Delicious Products: Appealing To Emotional Buyers Through Visual Symbols

I was recently hurrying through the mall (horrible places, malls) and came across what must be the easiest, fastest sell in that massive hive of people, shops, and restaurants – cinnamon buns. Tell me this doesn’t make you hungry…

Even Dmitri could sell these if he hadn't tried to eat a whole one himself.

For a company like Cinnabon, visual communication is a no brainer. All they have to do is show a picture of the product and trigger the salivary glands of anyone within visual or olfactory range. Unfortunately, most of us don't sell cinnamon buns. 

When I started to explain the benefits of visual communication to a friend of mine who works at a wholesale security company (they sells locks and other security products), he showed me the product page of their website - an attempt to show the visual nature of their site. The problem is this, unlike the cinnamon bun, the pictures of the locks don’t evoke any emotional reaction when pictured alone. Buying is an emotional decision. To help sell locks, we need a better visual strategy that triggers emotion.

Concrete images that symbolize an abstract idea are often more effective than the abstraction itself. If I were to offer advice to the security wholesale business I referred to earlier in the article, it would be to create a set of "secure" visuals around the products and "insecure" visuals around the rest of the site. A main page that features a shady figure breaking in through a window at night (concrete visual that implies "insecure") makes a bold and bright product page feel that much safer. You might even say, delicious.

This article is the spiritual successor to The Two-Second Sales Pitch.