content is a great way for a brand or company to tell your story. Sponsored stories are meant to boost the image of a brand or company or to highlight a product. The intention of these types of articles is to influence readers in a positive way in thinking and acting toward the sender of the articles.
Look inside our brains
branded content at Mediahuis is provided in studio MHX. It employs so-called content directors who have years of experience in journalism. But we didn't think that was enough. We took a college course in neuromarketing, sales & influence psychology. This teaches you to ‘look inside people’s heads.
For example, we learned a lot from psychologist Robert Cialdini's seven principles of influence. These provide valuable information that we use for our texts. Readers do not notice them or hardly notice them – or they must also have delved into the matter – but the hidden messages do have an effect on their way of thinking.
Anxiety about loss
Other insights have also made us wiser, bringing benefits to our clients. Ahead, we'll give you a hint.
Familiar phenomenon is that people are more afraid of losing, rather than eager to win something. The Postcode Lottery cleverly plays on this. Ask your neighbors if they think they are going to win a large sum of money and the answer is probably ‘no’. So why are they playing? Because they are afraid that people in their street might win and they won't. Fear of losing.
In texts you can take this into account by, for example, mainly pointing out that people leave money lying around, instead of insisting on possible savings. Example: you can write that you can save 800 euros a year with insulation. But a reader is more likely to be triggered if you write that (literally) 800 euros flies out of his house every year.
Crocodiles
Although we take a journalistic apprach to our branded content, we are extremely careful with a format commonly used in journalism such as ‘facts and fables’. Because even fables can get into the reader's head and have a negative impact on a customer. For example, a shoarma joint has already gone down with the vehemently debunked story that there was semen in the garlic sauce.
Just think to yourself. You are on vacation and are standing in a distant country by a body of water in which you are considering swimming. Beside you stand two men, one of whom asks the other if it is true that crocodiles swim here. That person denies it. But are you still going happily into the water?
At MHX, we take into account how things work in the minds of our readers. Thus, we go far beyond simply typing pieces.
