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Consider luxury and necessity items. Luxury and necessity are usually considered as "luxury versus necessity," indicating that people think of them differently. Intuition might dictate that where the mind-eye-brain needs to see luxury and necessity items on a web page would be different.
The first part is quite accurate. Luxury and necessity items are very different. They are, in fact, polar opposites. An interesting trait of polar opposites is that they are the same thing from a psychological perspective.
In the mind, 180 degrees from a thing is the same thing. The example I give clients and students involves love and hate. People think love and hate are opposites, but they're not. Both are strong emotions directed at an individual or group. They are also self-definers because they allow the person to define themselves in relation to whatever or whomever it is they love or hate. They are, therefore, the same thing. The true opposite of love is the same as the opposite of hate: apathy.
This works itself out on a web page by having both luxury and necessity items appear (all things being equal) in banners (i.e. leaderboards). What about when all things aren't equal? Consider recently married people, definitely for the first time and often for the second. Different "luxury" and "necessity" filters are now in place. The new living situation, the new demands on time, space and money, rearrange what information gets through and what information gets blocked out.
The brain tells the mind-eye combination to look for "necessity" and "luxury" in different areas of the visual field because the non-conscious has created new filters for that kind of information. The visitor's experience of a web page is determined by a complex set of characteristics. Some of these characteristics come from what's on the page, the rest come from what's going on in the visitor's life when they encounter the page.
Next: A skyscraper misadventure
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research.
