Treat your online customers, don’t trick them

Sales people up and down the land will be scaring their customers today. Not because it is Halloween, but due to the fact that sales people are taught that people buy because of fear. Nonsense. People do not buy because of fear, no matter what the sales text books tell …

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Packaging sells products

You need to wrap things up online

The latest smartphone from Nokia might just sell. Not because it is brilliant – it might be for all I know – but because it is brightly coloured. Most mobile phones are the same colour – sort of grey, silver, black combinations. The white iPhone was massively attractive, of course …

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Businessman holding a touchpad pc, reading a newspaper

Read this…! You’ll like it…honest….!

What do you like best – reading something on-screen, or having a piece of paper in your hands and reading from that? Consistently, people claim that the subjective experience of reading from print is better than screen reading. Although we have to read millions of words from our screens each …

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Facebook reveals your brain’s structure

How many friends do you have on Facebook? Whatever the answer, I can tell how much grey matter you have in your “amygdala” – a small, almond shaped area deep within your brain. The amygdala plays a central role in emotion and in memory – probably helping us remember things …

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Email users are more intelligent

Hate your inbox? Think again. All that emailing you do could be doing two things for you. According to a small study of Australian schoolchildren, email makes you more intelligent and increases your popularity at the same time. The research found that boys in particular were more popular the more …

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Are you as popular as Katie Price online?

The former topless model, turned pop star, turned reality TV star, turned business woman, turned novelist Katie Price (aka Jordan)  is now about to become a lecturer at Oxford University. Well, OK it is only a one-off lecture, but nonetheless she is going to speak at the Oxford Union – …

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Your website relies on social pressure

Teenagers simply “have to” get involved in sending “sext” messages – the mobile phone messages that reveal their sexual activity and which also may include nude imagery. A new study shows that if they don’t “sext” they feel left out. In other words, they do it because “everyone” is doing …

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Troy Davis

Social influence is not all it is cracked up to be

Troy Davis was executed yesterday for a crime he denied committing. Amnesty International had a petition of over 1m signatures protesting against the unsafe conviction. Even the Pope weighed in with a plea to prevent the killing. There was a massive international campaign protesting this man’s innocence – even the …

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Mirroring behaviour may not be the benefit that NLP suggests

Empathy and money don’t go together

People who love the concept of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” (NLP) will often try to empathise with you by “mirroring” your body language. There is plenty of research which shows that when people are attracted to each other they tend to adopt similar body positions, make the same gestures and so on. …

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Connecting with the digital brain

Five Psychological Tips for Websites

Getting people to engage with your website and to click on anything is an ever increasing problem. The number of available web pages is rising dramatically – 40 new websites are created every single minute of each day. And together with the existing websites (all 260 million of them) Google …

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