There is a great set of books from Don Norman called “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design“. They not only help in the development of a product but also in the marketing. People often buy products based on emotional (not logical) reasons including three key behaviors: visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing.
“Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact, to itsappearance. Behavioral design is about look and feel —the total experience of using a product. And reflection is about ones thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays,the message it tells others about the owner’s taste.”
This is a critical insight into how people make their buying decisions. Do your marketing materials feed into these insights or fight against them?
Visceral
There is a design principle called the “attractiveness bias”. People tend to give the benefit of the doubt to products and people that are better looking. This also goes for your marketing materials. For example: Do your marketing emails rely too much on images? The first impression will be a page full of broken images until the customer clicks “display images” in their email client. Obviously this does not yield a great visceral reaction. Does your website look polished or does it look like an engineer threw it together over the weekend? First impressions count more than any other.
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