About “The Wheel of Persuasion”
The Wheel of Persuasion is created by Bart Schutz, founder, and stakeholder of award-winning optimization agency Online Dialogue.
“It’s simply an overview of more than 200 Online Persuasion Techniques; practical & proven” (Bart Schutz)
Your customer is a brain. Persuading customers = influencing brains. The more you understand your customers’ brains, the more you will outperform your competitors. To give you that edge, ‘The Wheel’ is filled with scientific insights on the psychology of conversion (insights from behavioral economics, consumer psychology, neuromarketing, etc.).
And there’s more; digital analytics (or ‘big data’ if you like), online A/B-testing, multivariate testing, and RTD have created a ‘World Wide Valhalla’ of insights for everyone. Now everyone can acquire knowledge about our own, and our customers’, irrational brains. Testing it in a realistic setting, while measuring loads of influencing factors. These online tests will prove and provide the dependencies of the scientific insights, and probably come up with new insights as well…
We hope the Wheel will be interesting and useful to you. Please use all the scientific insights, online persuasion tips, and online test results from it! And do you like the companies that share all these test results? Are you all for sharing this kind of information? Will you share your tests and results too?
“Let’s share and help each other to grow our knowledge of our brain and how it can be persuaded” (Bart Schutz)
5 Dimensions & 17 Categories
The 5 basic dimensions from The Wheel are simple:
- Your Customer
- has an Online Dialogue
- with You
- about Your Offer
- in a certain Environment
Each of these dimensions is split into one or more categories:
Your customer
So, your customer is a brain. All of his behavior is controlled by this 1,5 kilo of cortical proteins and fats. Every decision is made by his 100 billion brain cells and 1.000 billion glial cells that interact via 1,000 times 1,000 billion synapses.
“It’s quite complicated” ;-)
We start to learn more and more about our brain, thanks to the World Wide Valhalla scientists have available. We start to understand how we are influenced by our ‘Needs & Motivations‘, how ‘Attention & Perception‘ work, how we save and use experiences in our ‘Memory‘, and how our decisions are influenced by ‘Ratio’s & Thoughts‘, as well as by ‘Emotions & Irrationalities‘.
Online Dialogue
In order to persuade your customer, you have an online dialogue with him. The structure and order in which you present the parts and phases of this dialogue affects the outcome. This structuring is called ‘Choice Architecture‘. Moreover, during your online dialogue, you constantly have to persuade your customer into the phase of your dialogue. In order to do so, you have to ‘Trigger‘ a response.
You
You are experienced by consumer’s brains as a ‘Brand‘ (and brands are treated as personalities).
Your offer
Finally, your customers’ decision to buy, use and promote your products also depends – science says – on your marketing efforts (lucky you…). The good old 4P-model applies here (or the more customer-focused SIVA-model): how you present your product or ‘Solution‘ influences your success. The same applies to how you bring ‘Information‘ about your offer (Promotion), and how ‘Accessible‘ your products are (Place), and of course, it’s perceived ‘Value‘ (Price).
Your environment
We have a tendency to overestimate the effect of ourselves and our personalities and underestimate the effect of the situation and the environment in explaining our behavior (we call this the fundamental attribution error). In reality, we are highly influenced by the momentary ‘Context‘ in which we make our decisions, our ‘Social Environment‘ as well as by our ‘Meso & Macro environment‘ (like our culture and politics) and -of course- the ‘Competitive Environment‘.