Research reveals yet another blinding glimpse of the obvious – if you know anything about selling,


My friend Michael Rhodes is the most diligent researcher into the weird and wacky world of the internet I know.


Yesterday he sent me a piece headed “Mixed Feelings – How To Cultivate Emotional Engagement In Web Design” from a blog called kissmetrics.

As you can expect from the headline, it is replete with all the usual jargon. “Psychology suggests” it reveals, “that most people buy according to how they feel about a product (their emotions) rather than logic.”

Well, you won’t get very far in this world if you don’t know that everything human beings do is driven by emotion. They go on to say “Cultivating an emotional bond with your customers is important—and it’s becoming more difficult to do. If your website isn’t tuned to resonate with your audience’s emotions, you could be losing business.”

Any competent copywriter knows that emotion beats logic every time, I have no idea why it should be any more difficult now than it was, nor have I seen any indication that it is. I find it rather easy, to be honest. However, if you avoid phrases like tuned to resonate, it’s a good start.

Anyhow the blog showed a chart based on Plutchik’s Wheel of emotion – rather useful for those who don’t understand which emotions make people do things. If you can’t read it, look on the internet – Plutchik is not the most common name. Crazy name, crazy guy …

Meanwhile, if you want sell shed-loads of stuff, you have to understand one rather tricky element, to explain which, here’s a little video.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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