Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Try These 3 Neuromarketing Tips (You’ll Be Amazed By the Results)
As if cookie trackers — those magical internet fairies that cause ads based on your web activity to pop up no matter what site you try to hide in — weren’t creepy enough, science is potentially giving marketers a far more intimate tool for figuring out what you might buy: your own brain. From Inc.:
“The stronger the sensory experience of a website, the greater the overall impact on the visitor. If you engage the user’s sense of sight, that’s good. But if you require the use of his/her eyes (sense of sight) and ears (sense of hearing), that’s even better. Better still, if you can engage the sense of touch or smell along with the others.
For example, restaurateurs have found that scent strongly affects human behavior. If you look at a cinnamon roll, that might be enough to compel you to purchase it. But if you look at it, and smell the fresh dough, cinnamon, and brown sugar, you’re even more likely to make a purchase. That’s precisely why Cinnabon, a bakery chain, structures their entire store layout to place the ovens at the entrance where people can smell the cooking cinnamon rolls.
Why is this the case? Your senses trigger powerful reactions in your brain. Recent research shows that the right scent can open people’s wallets, project a sense of comfort and home (think hotels), shorten the time you believe you’re waiting (think banking) or even improve your sense of performance (think gym).”
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Parting with Paper: Five Tips to Become a Paperless (and Productive) Professional
Digitally-dependent as we might be these days, the global population still has a rather large and nostalgic soft spot for good ol’ fashioned paper. And though it’s doubtful that the arguments for and against a full shift to electronic wordsmithing will resolve themselves in the near future, there are some fairly convincing arguments to go totally-tech when it comes to reading, writing, and working. From Wired Insights:
“When I tell people that I’m in cloud technology, many envision my life as something from a world’s fair attraction about the future. That is, I must work in an office that resembles something ultra-modern – sleek, white and free of clutter. While this is certainly a perception I enjoy, it’s not always the case. When I first entered the tech industry, the offices I worked in had as much paper as any other industry – and I always marveled at how unprofessional stacks of documents looked. You can be the highest ranking executive in your company or a young professional – it doesn’t matter – stacks of papers everywhere make you look messy, disorganized and unpolished. Nowadays it’s easier than ever to wean yourself off paper to maximize your productivity and professionalism. Here are five tips for success.”
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Coffee Is Killing Your Productivity
Perhaps the saddest news to ever appear in a Fun Friday post: apparently, the glorious buzz so many of us depend on to get our morning work juices flowing actually has the opposite effect. Or, it at least doesn’t do quite what we think it does. From Slate:
“You already know that caffeine is a drug, but really thinking about what that means in terms of physiological effects on your body can be a little alarming.
Travis Bradberry, co-founder of emotional intelligence testing and training company TalentSmart, is out with a new post on LinkedIn that makes the case as to why your daily coffee habits are terrible for your personal productivity. Bradberry points to research from Johns Hopkins Medical School, which suggests that those good vibes and the boost in energy you get from drinking a cup of coffee are the results of temporarily reversing the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.
In other words, that euphoric short-term state that you enter after drinking coffee is what nonhabitual caffeine consumers are experiencing all of the time. The difference is that for coffee drinkers, the feeling doesn’t last. “Coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights,” Bradberry explained. “In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.'”
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