University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) shows that people who use cosmetics buy these products primarily for emotional reasons. The study was carried out on facial creams (hydrating and nutritive ones, coloured or non-coloured, and anti-wrinkle creams) and body creams (firming and anti-cellulite creams).

“The study shows that both the emotional and utility aspect of cosmetic brands have a significant impact on consumer satisfaction, but that the emotional component has a greater effect,” Vanessa Apaolaza, a researcher from the UPV and lead author of the study, which has been published in the African Journal of Business Management, said.

Original story here.

What you can glean from this is use positive imagery in their brain to create good vibes for your stuff and you’ll win the sale. Paint pretty pictures for them to imagine.

Online consumers thought to be motivated primarily by savings are, in fact, often willing to pay a premium for purchases from online vendors with clear, protective privacy policies, according to a new study in the current issue of a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®).

Check out TrustGuard guys. I think they’re pretty much been around the longest and therefore have the most eyeball trust. Again, don’t just blatantly trust. All I’m saying is it’s worth testing.

Original story here

Dr. Danit Ein-Gar of TAU’s Faculty of Management at the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, working in collaboration with Baba Shiv and Zakary Tormala from Stanford University, has uncovered the “blemishing effect,” a counterintuitive benefit of negative information. When utilized in the right way, she says, a small flaw can actually improve consumer opinion of your product — and make people more likely to purchase it.

“Intuition tells me that if I have a small flaw in my product — nothing harmful, just a minor imperfection — I should hide it,” explains Dr. Ein-Gar. “But providing consumers with information about both strong benefits and a small shortcoming may improve their overall evaluation.” The surprising study will be published in theJournal of Consumer Research.

Not to be a humbug, I’m glad they put this info out there because there are ethical businesses who don’t know it and therefore are missing out. If they wanted to get to this conclusion quicker, they could have just run a A/B test on a direct marketing campaign and then look and their bank accounts.

Try google-ing ‘damaging admission’ and I’m sure you’ll come across some valuable info on this topic. Try it your marketing and reap the rewards.

When it comes to economic development in American cities, the trusted old theory “If you build it, they will come” may not work, a Michigan State University sociologist argues in a new study.

Conventional wisdom holds that job growth attracts people to urban areas.

But according to a study in the Journal of Urban Affairs, MSU’s Zachary Neal found the opposite to be true. Bringing the people in first — specifically, airline passengers traveling on business — leads to a fairly significant increase in jobs, he said.

Original article here

The same is true of online properties and websites. So many customers come to me and they just have really thought out their website…or really how great they think it’ll be and how much everyone will love, etc…but they haven’t really figured out or put much thought into traffic or how they’re going to spread the word. It’s almost like they just think magic will happen.

Dirty little secret: it won’t.

It’s work to get people to your site. It’s work to get them to convert. It’s work to change from what you *thought* was going to be great but now have to change/evolve/revise based on actual data.

The flexible ones win.

Call me if you need an SEO Phoenix company. I may not have room for you but I’m happy to hear you project ideas and give you a little direction.

Here’s one of the interesting parts:

“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

Hilarious right?! You probably know ‘that guy’ in your office, huh?

Original article here in case you ARE that guy and don’t know it.

Mashable.com has an interesting post about Facebook friends and your brain:

Ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it’s the cognitive limit to the number of people you can be friends with. The number is 150, meaning your brain can only handle that many friends, and — shockingly enough — it also applies to Facebook.

When I read about this stuff, it always brings me a back to that Malcom Gladwell book. I think they even borrow some examples from his book as well. Either way, it’s still pretty cool to see Dunbar’s stuff getting applied in a social media situation since that’s all the rage nowadays with internet marketing types.

Of course, you can still use a Fan Page or Group on Facebook to grow your business if you know what you’re doing. Even it you don’t, just create one and invite a few people. It can’t hurt and it’s free. Or, if you want to have someone from our company help you out, check out our Phoenix search engine optimization here.

Interpreting this facial expression correctly (as a „baffled” expression) is very difficult based on this photo alone. When showing the corresponding video sequence, however, recognition becomes easy, which underlines the importance of the temporal dimension for effective communication.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, found out that we are able to recognize facial expressions in motion — for example in a movie — far better than in a static photograph. The video sequence needs to be at least as long as one tenth of a second to gain this dynamic advantage.

Original article here

Bottom line for marketers here is that if you aren’t using video marketing in your marketing strategy, you’re losing out. It doesn’t have to be golden produced video for it to communicate however so don’t go talking yourself out of it before even trying. Get your butt down to the Best Buy and pick up  The Flip Mino HD and you’re good to god. If you suck at improving, write a script out that describes the problem the user is having and then solve it for them. Then, mention you have a product or service that makes it easier.

And most of all, be genuine. Don’t try to be a TV commercial. You’re not. That’s good. USE that. Keep it real.

I do video marketing at my Phoenix SEO Company if you ever want to explore this with your company. We usually do 2-3 min infomerical type stuff with a wide distribution channel of over 100+ sites. It works when done right.

Broken down; many of our actions are guided by emotions that originally fueled by thoughts brought on by stimuli around us. These actions in turn have results, that often fuel future thoughts, and thus the cycle continues.

Original story here
Really neat piece that mixes SEO with psychology. Very interesting, well thought out points that flow in a nice manner. I wish I could say more but I really recommend you just read the original article. I just wanted to put it here in case other SEOs stumbled across my blog and wanted to learn more about stuff like this.

Learn more about about my Phoenix SEO company by visiting the rest of my site. I use this stuff daily.

providing consumers with a very small or even trivial immediate benefit encourages people to use products that may have more significant long-term advantages. Her research may offer the key to getting kids to wear their seatbelts and encourage adults to use sunscreen.

Using the technique in field experiments on about 300 people, the researchers were able to get more subjects to use so-called “virtue products” like dental floss and sunscreen on a daily basis.

Dr. Ein-Gar says that if companies, health authorities and parents offer an immediate benefit, no matter how small, that may have a long-term advantage and lead to more success in continued use. It shouldn’t be that expensive either: in one test case, the facial sunscreen lotion, a 3% increase in manufacturing cost led to a more than 30% increase in average daily use.

Original article here

“Virtue products” ARE hard to sell. I don’t know this scientifically BUT I’d be willing to bet this has a lot to do with that chemical that humans secrete in their heads when they’re buying stuff. And, the drain of that chemical soon thereafter that can sometime lead to buyer’s remorse. Sticking a little immediate benefit-laden gifty gift in here obviously works. If it does and can bring your bottom line up, all the better. What can you do to capitalize in this knowledge and your business?

Need SEO? Phoenix area or otherwise, I can help.

“Our natural inclination is to avoid — or try to avoid — anything immediately aversive even though it may be beneficial for us in the long term,” write authors Aparna A. Labroo (University of Chicago) and Jesper Nielsen (University of Arizona). “But to what extent might our natural avoidance of such activities and outcomes be reinforcing our dislike of things that are good for us but difficult to stomach?”

Approaching pleasure and avoiding pain are fundamental human behaviors, but the authors argue that people also subconsciously reverse this relationship: “We tend to infer that something is good based on the bodily sensation of approaching it or bad based on the sensation of avoiding it.”

Pretty cool information from this study. We’re always taught in marketing pleasure vs pain and that pain is always more of a hot button (in general). Driving your customer to either is more useful than to leave them sitting on the fence however. What can be really useful for you is to really pay attention to your business with regard to this and see if you can sculpt that experience in their favor…and ultimately yours. How *do* people feel when they approach your product or service? That answer plus actionable information could grow your business.

If you’d like more business through search engine traffic, feel free to check out my Phoenix SEO company. Dialing in this process combined with good search engine rankings is sure to grow your business.