Monday Mindhacks: Harness the Proximity Effect

Monday Mindhacks: Harness the Proximity Effect

Imagine being able to make your company or product become more desirable, just by putting it next to the right things? It can work … Here’s how.


Transcript:

Raj: Did you ever wonder why so many advertisements for luxury goods might feature models and expensive cars and expensive settings and things like that? Well, they’re using a psychological principle and in today’s Mind Hack, we’re going to look at why those psychological principles actually work. This is a series in which we go through how you can use psychology in order to make your products, your services, your company, more desirable. And today it’s something that you can use and it’s called the Proximity Effect. The Proximity Effect is a little mind hack in which the mind perceives things that are closer together as being more related. You can use this in several different ways. First of all, you can associate your product and service with things that are desirable. For instance, having that really attractive model is a tried and true way of associating your product with something that is desirable.

But you can also do it in other ways that create clarity. So when you’re perhaps doing a website design, when the eye goes to the two things that are close together on the page, the brain is going to see them as connected. So perhaps you are having a signup portion of your webpage, then putting the benefits near the signup is going to associate mentally the benefits with the signup. So think about the Proximity Effect. Whenever you are doing any kind of advertising, you’re doing any kind of marketing, are you associating your product, your service, your company, with something that the customer wants. Now, that doesn’t mean that if it’s irrelevant, you should be using models and things like that, but you should be using the outcome that the customer wants. If you are in a business context, then the outcome might be a financial outcome that they get from using your product, your service. And when you’re doing web page design, you want to associate the benefits with the actual signup where the next step that you want to take. So make sure you’re using this Proximity Effect of near and far and looking at all of your marketing and your design to make sure that you’re using this Mind Hack. So there’s a little tip for you this week. On the Monday Mind Hack, it’s called the Proximity Effect.

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