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Nigerian banks must stop using attractive women to persuade customers to open accounts

What should marketers take away from this research? For one, marketers should be very suspicious of market research that claims to uncover the "why" behind a decision, such as "Why did you buy that Budweiser?" This isn't big news, but the research underscores why it might be difficult or impossible for a consumer to explain the thought process behind a purchase (since most of that process occurred subconsciously).

eyetracking can solve the problem of asking the conscious why because we can derive it looking at perception.

The results of the study clearly showed that those people who had feelings of fear evoked prior to seeing the ads were more persuaded by messages that employed the social proof appeal compared to a scarcity appeal or a control message. However the opposite was true for those who had their feeling of romance evoked before seeing the advertisements. The people in this group were more persuaded by messages that described features that were unique and scarce.

That sort of thinking, though, is counterintuitive. Not adding a new feature to a product, not creating a new rule to elicit a desired behavior--these notions rub against the Western sensibility. "A bias for action naturally leads us to want to do something," writes May. Which often leads us away from simplicity. Less may be more, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

On Twitter, hundreds of updates tagged "iranelection" appeared each hour. A steady stream of photos and witness reports came from one Twitter user, persiankiwi. He sat at his computer in Tehran, as friends fed him information on the protests. "We honour and thank the people of Iran and especially the hackers," he tweeted late on Monday. "Basij [the militia] have guns - we have brains.

When a digital photograph was attached to a patient's file, radiologists provided longer, more meticulous reports. And they said they felt more connected to the patients, whom they seldom meet face to face.

Try to learn as much as you can about the business that you are advising, what drives it, and the changes that it is capable of making. Be user-centred, in the widest sense: the users who will use the product, the staff who will help them to do so, and the client who is commissioning all of it. Involve users as much as you possibly can. If you're forced to do an expert review, at least try to do a 'persona-led heuristic inspection' to bring some users into it.

Hunkering gives the designer a chance to get lost in the reality of their design. Like visiting a vacation spot you've only seen pictures of, the initial impression takes a little getting used to. Then, once you've had a chance to orient yourself, to find the familiar elements you were expecting and place them relative to each other, the vacation spot becomes more comfortable.