Persuasion Profiling: How the Internet Knows What Makes You Tick

On average, merely five in every hundred visitors of online stores actually purchase a product. This, despite the fact that in offline, brick and mortar stores more than twenty-five out of a hundred visitors make a purchase. Why is this gap so large? The answer can partly be found in the ways in which vendors adapt their promotional appeals to the unique individual preferences and needs of their customers.

Based on insights from behavioral economics, marketing, and his own groundbreaking research on Persuasion Profiling, Dr. Maurits Kaptein developed a mass-market personalized technique that enables you to treat online visitors as an offline vendor would. Kaptein combines a thorough description of our knowledge of sales psychology with an understanding of interactive technologies to demonstrate the opportunities these technologies offer for personalization. Kaptein discusses novel research results on the individual effects of well-known persuasion strategies, and discusses the ethical issues that arise in large-scale personalization efforts.

The result is a vivid and clear introduction to the science and art of real time and personalized persuasion on the Internet. It is an introduction that is certainly indispensable for marketers but is also unmissable for you, the consumer.

Dr. Maurits Kaptein (1983) is a scientist and entrepreneur. He obtained his Ph.D. with honors in a joint research project at the Technical University of Eindhoven and Stanford University. Maurits' scientific work on Persuasion Profiles and large scale online personalization has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Interactive Marketing. His work has also been featured in popular press: Magazines like Wired (USA), Blink (UK), and Bright (NL) have all covered his work. He is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Science Rockstars (www.sciencerockstars.com). Currently Maurits works as an assistant professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands where he runs the Artificial Intelligence for the Web lab. Maurits is also an active international speaker both in academia and in industry, having spoken at such companies as Booking.com, Bol.com, Google.com, and many others.