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Mar 3
Emotive Cultural Responses as a Function of Screen Element Placement
NextStage: Predictive Intelligence, Persuasion Engineering, Interactive Analytics and Behavioral Metrics One of our NextStageologists has completed a study of the effectiveness of Middle East websites at communicating their messages. This was a fascinating study (started on 24 Jan 07 and completed in Jan 09) to watch unfold and involved monitoring such sites as AlJazeera, AlBawaba, Middle East Daily, Al Hayat and Middle East Intelligence Bulletin among others (you can find an extensive listing of such resources at the Internet Resources for Middle Eastern Studies website).

The purpose of this research was to form baseline psychographic comparisons between non-English and English sites from the same group as well as moderate to less moderate to hardline information and news sources. What spurred it? Hearing then Secretary of State Powell at the UN describe what had been found during the invasion of Iraq. There were things he stated as quotes from people in the region. I do not speak any Middle Eastern languages and I have studied the psycho-cognitive and -emotional biases of the peoples in that area. His quotes could not have been conceptualized by people from that area, meaning there was no way his quotes were quotes, nor even translations of quotes. His "quotes" were perfect for a western audience (as indeed it turned out they were intended to be) hence my curiousity led to this study (thanks to Stonewall for conducting it).

Anyway, the end goal was to look for conceptual collisions between such groups as Hamas, Hezbollah and the west (ie, "If everybody wants peace, why is there so much fighting?"). I can't share the findings directly and will share some of the more "cultural marketing" things we learned.

mehrnews.jpgWhat we found extremely interesting was the placement of screen elements for the non-English sites versus the English site with the same content. It was fascinating. One thing that all the non-English sites had in common was a base understanding of how screen element positions influence emotional response within that language audience. It was far greater than what can be found on the majority of western and world-based English audience sites.

alalam.jpgAs I have no Middle Eastern language skills I wondered if this language group has more emotional clarity than european languages.

One site that used facial images incredibly well to direct visitor attention was Mehr News while Alalam.ir used all images, text placement and colors to convey authority.

ahmadinejad.jpgOne site that might be considered amusing or even laughable by western standards, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memoes, made generally excellent use of the few images it displayed and contained postings (it's a blog) that would do a good job of focusing readers to thoughts, concepts and ideas that the author(s) desired.

khamenei.jpgOne site that demonstrated cultural awareness even in how it loaded its webpage on the browser was Sayyid Ali Khamenei while International Quran News Agency, a site that serves several language and cultural markets, showed moderate to good visual sensitivity to the different culture groups it served.

iqna.pngI think the big take-away from this study is that peoples served by these sites can take a real, genuine and active interest in the content provided because the layout of the individual screen elements encourages an emotional response. This isn't the case -- at least not in kind or degree -- with their USA counterparts such as CNN, WSJ, WhiteHouse.Gov and so on, where cultural training dictates a largely unemotional response to news.

Well, probably more correctly there's this belief that western audiences won't accept direct emotional appeals. That may or may not be true. The Middle Eastern sites also don't make direct emotional appeals, they simply know how to appeal to their audience's emotions far better than their western counterparts.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.


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