cognitive biases can prevent you from connecting to your audience

You can convince your customers to make a phone call, click a button or buy something by being a marketer. It doesn’t end there. You can trigger feelings, emotions and thoughts. You can influence complex behaviors to support your brand for a long time.

How can you create a strategy to drive customer behavior through a campaign and beyond? To begin, you need to understand how your customers will respond most likely to creative work.

In my previous articles I discussed how to create marketing assets that trigger certain responses in the brain such as:

• Dopamine, the Golden Rule of Content Marketing
• 
  Neuroscience, Beauty and Making an Impact with Visually Appealing Assets
  

You can also read about how to tap into the cognitive biases of customers that influence their decisions.

• Four cognitive biases, and psychological drivers that influence behavior
• 
  How to use cognitive biases in marketing to influence consumer decisions
  

It’s obvious that to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing, you must get into your customers’ minds. To do this successfully, you must get out of your own head. This article highlights the cognitive biases which might stop you connecting with your customer optimally.

Fundamental attribution error

Lee Ross, a Stanford University professor and psychologist, published ” the Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcoming : Distortions of the Attribution Process in 1977. Ross’s paper is about a person who tries to make sense out of the world through interpreting his own behavior and that of others.

According to Ross, the fundamental attribution mistake is a tendency for a person to attribute certain behaviors as a result of a character flaw or disposition rather than external or situational influences. A hypothetical situation can help you gain perspective on biases that contribute to losing perspective.

Imagine that you are heading to a presentation where you will be presenting your new campaign. Everyone is eagerly awaiting your insight at this important meeting.

You notice that a seat is empty in the conference room. This was occupied by a member of your team. The missing coworker enters the room and sits down after you start your presentation. You’re frustrated. You’re frustrated. You then focus on the presentation and dismiss the late-arriving colleague as being lazy and disrespectful.

You only make eye contact with those who arrived on time. This is a strong reaction, because your values do not align with those of your coworker. Is it possible, however, that your coworker’s late arrival was due to external circumstances?

In this case, you didn’t know that your co-worker was required to pick her mother up from the hospital prior to the meeting. Your co-worker called the hospital and confirmed the time of arrival. Your co-worker arrived on time but was informed that the information received by phone was incorrect. She would need to wait another 20 minutes before her mother was discharged.

You attributed the delay in arrival of this hypothetical scenario to an internal problem. This is a common response. It can prevent us from understanding people accurately. When trying to understand behaviour, it is important to keep in mind that the fundamental attribution mistake can lead to incorrect conclusions.

Another interesting aspect of this fundamental error is the attribution. When your behavior is in question, you’re more inclined to blame the external circumstances. Ross says that you rationalize your behavior as a result of “asymmetry between positive and negative outcomes,” meaning you are more likely to excuse yourself for the same behavior.

What impact does this have on your role as marketing leader? You must know your customers, and this means understanding the factors that influence their behavior. You must understand how internal and external factors influence behavior when you are assessing a large audience.

You can achieve the highest level of influence if you understand your audience completely. This includes understanding how you may inadvertently attribute wrong qualities to your buyer persons.

Apophenia in Marketing Analytics

As Atlas, the weight of the world rests on you to link the impact of your creative efforts to your bottom-line success. You’re eager to link your analytics with your campaigns as you evaluate your marketing metrics. You’re paid to influence attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, and failure comes with a steep price.

Can you prove you are responsible for an increase in clicks, likes or purchases? You can be sure that if you notice a shift in data which corresponds with the timing of a campaign, it is a result from your brilliant marketing insight, right? Possibly. But not necessarily.

Enter apophenia. This is a cognitive bias that involves creating meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena. Klaus Conrad was a psychiatrist and neurologist who treated schizophrenia patients in 1958. It’s not just a problem for those with DSM-5TR. You are also affected by it.

Have you ever noticed shapes in the sky? What about seeing a face on a random object, like a wall or food? Pareidolia is an example of apophenia. It’s why we tend to see faces on random objects.

Francis Bacon, a philosopher and scientist, pondered on the tendency of humans to imagine a world more ordered than reality. In 1620, Bacon wrote: “Human understanding by its very nature is prone to imagine a world with more order and regularity than what it actually finds.”

Researchers are discovering that pattern recognition plays a role in what makes us unique. Mark Mattson is a professor of Neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He says that pattern processing is the “essence of the evolved brain.”

You might find it easy to give value where none exists, because your brain is built to detect patterns and you are motivated to identify positive outcomes in your data.

Take a minute to question any improvement you see in your analytics. Can you untangle the connection between two things that could be beneficial to you? You need to be able to accurately interpret your data. Yes, this is more important than giving a positive summary to your organization of the impact of recent marketing efforts.

You’ll only be able do your best work when you fully understand your audience, their behaviors and all the aspects that go with them. This requires an accurate interpretation. Your analytics may tell a fascinating story about the brilliance of your marketing — or they might not.

Be cognizant of your own cognitive biases

It’s important to keep in mind that when you try to understand the behavior of a co-worker, a client or yourself, your brain will tend to make quick and inaccurate conclusions.

You can use cognitive biases to influence the behavior of your customers. You’re also susceptible to faulty judgements because of the defective hardware in your head.

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