Priming and context - why we miss the steering wheel for the speedo ?!
- of why you can't sell upsell a (n-1) version of a new, different in context product to an audience that loves the (n+1)th version of a much loved product from a different context
Having been a keen student of philosophy and ironically procedural detective (motive, means and opportunity), I have been endlessly fascinated by the trinity of :
Motive/priming (what goes in someone’s mind before an event)
What causes cognition of the trigger that eventually makes way into consideration - the decision making process ?
What does this mean in terms of opportunities that can be addressed without re-framing the context ?
What is the Minimum Lovable Threshold of those opportunities in the market and what should we do bring our product/service into the consideration
I have been endlessly fascinated by thought experiments about the following segues :
Netflix into gaming
Cred into selling knick-knacks using its captive audience
Its fascinating that while the underlying motives seem obvious - for eg. netflix it was getting into gaming which is emerging as a favourite pastime (gaming is the OTT of 20-22 for the 2022-23’s it seems), there are a few fundamental observations that go beyond the obvious when it comes to gaming :
One way Vs two way: Netflix has slotted itself into a “ lazy and get fed some entertainment” zone whereas gaming is all about “active engagement, strong bursts of real time emotions”
Engagement Vs entertainment : Netflix is into the business of “ press a switch and go brain dead for the next 3-4 hours” - you are an agent of someone' else’s principal; whereas gaming is an amplified version of watching an india- pak cricket match - you yourself are in it, you are both a principal and an agent.
Relaxed Vs “into it “ posture: watch how someone watches netflix vs how they are when they are into gaming. In the former, eyes glaze, mouth gapes and you lose track of time by entering a world someone else has crafted for you whereas in the latter, your animated, mouth is actually uttering words (depending upon where you fall on the spectrum from U to U/A to err..)
And when it comes to cred :
Cred example;
I love cred because its an singular way to pay all bills, keep track of unbilled/billed, overall tabs on cards etc. So from a priming perspective, I am usually thinking about liquidity and how much I have to pay up both now and in the near future on cred. I am not really sure if I am thinking about how I am going to spend something - especially something that I did not even think about in the first place - like a newly launched peanut butter.
While settling bills, the associated paper work(accounting, timelines, quantum) is very much something I would imagine a lot of people think about while being on cred, I am not sure if i am looking at spending something meaningful or frequently on cred. At best, I may do it to humour them - would you buy gold jewellery for da missus sold by your tax filing consultant at the end of the year in march ?
Another one of my favourite examples is the amazon mini TV. When someone is on amazon app to shop, why would you distract them to see a 5/10 min comedy ? would you like it if you had someone shove a TV screen in front of you when you were shopping in a hypermart for harpic ?
Where am I going with this - overlay context and priming and you will find out which can be an add-on artefact, which can be a pesky bug and which can be a cute pet. if you have to diguise a bug as a pet, you need to change context and do it effectively. That requires answers that we will explore in the succeeding posts. I hope to make one a week.