Target Digital Consumer Psychology

Paul's Boutique Pitch: Enhancing Social Media

Enhance a social media post from Paul's Boutique by targeting consumer psychology to improve sales.

Software: Adobe Photoshop CC 2015, Adobe After Effects CC 2015, Adobe Media Encoder 2015

Execution: Re-purposing content from Paul's Boutique by creating copy that takes advantage of the 'Loss Aversion' concept & use colours that grab a consumer's attention.

Trading on Audience Attention

Instagram is a social media platform that sees users swiping up & down at record speeds as their eyes selectively latch onto imagery. Businesses compete to attain & retain an audience’s attention. Incorporating messages that affect audiences emotionally can be a technique to positively or negatively impact digital consumer psychology. Here we see Paul's Boutique promoting a “free gift”.

Assessment

1. Copy isn’t emotionally challenging as the user is only confronted by what they “gain”.
2. Attention isn’t brought to the copy within their overall Instagram grid layout.
3. Static image.

Smarter Advertising Copy and The Noise

Using the correct copy to draw a consumer to purchase a brand’s product is the ultimate goal. Drawing consumers into a brand’s online customer journey & keeping their interest is part of the process. “Loss Aversion” is one of many techniques that can promote a consumer to buy a client’s products & into incentives. “Loss Aversion” can be encapsulated in the expression “losses loom larger than gains” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). In other words, it is better not to lose “10 dollars” than it is to find “10 dollars”. The subtle change in the copy used for advertising has a profound effect on a consumer's buying behaviour.

“..losses loom larger than gains”

— Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291.

Audiences are able to unconsciously tune out the ‘noise’ when it comes to advertising copy. Most often the more desperate a message comes across and or is presented in an unorganized manner, the more likely a business can fail to engage a potential customer & or retain existing clients. If clear and concise attention is not brought to a message that works on digital consumer psychology, audiences will not buy into incentives.

As a consumer scrolls through a plethora of images at an almost frantic pace, latching onto their attention is vital. Copy that is lost among an image’s background colour will lose a consumer’s focus. High contrast colours work best to grab onto digital consumers. White on black, orange on deep royal purple, or well bolded black text on subtle creams are a few options. The latter needs to be carefully tuned to abide by a brand’s visual guidelines. An animated image will always make a difference by engaging a casual consumer with visual excitement. Even though there is more to process visually, for this unique instance it is recommended to animate a few objects as 12 posts earlier there was yet another similar static image with the same incentive.

Optimizing Assets

Improving download/streaming speeds is absolutely vital. The longer your audience has to wait to load an image/video, the less time a business can keep a consumer’s attention. Improving production techniques to reduce the size of images/videos while retaining a high quality visual should be the priority. The latter applies beyond social media and must also be incorporated for any content in email marketing (see GIF).
There is a time and place to use either a static or a moving image. Not every piece of marketing content on social media has to be an After Effects file! However, not optimizing existing images or video content for social media is unacceptable. Diversity of content is important.