3BrainMarketing

Consider carefully the goal of your advertising, proposal or presentation when using pictures of people, pictures of faces. 

We’ll cover the “triune brain” in another posting, but essentially, you have been hardwired to perform certain functions, dating back to the good ole cave man days when a single guys guaranteed score was a grunt, a snort and a bash over a chick’s head with a stick.. yes we miss the good ole days but essentially, many of our universal behaviours today, regardless of country of origin, language, color, age, race or any other factor are the same today as they were in those caveman days (when men could wear fur, without ridicule). 

Language has been around for a few thousand years, but humans have been communicating for thousands and thousands more. (NOTE: not necessarily men communicating with women, i think that’s still evolving..). Consider the fact that your: 

• Voice’s Pitch/Tone/Rhythm = 40% of communication
• Body language: posture, gesture etc = 50%
• Actual words = 10%

These hardwired behaviours are same today as when Capt. Caveman was Nick Jonas, offering a grunt or a yelp instead of an autograph. Take this into consideration when creating your marketing material.In the examples below, you’ll see how using different images, intentional or not can influence different actions on your viewer’s part.

One of those hardwired behaviours is the power of the eyes in communcation. Its no coincidence that babies have large eyes and in turn large pupils, we’re biologically wired to find those large, dark pupils attractive.  Its a fact that Jim Henson used this principle with his muppets.. so if you’re like me and felt guilty all these yrs. that your first crush was grungetta the grouch, take heed. 

 IN THE IMAGE ABOVE: You naturally follow where the girl’s eyes are focusing, in turn reading and absorbing the message. If you focus away, looking only at the girl, notice you ‘feel’ something. You feel uncomfortable. This is the principle above in action, the part of your brain that is esentially the same as Capt. Caveman above, is trying to do what it was programmed to do.. follow the eyes. Having said that you would want every image in your marketing to be a person looking at text, but what if you had a 48hr. sale and you wanted every visitor to your site to know, this would be  an easy quick way to do so. 

THE IMAGE BELOW is an example of a common mistake many advertisers make. “If I use a great image of an attractive person, I’ll capture my visitor/reader’s attention”. The problem is, there’s some actual truth here, but consider this, on the internet your site has under 7 seconds in which to convey its message or you’ll lose your visitor. In this case and again, thanks to Capt. Caveman and his bumpy headed girlfriend – you’re drawn to the large eyes and big pupils. You’re so much at ease focusing on that image you barely notice the text. Using the example above, you visitor/reader might never have learnt of your 48hr sale.. potentially losing that sale.

Beofre you build your advertisement piece, consider what you want the reader to do. Which action you want them to take, then select the images that would reinforce the core selling point and not distract.

grunt, yelp, grunt, grunt.

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This article was written by Marc Narine.
Marc works with companies to elevate marketing performance and profitability by going beyond the feature/benefit approach to instead assessing the consumer’s emotional and cultural imprints and subconscious attachments to a product. He is the primary author at 3Brain Marketing.