Gently does it: The new rules of digital persuasion

Modern persuasion involves data, e-commerce, metaphor comparison, social media monitoring and even chat-based games, and a lot of these companies are based in London.

Soho is still important, but the marketing startups being persuaded to set up in Shoreditch are deploying digital tools that are creating a cluster of marketing technologists who are redefining the nature of persuasion and how we react to it.

Data

Catching a consumer’s attention is challenging these days. “The individual consumer now has the highest level of control ever over what they see,” says Ivan Mazour, CEO of e-commerce intelligence startup Ometria.

Email tools such as Inbox, Sanebox and UnrollMe let the consumer easily block marketing communication to stop the torrent of messages trying to sell them things, Mazour notes. That increases the importance of understanding customer psychology and how to effectively persuade.

Ometria’s answer is data. The company offers a platform that uses profiled data such as proprietary on-site tracking algorithms on its website, back-end ecommerce platform data and offline point-of-sale data to provide retailers with customer behaviour patterns. It is data that retailers can use and refine to target their audiences.

One way clients acquire more targeted customers is when a particular affiliate domain within Ometria identifies customers who are frequently purchasing a particular product, such as women’s shoes. Based on this, and without previously knowing anything about them, the retailer can display shoes more prominently to any new customers who come from that affiliate, a higher chance of converting them to a sale.

“Customers need to want to see messages and that means taking them on a carefully controlled journey via our subtle suggestions to that product they want, where at each step you anticipate what they are going to respond to," says Mazour. "When you get it right, you go from being just another piece of marketing noise to a place where the customer really wants that service."

Community

Chat-based games where users can play basic games, such as Hangman and Fishing within messages sent on a group messaging platform, are building communities that are fast becoming a marketing opportunity.

Since purchasing social and mobile games company Free Lunch Design in Q2 14, London-based and games-focused chat company Palringo moderates 350,000 chat groups.

The company now has more than 40 million active users and is growing at the rate of 1 million new users per month. Downloading its free app means their customers can join more than 350,000 special interest groups ranging from learning English to astronomy, Minecraft to anime, and Korean pop to the NFL.

But where Palringo makes money is through in-app purchases and its ability to offer its customers something different.

“We are up against the industry giants such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, so we have to offer something different and we’ve seen from our groups how much people on chat platforms love games," says Palringo chief executive Tim Rea.

“By also publishing games with its strong revenue stream of in-app purchasing, we give them a chance to press the Palringo button and enter another world; one that has 40 million members and rising."

Matching

To Giles Palmer, CEO of social media monitoring company Brandwatch, which archives social conversations and data, the value of all the data social media is throwing off is in helping to match the right message to the right buyer, fast and at scale. Users can search Brandwatch’s data for specific terms before using charting, categorisation, sentiment analysis and other analytic features to monitor what their customers think of them and what their competitors are doing, among other things.

“When we think of great persuaders, we think of individual people and leaders. They appeal to our higher senses of individual purpose and most powerfully to our sense of group purpose and our deepest programming,” says Palmer.

“But the science of persuasion is very different to this art of persuasion; it is effectively an exercise in matching these two sides. If an algorithm can match the two data sets of buyer and seller as accurately as possible, one would expect the rate of transaction to increase."

Words

The message matters too. Linguabrand focuses on the use of so-called verbal identity and how companies use words to deliver their brand messages. Its software measures emotional undercurrents that uncover brands’ emotional buying triggers. Persuasion not by measurement, communities or algorithms, but groups of words – by metaphors.

“It seems inconceivable that a single individual was largely responsible for Nazism or the liberation of India because of one particular tenet of their ‘persuasion’," says Linguabrand chief executive Alastair Herbert. "They did so because their personal persuasiveness was based on their language, looks and psychological characteristics, not just their oratory skills. So it is with brands."

In one experiment, the company wanted to establish whether Adidas or Nike had the most distinctive language. As Adidas’s client in 2013, Linguabrand found at that time it was Nike, because it framed the market thinking of ‘sport as war’, rather than other metaphors.

In the intervening 12 months Adidas has gone from 86 per cent generic language to 68 per cent distinctive in its marketing materials and messaging and has established a clear difference between the two brands by using similar, though less strident, metaphors alluding to sport as a different kind of ‘war’, and its profit margins have improved at the same time.

“Our work on measuring persuasion is using machines to understand what makes people tick. Psychologists have been doing this for years, business has been slow to adopt," says Herbert. "These analytics are leading to greater understanding and adding emotional analytics to complement all the current work in profiling and persuasion.”

Monty Munford has 15 years' experience working in the mobile and digital sectors. He writes on tech and culture for The Economist, Forbes, The Telegraph, MIT Tech Review and many others. He tweets @montymunford