A three-step engagement template
Creating and keeping engagement and delivering a renewable effort-based reward are easy to do. Three steps are involved regardless of perceptual load, and these steps make use of how our senses, our predatory wiring, and emotional engagement work together.
Tease the senses
Remember the cat preparing to pounce? That preparation occurred because the cat's senses were being teased by the mouse. It could hear it but not see it, see but not touch, touch but not taste, and so on.
Preparation is anticipation, and few things are as engaging as anticipating a reward for our efforts, so provide that visitor with a mix of sensory data and remember to mix it up!
Don't provide all your sensory data at once: When you do that, the "desire" {C,B/e,M} shuts down because there's nothing to anticipate. Tease the cat. Get it ready to pounce.
Close, but no cigar
A large part of anticipation involves being close to but not having, or, in the words of Hannibal Lecter, "We begin by coveting what we see every day."
We covet what we see: Our eyes seek out what we want but do not have.
There is an old axiom that the value of a service decreases exponentially after the service is rendered. That's because the {C,B/e,M} driving anticipation and desire has been replaced by a {C,B/e,M} that includes neither. Once the coveted object is attained, there's nothing left to covet. (Think of Groucho Marx's famous quip, "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.")
So, step two of engagement is to keep your prospects close -- but not too close.
But wait, there's more
I mentioned delivering a renewable reward above. Engagement is maintained when we know there will always be something just a little bit further away, just a little bit better, and just a little bit more enticing than what we have right now.
So, fulfill your customer's immediate desire, but when doing so, replace it with another desire. Sell them the car, but make sure they know about next year's model, or the next model up, or the latest sound system, or onboard assistant that's right out there, waiting for them, and just a little bit beyond their immediate reach.
The only difference between high and low perceptual-load -- mobile versus TV -- is that the mobile method must be obvious and easy to understand ("No thinking allowed!")
Conclusions
Engagement is easy to create and maintain and doesn't require expensive hardware, fancy headgear, advanced analytics, or isolated environments to monitor and measure.
Here's another way to describe the simple three-step engagement process:
Use their senses to entice them. Make sure the senses you're enticing -- vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell -- are specific to your brand offering. You can even stimulate taste, touch, smell, and more online via images, music, animation/video, text, and so on.
Keep them sensorially active. Bring your consumers closer, closer, closer, but not close enough to "get" it until you're prepared to...
Give them what they want. But promise them more. Replace "this" desire with a new desire and you'll keep their engagement muscles working for you.
I mentioned above that engagement is easily measurable. Currently, patented technology is being used to develop a "Love/Like" tool that determines how many visitor's "likes" will turn into how many dollars and when.
Joseph Carrabis is the founder and chief research officer for NextStage Evolution.
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"Human intelligence" image via Shutterstock.
