Persuasion would be a much simpler process if people didn’t have these annoying things called emotions and imaginations. But then again, without them we would have no persuasion.

Emotions and imagination drive the persuasion engine, but refuse to be chained by those little things called logic and linear processes. It’s one of the reasons why we human folk spend piles of time spouting out logical and sensical reasonings and doing the precise opposite of those spoutings. Everyone has seen the smartest, most logical people we know, do the stupidest things on the earth.

Michelle Miller of WonderBranding Blog fame alerted us to a fascinating article in Newsweek. Seems researchers are trying to figure out what is going on in our brains when we do ‘illogical’ stuff. Here is a nugget from that story…

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. Read more.

Persuasion architecture assists by mapping and managing the non-linear sales process, allowing the non-linear, emotional/imaginative human visitor to bail out of your ‘linear’ sales presentation and blaze their own trial through your website. And the more we know about the humanistic personas that visit your site, the better we can anticipate and use hyperlinks to fuel them deeper into the site purposes.

Does your website take into account that the visitor may not be interested in buying the way that you want them to? Are you using non-linear hypertext in a non-linear fashion, using key words and trigger words to help the persona click on the information she is most interested in?