What Sells Best? Words or Pictures? Why?

I was attracted recently to an eyetracking research study. It is an interesting piece looking at how the eyes move from element to element on a webpage. And the research group list a series of observations about what they saw. But my criticism is this – they don’t tell us anything about why a particular thing happened, they just record what happened.

This worries me. We should try to understand why. If we don’t understand why we have no real rhyme or reason to propose A is better than B, and why to achieve a particular business goal it is better to do, say, A.

So, using recent ideas from neuroscience (and some older ideas from psychology), I want to start thinking about the why, not just what, and consider how more rigorous and theoretically based conclusions might be used to make a better internet.

So, what sells best? Words or pictures? Why?<

I believe the answer goes like this. As humans, we are evolved from lower creatures, and one of the consequences of this is that our brains have developed layer upon layer. In the centre is the reptile brain, automatic, instinctual and fast. Next layer is the mammalian brain, or the limbic system, emotional, visual and non-verbal. And, as humans, we get the neo-cortex which is a mixture of rationality, verbal behavior and complex concepts like justice, guilt and shame.

Each system grapples for control of the human system, with the fighting ground being attention. Whichever ‘brain’ gets the organism’s attention, gets to determine the response.

So the answer to the question ‘what sells best’ isn’t straightforward, but there is a theory that you could start to apply to it.

‘What’s best’ is whatever can most efficiently, most effectively, get attention in the brain(s) you want attention in.

For rational purchases, this will be the neo-cortex, for emotional purchases this will be the limbic system. And what you must also do, and here is the crunch, is you must support that sale in the other brain systems. The either/or rational/emotional dichotomy is wrong-headed. To sell best, you need to sell to all brains, and all at once.

What’s to do?

The best way to do this is through real test-and-learn with the page or pages that you want to optimize. We will work with you to devise a set of candidate words/pictures page combinations that are right for your audience, and test them with page optimization technology.

Doing it this way you get the best of both worlds:

• The consultant expertise to choose the candidate pages; and
• The customer power to choose the winner.