Optimise the emotional load of your slogan using AI
How to rephrase your slogans and short pieces of text with synonyms in order to trigger the right emotional load given your target.
This article is based on our research: Hadoux, E., Hunter, A., & Corrégé, J. B. (2018, May). Strategic dialogical argumentation using multi-criteria decision making with application to epistemic and emotional aspects of arguments. In International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (pp. 207–224). Springer.
Have you ever been left wondering whether this word would be better instead of this one, spent lots of money on A/B testing, to finally find out that this third synonym is actually better than the two previous ones?
That’s what everyone goes through when writing something that is supposed to be a catchy phrase, a piece of text which sole existence is to trigger interest in what you’re presenting next. And in fact, there is a catch: what sounds better for you, might not be the most efficient for persuading your target to spend a little bit more of their precious time on your website. So, what if we could predict the kind of emotion, the state of mind that is induced by what your visitors read to choose the right words to write? Actually, we can.
Well, at least we can have a hint that is close to reality.
Researchers in Psychology have been working on that for decades: what is the emotional load associated with words. Like everything in psychology, there is no unique truth on how emotion should be represented but in this article we’ll briefly see the Circumplex model.
The idea is relatively simple: we have two dimensions: horizontally the valence and vertically the arousal.
We can find tables of words where the values on both dimensions have been crowdsourced.
Interestingly, other studies have been conducted on the behaviour of people depending on the values of these two axes. For instance, we know that stimuli scoring a positive valence value are treated faster if they also have a neutral arousal value. And this is exactly what we are looking here, fast treatment. You definitely want your visitor to have a good opinion from the first glance, without having (and surely without taking the time) to think about it. In the same idea, stimuli with negative valence will be more efficient if the arousal is high. This is obviously highly dependent on your objective. In the case of the negative valence, it means you want your visitors to stay alert, to be alarmed about something, like a threat you want to protect them from.
That’s where it becomes interesting: can we actually change a sentence, so that its meaning stays identical, but its valence-arousal values are the best we can have given our objective?
Once again, yes we can. And this time it is a hard yes. That is where AI enters the game. We use for that bi-criteria optimisation. But I won’t bother you with the details, I’ll do better than that. What about a web app? We’ve done it for you.
If you go to Wordimiser, you can easily optimise your slogan or short piece of text.
- Enter your sentence.
- Remove the “meaningless” words, the ones for which you don’t want to consider the synonyms.
- Select the synonyms you want to compare for each word. Because of the steming (removing the plural, conjugation, etc.) you have to enter the accepted form of your initial word.
- Select some conditions for your target and voilà, the best version of your slogan comes out.
Isn’t that amazing? Go, experiment, use it, leave comments on features you’d like to see, it’s completely free (and it’s working!). That’s how much we like all the research around automatic persuasion. And it’s only one of the many features we use for Pedro, our automatic persuader at Persuadr.ai.
At Persuadr.ai, we use the research that we have done to give Pedro that ability to persuade your visitors, your users, that your product or service is worth it. We try to answer their questions and worries automatically given their profile to increase your engagement and conversion rates. Come see us, we launch soon and we’ll have a free beta plan! You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest updates.
That’s all for now, and that’s only the beginning of your amazing journey in the automatic persuasion territory.
