Are there nonverbal cues in advertising Yes Advertising

Are there nonverbal cues in advertising? Yes! Advertising and marketing is all about nonverbal and body language cues because companies have to put their brands and messaging into every aspect of promotion. Let’s look at a few studies about nonverbal behavior and advertising to see how companies can use body language to increase their income, influence and impact.

Nonverbal in Advertising 1. Show People Where to Look Usually in an advertisement there is a central focus–an action step, like “Click Here” or a product, and this is where a customer’s attention should ideally be. There is actually a nonverbal trick to getting a customer to focus on a target. Humans instinctively want to look at what someone else is looking at, here is an example:

Your eyes want to follow where his eyes are looking…towards a logo, slogan or call-to-action.

2. Eyes As Cues Having a picture like this in the ads or website is a great way to control the gaze direction of a customer. Look at this picture of an eye map. This is where most people look when seeing a picture for the first time. As you can see we typically look at people’s eyes, so if their eyes are pointed somewhere else, we tend to follow.

Take a look at how marketing and advertising guru Seth Godin uses this principle on his website. He wants you to take action so he is looking at the sidebar panel with all of the cool areas of his website.

3. Pointing You will also notice the picture above has the woman gesturing or pointing up. Pointing is another nonverbal way to get a customer to look or focus where you want them to pay attention. This is why stock image photos of people looking, gesturing or pointing in every direction are so popular. This is a great way to get people to focus on a product or action button. Here is an example in a print add of someone in the ad gesturing towards their main message. This automatically makes you look up towards the message.

4. Happy Faces We have mirror neurons that encourage us to mimic or mirror the person we are looking at. We do this to feel empathy. When we make a face we tend to feel the emotion. This is called the Facial Feedback Hypothesis– where the face you make also makes you feel that emotion. In the ads it is a good idea to use happy faces. If we see a confused or frustrated face in an ad, we tend to copy the face and therefore feel more confused or frustrated ourselves. Hopefully, product or service is solving a pain point, so show the end emotion of success not the frustrated starting place.

5. Babies Our brains love looking at babies. See this iconic ad from Cola: Babies engage a different area of our brains– especially for women. It instantly puts us in a warm, caring, compassionate mood. And this of course, makes us want to buy more.

6. Dilate Pupils Back in the 1870’s Charles Darwin found that when we feel fear, our pupils expand to help us take in more of our surroundings– this helps with fight or flight response. When we can see more, we are more likely to survive. Interestingly, our pupils also expand when we see something we like. In 1965 a psychologist named Eckhard Hess performed an experiment where he showed his research assistant, James Polt, a series of photographs while tracking the diameter of Polt’s pupil size.

When Hess showed Polt a picture of a nude woman, his pupils enlarged immediately. Further experimentation found that, in fact, our pupils do dilate when aroused–to take in more of the pleasant surroundings. Additionally, researchers found that people also find faces with dilated pupils as more attractive. If companies really want to up the attractiveness of their product and ads, they are increasing the pupil size with photoshop. When you look closely, you will notice most major advertisers already do this.

7. Use Color Psychology Research has found that colors can greatly affect our moods and perceptions. Using the right colors is extremely important. This is because a color can represent many different energies, emotions, and feelings. For example, the color red can stimulate excitement but at the same time can also represent danger. For businesses that are marketing a relaxation service the color red would not be wise to use within their advertisements. However, for businesses that are promoting a fun filled event the color red within advertisements may actually increase the turnout of potential customers. It is very important to study the psychology of color manipulation!

For example: White represents purity, innocence, and cleanliness. The color white is most often used with products and services such as charitable organizations, spa's and salons, and even technologies such as Apple. This is because the color white helps create a calming sensation as well as feelings of peace and relaxation in order to put potential customers at ease while making their purchase decisions. Black The color black usually represents authority, boldness, and elegance. For example, automobile manufacturers such as Jaguar will use the color black during their marketing campaigns in order to attract a specific target market of individuals who are the heads of their households, earn a higher income, and have a higher level of education. This is because the color black during these marketing campaigns denotes a feeling of sophistication as well as a prestigious lifestyle for the end users of this product.

Red The color red is associated with action, excitement, and passion due to the fact that the color red symbolizes fire. During marketing campaigns the color red should be used for products and services that require the end user, or customer, to 'act now. ' For example, Coca Cola uses the color red so that their consumers will feel that they are drinking a more exciting soft drink as well as the company Target uses the color red in their logo to direct customers to their 'one stop shop' location. Yellow is commonly associated with sunshine therefore creating feelings of warmth, happiness, excitement, and fun. Businesses that specialize in social events, clubs, feel good products, and social activities will especially benefit from using the color yellow within their advertisements because the brightness of the color attracts attention. Some examples of businesses that are associated with the color yellow are Mc. Donald's, IKEA, The Yellow Pages, and Chiquita Bananas.

8. Money! There are two nonverbal ways to increase sales using dollar amounts in the advertisements: Researchers have found that removing the $ sign in front of numbers helps take the sting off of the price for customers. There is a reason infomercials always say, “Most products like these cost thousands of dollars, we are only offering this today for 199!” They are priming you to think that thousands is high, so $199 isn’t high comparatively.

9. Trust Action, Not Focus Groups Many people put together focus groups or ask friends or family what they think of their ads. This is actually not a good idea. Our logical brain often makes different decisions than our emotional brain–and our emotional brain is what dictates our buying behavior. Take this study for example: Researchers had 30 smokers who were trying to quit watch television commercials from three advertising campaigns, which all ended by showing the phone number of the National Cancer Institute’s smoking-cessation hotline. They had to choose which campaign, “A” “B” or “C” would be the best. The smokers chose A and B as the best and C as the least effective. Then the researchers had the smokers watch the ads in MRI machines and saw that the medial prefrontal cortex had higher activity during advertising campaign C than it did during A and B. It turns out their brain knew which ad was best, even if their logic didn’t. When the ads aired, the C campaign caused a thirty-fold increase in call volume while A and B had less than half of that.

10. Position for Readiness Nonverbally, companies want their advertisements to signal “readiness. ” What I mean is that if you have a picture of a food product you want that product to look like it is easy to pick up and eat. This triggers to the brain that it is about to have a snack–hence increasing cravings. For example, which ad do you think will perform better: A. B.

If you guessed A, you would be right. This is called the Visual Depiction Effect. Nonverbally this signals to a customer that it is ready to buy or eat simply by changing the product’s orientation. Researchers have found that if you orient a product toward a person’s dominant hand in a visual campaign, it increases the imagined product use.

Thank you!