract them. Do not raise further questions. For the final moment of purchase use web content that is quiet and calm. There is too much web content that at the point of purchase is too loud and raises 101 further questions to be answered by the human senses. You may want to try and bind this relationship between the customer and the product by using wording such as "Your product will be shipped immediately" rather than
the impersonal "This product will be shipped immediately".

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Behaviors