Business Benefits
Associate your offer with something – or someone – attractive to raise its perceived value and improve conversions.
Associate authoritative people or celebrities with your products and services.
If the allure of the authority or celebrity is strong enough, there doesn’t even need to be a strong correlation between the person and your offer. This tactic is common among brands of all shapes and sizes, just like how Gold Bond associated Shaquille O’Neal with their Ultimate Men’s Lotion in their TV campaign. However, bear in mind that this can sometimes lead to a vampire effect, where the authority or celebrity used to create attention ends up pulling too much away from the actual product.
Use beautiful and attractive people, like models, in your design.
Advertisers have been using beautiful people to sell their products for decades. Studies have shown that the overall perception of the model, including personality, factored into the effectiveness of the advertising. Note, however, that this strategy won’t usually move the needle by itself and always depends on your market and the audience you’re targeting. For instance, it would be much more effective in the alcohol industry than in SaaS.
Use polished, professional, and beautiful images and design on your site to create a good first impression and build trust.
Beautiful images and design can also induce a Halo Effect on your offer by creating attraction through polish and professionalism. An article published on Academic Insight found that visual design - the use of colors, layouts, layout complexity, and photographs - is the most reported factor on why people trust or distrust websites and businesses. Invest in a professional design that quickly makes people feel safe on your website rather than cobbling together a cheap and tacky website. Test different variations to identify which works best.
Perform usability testing and user research to identify and fix any bottlenecks and user frustrations.
One poor usability issue can ruin a user’s experience and paints a poor picture of the rest of the website and brand as a whole. For example, the quality of a website’s internal search results is used to judge the overall quality of the site and, by inference, the quality of the brand behind the site and its products.
Create brand equity for your products or services by making them memorable, easily recognizable, and superior to the rest.
- Brand equity is the value premium that a brand generates from a product or service with a more recognizable name when compared to the competition.
- Identify and work on the unique value proposition, benefit, or quality that sets you apart from your competition and use it to build a strong reputation and brand name.
- This is a long term play and is difficult to pull off through mere short term tactics or campaigns. Repeated execution in this direction is required.
For example, Nike are known for their shoes but, because of the brand name and strong reputation of their shoes, people also tend to trust golf balls and golf clubs made by Nike. Apple is known for luxury goods and consistency, so they’ve been able to expand from computers to phones, tablets, watches, headphones, and more. Many people think quality when they think of Apple.
Focus your marketing efforts around your best product or service and let it serve as a halo effect for the rest of your brand.
- Simply increasing the quantity of items you offer or the amount of benefits in copy doesn’t increase perceived value or brand equity. For example, Apple put the bulk of its marketing budget behind the iPod back in 2005 and created a halo effect that helped make the brand what it is today.
- This also works in an industry context. For example, Amazon’s Prime Day created a halo effect for other retailers, with online traffic increasing by an average of 21% and conversions rising by an average of 57%.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T16:01:07Z