cScape Breakfast Briefing15 March 2007, Soho House, London
Persuasive solutionsfor demanding times
Richard SedleyDirector, cScape Customer Engagement Unit
A bipolar credibility test was undertaken on each of the pages above.Participants were given half a second to rate credibility against specific tasks.
The need fordecisional heuristics
500 milliseconds todetermine credibility
4 seconds todetermine usefulness
Elaboration Likelihood Model
• High elaboration (central route)Requires great deal of thought to make adecision
• Low elaboration (peripheral route)Requires little thought, reliant on decisionalheuristics
How we make our decisions
Petty & Cacioppo, 1981
An attempt to change attitudes or behaviours(or both) without using coercion or deception
The need for Persuasion
Acquisition Conversion Retention
Findability Persuasion Engagement
Classic
History of persuasion
Modern Post-ModernTreatise on Rhetoric
by AristotleThe Hidden Persuaders
By Vance PackardInfluence: The Psychology
of Persuasionby Robert Cialdini
The functional triadHow computers can be persuasive
Social actorCreates relationships
Can be persuasive by:•Rewarding people with positive feedback
•Modeling a target behaviour•Providing social support
ToolIncreases capabilityCan be persuasive by:•Making target behaviour easier•Leading people through a process•Performing calculations or measurements that motivate
MediumProvides experience
Can be persuasive by:•Allowing people to explore cause-and-effect relationships•Providing people with vicarious experiences that motivate
•Helping people rehearse a behaviour
BJ Fogg, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think, 2003
• Persistence• Anonymity• Data handling• Use different modalities• Easily scalable• Can be ubiquitous
Six key advantagesof computer interactivity
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003
• Presumed
• Surface
• Reputed
• Earned
Four types of credibility
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003
=
=
=
=
General assumptions in themind of the perceiverSimple inspection or initial firsthand experienceThird party endorsements,reports or referralsFirst hand experience thatextends over time
The power of credibilityA B
Conversion rate = 2.69% Conversion rate = 3.03%
% change = 12.64%Projected monthly gain = $30,582.30
Marketing E
xperiments Journal, Feb 2007
• Reciprocity
• Commitment and consistency
• Consensus
• Affinity (Liking)
• Authority
• Scarcity
Principles of motivation
Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984
Consensus (social validation)
Experiment: Milgrim, Bikman and Birkowitz
An experiment was done in the 1960s where a guywalked in to the middle of a street and looked up.
Four per cent of people who walked past him withina set time period joined him in looking up.
When they repeated the experiment with five peoplelooking up, 18 per cent of the passers-by stopped andlooked up in the air.
When they had 15 people standing around, theymanaged to stop traffic within a minute and 40 per centof the people passing looked up.
Has anyone heard of the term kairos?
Timing is everything – it’s critical for any persuasion tactic to be effective. Those of youwho were at a presentation I gave in the middle of last year at Microsoft will know that Igave some examples from my daughter’s nursery where we managed get people to stopdumping rubbish outside the nursery simply by displaying a map of where the dump was.The idea was that when people came to drop their rubbish off that was the most opportunetime to persuade them not to be anti-social. Putting leaflets through their door had almostno effect. So the concept of timing is ever important.
I have a question to throw out to you: If we’re going to say we need to be in the right placeat the right time, how can we create the right place and the right time? Because nine timesout of 10, you don’t know exactly what’s in people’s heads, what they’re trying to do whenthey arrive at your site. I want to try and give a bit of structure to that by saying if you canshape some of the elements listed on the next slide, you can start to shape the right placeand the right time.
Kairos(Persuasion windows)
• When you are in a good mood
• When your world view no longer makes sense
• When you can take action immediately
• When you feel indebted because of a favour
• Immediately after you have made a mistake
• Immediately after you have denied a request
Kairos(Persuasion windows)
Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab, 2003
What’s the second best thing about skiing? It’s got to be après-ski, right? As a non-skier I know that!
Here’s a photograph of something brilliant – it’s a chalet in the Alps. Inside is a purpose-built, abespoke, bar in Swiss chalet style. But the bar is six inches lower than any standard bar and above it,tucked in to the ceiling, is a hand rail.
So people go here on holiday, they have a really nice time. Then they go home and talk to their matesand they say “it was such a good holiday – it was so good people were even dancing on the bar”.
What they’ve done through persuasive design is they’ve shaped the way that people are going to beable to spread the news about this particular holiday. It’s very clever and encourages people to spreadthe word.
If they’d put up a sign saying Dancing on the bar is permitted do you think it would have had the sameeffect?
What is themost powerful pageon your site?
Does anyone have any idea of what the most powerful page on your site is? The homepage?OK, anyone else? Well, it’s probably your thank you pages. There you’ve got a persuasivewindow, there you’ve got an opportunity to talk to people, you’ve got a situation where someoneis already committed to you and has already decided to do something.
Marketing Sherpa did an analysis in January this year where they looked at their own thank youpages. 39 per cent of the people who viewed them accepted offers for something else. Whereelse do you get 39 per cent of your audience committing to do something else? What wasinteresting was that 29 per cent went for the most popular offer and 10 per cent went for otheroffers. So showing one offer is not enough. You need to be able to give people choice in thesekind of moments. These are your moments of power, these are your persuasion windows thatyou need to make the most of in order to maximise the impact that you have on your sites.
To influence aperson to change their
attitude or behaviour The process ofpersuasion changesthe persuader
Web2.0: Persuasion as a dialogue
I thought I’d give you a very simple example of ‘Persuasion as a Dialogue’. This is something I’vestarted to use on my blog. It’s called a ‘swiki’. It’s basically a search result that’s also a wiki, whichmeans that these search results are editable by the people who find them.
So you are allowing people to navigate into the search results page and then – what I’m showing youhere is a very simple example around Alzheimers – you’re giving them the opportunity to say ‘this is avery good result for me, that isn’t and that is completely inappropriate’. And over time, what happens, asyou can see, is that the user-generated aspect of it is beginning to shape the site. It’s beginning toimpact on the site so that it’s becoming more persuasive and more useful. All of this is a result of youpersuading someone else to interact with your content.
Persuasion is about aligning our needs anddesires with the needs and desires of ourcustomers - for mutual benefit
• Creation of persuasion pathways
• Right touching through persuasion windows
• As part of engagement modeling
The value of persuasion
• How can we use iterative interactivity to motivate?• How can we encapsulate the four types of credibility into a single site or even a page?• How can UGC be used to motivate?• How can we create the right place and right time for persuasion?• How ethical is persuasion?
Questions
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