Trust, Loyalty, and Building Habits in Marketing (Or: How to Not Offend People). A Review

You know when people start raging while they play a game and then slam their gaming pad into the ground? :D

I do. My brother does. And pretty much all of my friends do as well. Lol.

Guess what, Starbucks once offended people by removing all their bonus points, they earned in a Starbucks app. You know, those points you earn every time you buy a coffee. You can then use these bonus points to get free stuff.

Now imagine one day you wake up and all your points are gone due to inactivity or whatever reason. You’d say fu*k off and hate on them. Kinda like the gaming pad example…

*rage mode: ON*

Well, that’s what really happened.

Starbucks failed and offended many people by removing their “hard-earned” points. People started raging all over Twitter.

And it makes sense. Imagine you’re one point away from obtaining your reward… and then… everything gone. I’d be pissed as well.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I just finished week 6 of the CXL Institute certification program for Digital Psychology & Persuasion. This means I’m halfway through. Can’t believe it. Six more weeks and I’ll hold a sexy certification in my hands. Can’t wait. *Hype*

Every week, I’m writing about my experiences and thoughts on the certification program. Especially since I’m trying to get into a new career in marketing. That’s why I do this certification. To have an edge over others and have better chances to land copywriting gigs as a non-native speaker.

Or just to get a job in that space. A job where I can truly grow and learn stuff I really enjoy.

If you’re in the same situation, this might be useful for you. So keep reading.

Anyway.

This week, I learned about the psychology of trust, loyalty, and habits. And the Starbucks story above is one of the failed attempts to build loyalty with people. Don’t take peoples rewards away.

Let’s go deeper into this week’s lessons:

Building Trust

“The pyramid of trust”. Did you ever head that term? I haven’t. It’s based on the Maslow pyramid. Just for trust, instead of basic human needs. It looks like this:

• No trust (first-time website visitors for example)
• First impressions, baseline trust (or: your site looks credible enough to appear safe)
• Interest and preference over other options (People wonder why you’re better than the competition)
• Trust with personal information (they opted into your email newsletter for example)
• Trust with sensitive/financial information (they shared their credit card details when buying)

Pretty simple. Now, the mistake most websites make is that they ask for personal information way too early. Imagine you just opened a new website. You get an immediate pop-up that asks you to sign into their newsletter. Not only is that annoying, but you haven’t even decided if the website is any good. Yet, they want you to share your personal information with them. *Booo*

So, the next thing they teach you in this course are the 10 factors for building trust. This way, you can make sure to establish some baseline trust first before ruining your website visitor’s day :-)

In fact, these 10 factors for building trust gave me a great overview of things to keep in mind. I’ll be actually reviewing them in the next few days and see if my wedding photography page is missing any of these.

In case you want to know them, here they are:
1. Appropriate design
2. Easy verification
3. Show you’re real (tell your story)
4. Prove expertise
5. Show real humans
6. Be easy to contact
7. Easy of use
8. Update often
9. Limit promos/ads
10. Avoid all errors

The course then went into a couple of fascinating details:

• What kind of reviews create the most trust?
• Can your domain name affect trust as well?
• How to optimize photographs

The part on photographs was an amusing one. You could use the information in there to improve your Tinder profile… scientifically. 🤓 To name a few highlights:

• What side of your face should be facing the camera?
• What facial expressions should you be doing for trust or authority
• The importance of the limbal ring in portraits (really liked this one)
• Larger VS smaller pupils in pictures
• And how people associate alcohol in pictures with cognitive impairment 😆

One thing I found confusing though: So far, I thought when someone says „trust me” it causes the opposite reaction. But this time, I learned that when you state you are trusted in your advertising it can actually help people to trust you… hmm… well, guess it’s not a major thing.

Loyalty & Habits

This part of the course talked a lot about reward programs. You probably know about these bonus cards you can get in coffee shops for example. The ones where you can collect 10 stamps to get a free drink. Well, did you know you can increase people’s motivation to actually get all 10 stamps?

It’s what’s called the Goal Gradient Effect. And it’s simple to apply:

First, instead of 10 boxes, you print 12 boxes on the card. Next, you pre-fill 2 of the 12 boxes with stamps. So, you need 10 stamps to get a free drink. Same as the other bonus card with 10 boxes on it.

But there is a difference now. Since you have two stamps already, you feel you’ve made some sort of “progress” already. This is the goal gradient effect. You feel closer to the goal, you don’t start from scratch.

It’s like receiving a bonus weapon in games. It makes the game more fun and easier to progress in the beginning. So you spend more time playing I guess.

Next, you get to see some lessons from the book “Hooked” by Nir Eyal. I bought this book a while ago but haven’t read it. Don’t even know why. I guess I was too busy reading all the classic books on advertising.

But having seen the lessons from the course I really want to take a look inside now. They talk a lot about BJ Fogg’s motivation theory which was covered in week 1 already. But this time it was covered deeper. In case you never heard of it, the theory basically says:

For any behavior to occur you need 3 things: a trigger to initiate the behavior, motivation to do so, and it should be within your ability. (or in other words: as easy as possible to do)

Nir talked about ways to increase motivation and ability as well as about types of triggers. I really liked this lesson, because Nir tells you how you can create habit-forming products. He gives a few examples and what makes them great. Classic example: Instagram.

In order to create habit-forming products, you need 4 things:

• A trigger … that causes …
• An action … that gives …
• A reward … that’s like…
• An investment.

For example, the trigger to use Instagram would be boredom. So you go on IG too see what others are doing (scrolling down the feed =action) or if you got likes on your post (reward). And since you constantly “collect” more likes and followers the platform acts as a type of investment. The more time you spent on the platform, the more likely you’ll stay on it because the experience gets better with time. (more likes, more followers)

Makes sense. But once again, it’s the awareness you need to understand the world around you. And that’s what I really enjoy about this certification. I start to be aware of so many things it’s crazy.

With that being said, that’s it for my weekly review.

Next week, I will take a look into interactive and behavioral design. Sounds good to me.

Till then,

Sascha