Marketing disassembly: conversion rate surge, anchoring effect use cases and cracking methods

The anchoring effect, also known as the anchoring effect, means that when people make judgments about someone or something, they are easily dominated by the first impression or the first information, which fixes people's thoughts somewhere like an anchor sinking to the bottom of the sea. So how can we use the anchoring effect to increase conversion rate ?

In the eyes of many people, marketing seems like a metaphysics at first glance, similar to magic.

The reason why laymen have formed such an impression is probably because they have been fed with a lot of clever but popular marketing "techniques", "effects" and "laws" in many chicken soup articles and best-selling books. Such as the Aronson effect, the compromise effect, the fruit effect, the 7-second rule, the Matthew effect , the network effect, the herd effect... Each theory is also equipped with a case that is more ups and downs than a story and will make you applaud.

The reason for the above cognition can be explained by a psychological effect, that is, the anchoring effect .

The anchoring effect , also known as the anchoring effect , was proposed by Nobel Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman in 1974. It means that when people make judgments about someone or something, they are easily dominated by the first impression or the first information, which fixes people's thoughts somewhere like an anchor sinking to the bottom of the sea.

This psychological effect is almost a compulsory subject in user psychology research and major business schools. It permeates every aspect of our lives. Specifically in the field of marketing, if the anchoring effect is properly utilized, many scenarios will make customers behave as if they are being manipulated.

It should be noted that many people, even so-called marketing experts, confuse the anchoring effect with the sunk cost effect . The sunk cost effect refers to "the widespread irrational phenomenon of taking sunk costs into account when making decisions in people's actual investment activities, production operations and daily life - in order to avoid the negative emotions brought about by losses, people indulge in past efforts and choose irrational behavior."

This is also a very useful psychological effect, but it has no substantial correlation with the anchoring effect except that they both contain the word "anchoring".

Next, I will tell you about the use cases of the anchoring effect and how to solve it.

Use Cases

Behavior is a slave to thought. The formation of thought depends on what people see and hear, and the anchoring effect emphasizes that the first impression and the first information have a weighted influence buff among many information . So theoretically, this effect can be used everywhere. Like air, although it is precious, it is often overlooked because it is too common. Therefore, picking out some impressive use cases will make everyone aware of its power.

(1) In many fast food restaurants or breakfast shops (Nanchang fried noodles, Shaxian snacks), many experienced waiters often add a sentence after you take your order, "What kind of soup do you want?" or even more specifically, "Lotus seed pork tripe soup, black chicken soup, what do you want?" Inexperienced waiters often ask, "Do you want soup?"

A small sales pitch can make a huge difference in the conversion rate. Experienced waiters will often anchor in your mind that you want to order soup, and then it’s just a matter of which one you order. When an inexperienced waiter says this, many people's instinctive reaction to the unexpected information is to refuse, even if they want to drink it. In addition, there is an extra step from whether to order to product selection, which increases the number of decision-making steps for consumers and reduces the conversion rate.

(2) In terms of pricing and marketing strategies, first use high prices to enhance brand value, and then use promotions to satisfy people’s psychological preference for getting a bargain. This can help consumers convince themselves that they can buy good products at a low price.

For example: Rongsheng water purifiers went to the countryside for sales meetings. They used various CCTV reports and other misleading plots to prove the importance of water quality. They then started to promote their products by saying that the best foreign water purifiers cost hundreds of thousands of yuan each. Then they asked the audience to guess how much Rongsheng's product cost. After a lot of chatter from the audience, the host announced in a thunderous voice that the price was only 4,980 yuan.

After being told that the equipment cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, everyone was surprisingly calm (it wasn’t expensive), but they were probably still hesitating about buying it.

Finally, there is one more trick. Zhangmai claims that it responds to the national call for home appliances to go to the countryside and offers subsidies. In addition, the cost of saving on TV advertising can be used to provide benefits. With the business cards distributed tonight, those who place an order within seven days can enjoy a discount of 2,000, only 2,980. As a result of this, the stingy rural consumer groups surrendered one after another, and the high-priced products were sold to the "low-value" user group.

(3) In offline store location strategies, many second-tier brand stores tend to try to be close to first-tier brands. This is because they take advantage of consumers’ psychological assumption that big brands are often located next to other big brands. For example, Zara, which is obviously a low-end brand, tries hard to open stores next to first-tier luxury brands. In New York, it opened a store on Fifth Avenue; in Paris, it chose the Champs-Elysées; and in Shanghai, it chose Nanjing Road.

(4) In addition, in the process of interpersonal communication, experts in flirting often give the other party an anchor (presumably a boyfriend or girlfriend, or even a couple) and then expand the scope of topics to an endless number of new, exciting and hopeful areas.

When inviting someone, you are often given choices, for example: going karaoke or going clubbing, instead of asking whether you want to go out and have fun; asking your husband for gifts and making requests to your boss have become jokes on Douyin and Kuaishou . Asking for a high price first to raise the other person's expectations, and then making reasonable requests will greatly increase your success rate. As the saying goes, if you plan for the best, you will get the middle; if you plan for the middle, you will get the worst.

During debates or negotiations, the anchoring effect is often used to "set a trap" for others, that is, to assume that someone knows or owns something that he actually does not own, in order to find a flaw.

(5) In online marketing , I often emphasize the importance of occupying a position and dominating the screen. When the entire industry is filled with the content you produce, few consumers can escape your "clutches." Taking it to the extreme, encyclopedias , books, and industry standards can all be written by your organization. Let me give you another interesting example. For many people who claim to be marketers , it is often easy for me to tell where their teachers came from just by looking at their circle of friends , because it is difficult for most people to break away from the influence of their first master and form their own style.

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When making value judgments and decisions, people need to retrieve their existing experience and use a reference system as a basis for judgment. At the same time, fresh information that is seen for the first time is more easily archived and deeply remembered. This tells us that we should occupy the customer information channels as much as possible and lay the foundation for information that is conducive to achieving our business goals, and try to ensure that our information becomes the "anchor" for customers to make judgments.

Can the anchoring effect be solved?

Some people think that the anchoring effect applies to everyone and cannot be completely solved. People can only reduce its impact as much as possible, but it is almost impossible to completely get rid of its influence, even experts in various fields.

I think that this is not the case. In theory, the information stored in people's brains, whether true or false, will indeed have an impact on people. Although anchoring is weighted, it does not mean that it can determine people's final value judgments and accompanying behaviors. As long as there is a sense of countering the anchoring effect, the initial impression may not be able to determine the final decision, and in many cases it cannot even determine the final decision.

If "anchoring" refers to the first impression, the first information can no longer influence people's final judgment, and it is completely true to say that it has been cracked.

The reason why the anchoring effect works is first of all determined by people's physiological memory function, that is, fresh information is more easily archived and deeply remembered by people. This is also the reason why people feel that time goes by faster as they get older. Because the older you are and the richer your experience, it often means that most of the days you live in the future are repetitive, and repeated events are often not archived by memory.

Secondly, people’s thinking inertia and attention distribution are divergent, and they are too lazy to conduct in-depth analysis and do not pay attention. Because the world people face is extremely complex, but energy is scarce, many people tend to make do without going into details.

Once you understand the mechanism of the anchoring effect, the solution is straightforward:

1. Obtain multi-dimensional information, avoid a single source of information, establish a cognitive model of things that is as objective as possible, and prevent yourself from being anchored. The simplest example is to compare prices from three different stores.
2. You should hone your logical thinking ability in all aspects. You should be able to make inferences based on certain materials, but also prevent yourself from making self-righteous inferences based on materials deliberately placed by others. Because sometimes the conditions on which your reasoning is based are given by others, and they just take advantage of your self-righteous logical thinking ability. Strictly speaking, this is called "inertial thinking."
3. Substance is more important than form. If the product is good and the price is fair, there is no need to delve too deeply into the promotional methods to the point of paralyzing yourself and suffering from paranoia.

Finally, it should be explained that various psychological effect marketing techniques are indeed good things, but the prerequisite is that you must first build a complete online marketing cognitive system in order to classify various skill points for easy memory and use. Otherwise, you will feel that you have learned a lot every day, but when asked about what marketing looks like, you will be confused and have no idea. In the end, more than ten years have passed, and you are still an old rookie .

Source: iDark Horse