Oct 31 2007
Come on! Smile for me.
Here’s a little food for thought on the power of a smile. I was tuned in to the subject by reading Smiles Really DO Boost Sales by Roger Dooley at NeuroscienceMarketing.
Offline retailers teach and encourage sales and service personnel to smile 
because of the conventional knowledge that it is effective. Advertisers have also leveraged this concept by portraying the smiling faces of happy people who celebrate life as the standard formula for creative development.
But with all these laughing people, it becomes difficult to differentiate your brand when everyone is happy and having a good time. This has resulted in some interesting developments when marketers attempt to raise the bar:
- A proliferation of advertising that is nothing but a great joke with memorable visuals (gets noticed but there is a lack of brand recall).
- Advertising that is positioned to be not happy or humorous so it can differentiate. This is typically used for upscale brands with imagery of beautiful people dressed in black who are exiting a Mazaratti before entering a seaside mansion. These people never smile except for an occasional upturn of one corner of the mouth when they are bemused.
This causes me to assert that there is a media generated perception of two types of people.
The common mass of humanity that whoops it up all the time.
The uncommon folk who are very cool, affluent and sophisticated. Snooty people are apparently not a happy lot but they don’t care because the masses are jealous of their affluence.
Online marketers don’t need to deal with this silliness because the bar is yet to raised in this channel. Most websites don’t smile at all (I performed a random check of 10 websites found 2 smiles) and are thus missing out on the easiest and most basic branding and conversion tool available. Unless you have a reason not to smile, I suggest you get cracking. Here are a few suggestions:
- Place a smiling photo and quote from your spokesperson or president on your home page.
- Incorporate models to demonstrate your widgets.
- Find opportunities to insert smiling imagery into your non-product pages.
By the way… Why do the photos and avatars of marketing bloggers lack a smiling face? Is it the perception that people who smile are not as sophisticated as those who don’t? I suggest that you get over yourself and post a a new photo with a smile.
