Written by Reese Halter, CNN
A recent study from Microsoft found that it’s not so much what you say about a product, but what you don’t say, that drives customers.
Entitled “How Spiciest Puns Help Marketers Make Contradictory and Tragic Decisions,” the study looked at how to engage with customers at work — specifically in online searches.
The tech giant chose a group of frequent viewers of its advertising, and began tracking their behavior on its products as they searched and purchased them.
Researchers found they were more attracted to SAG tech ads with words like “attitude,” “fun,” “popular,” “followers,” “radioactive,” “social,” “energy,” “magic,” “youthful,” “original,” “modern,” “childish,” “unique,” “youthful” and “healthy.”
But for car ads, the researchers focused on words like “boring,” “purposeless,” “boring,” “clown” and “clueless.”
(Note: Bing is the online search engine belonging to Microsoft. Yahoo is the advertiser.)
Yet you don’t hear “boring” often in online searches for Google, Apple or Amazon, for example. And it’s not used as a keyword for any of the four companies in their competitors’ advertising.
Researchers said that high search volume and low keyword traffic “reflect the volume of search queries that a user is interested in, rather than the type of answers searched for.”
It’s better to speak to a client’s emotional needs, and avoid marketing jargon.
According to people interviewed for the study, a dominant concern of older people is isolation, and time constraints.