emergencemarketing.com

People with ambivalent attitutes are more open to influence, and so sending them a glut of information can be very effective. That is what Columbia University Professor Gita Johar found in her research (you can download the pdf of the paper here). These findings are especially valuable for marketers and politicians.

Better yet, ambivalent people are more likely to accept messages regardless of their source…in fact hey will be influenced by messages even if they cannot check the source. According to Johar, that is in part due to the fact that in today’s world there is so much information clutter that some people just don’t think about it. Even people with strong opinions, who are more likely to check a message’s source, can be influenced by messages where the source cannot be verified.

So the key to succes is to send out as much information about a product or candidate while buyers and voters are making up their mind. The problem is that it is really hard to segment those people who have not made up their mind yet or even decided whether to buy a certain type of product or vote in a particular election. So if and when companies and politicians read these findings, the level of spam we receive from them will increase once again - causing our general level of trust towards messages coming from these sources to diminish even further.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.