Category: Marketing

The Zeigarnik Effect is the uncomfortable feeling we get when things are left unfinished. That could be the cliffhanger in a season finale of your favorite TV show or the half-written proposal that’s been sitting on your desk for a week.

“It seems to be human nature to finish what we start,” according to Psychwiki.com. “And, if it is not finished, we experience dissonance.”

Whether you realize it or not, the Zeigarnik Effect helps you decide what products to buy, which TV shows to watch and what work to tackle each day. Maria Konnikova explores some of psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik research in Scientific American:

Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop.

Zeigarnik’s research (and more since) show that humans are bothered by loose ends. The Zeigarnik Effect is not only easy to understand – we’ve all experienced and acted on those feelings – it’s also easy to apply to our lives and work.

You’ve likely heard advice that goes something like this: “Start somewhere, but just start.” Want to start a company or write a book? Just start. That nagging feeling of incompleteness will help you keep going. It works the other way too. Want to cut down the amount of TV you watch? Don’t start watching a new show. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to keep going.

You might not be surprised to learn that businesses use the Zeigarnik Effect in their product development and marketing. The gaming industry, for example, relies on discontent to keep players engaged. The harder it is for a player to finish, the greater the dopamine rush at the end.

Remind Users When Items Need Their Attention

Zeigarnik’s research (and more since) show that humans are bothered by loose ends. The Zeigarnik Effect is not only easy to understand – we’ve all experienced and acted on those feelings – it’s also easy to apply to our lives and work.

You’ve likely heard advice that goes something like this: “Start somewhere, but just start.” Want to start a company or write a book? Just start. That nagging feeling of incompleteness will help you keep going. It works the other way too. Want to cut down the amount of TV you watch? Don’t start watching a new show. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to keep going.

For these customers, Vero provides a platform for several or more employees from different teams to work together to deploy high quality email experiences: experiences that are heavily data-driven and personalised.

As we look to the future, we want to highlight that Vero is the platform that enables Product, Engineering and Marketing teams to collaborate on product experiences. What we have built today is just the beginning of what we want to build to help teams achieve their goal of providing customers with consistent, personal and valuable experiences of their product(s).

• Data accuracy – ensuring complete and accurate data is available for personalisation and modelling,
  as organizations invest too much time synchronizing and managing the accuracy of their data.
• Highly available user models – in order to create personalized, valuable product experiences, you have to have data about your customers at the ready, whether they are interacting on-site, in a mobile application or via an email or message.
• Efficacious customer interactions, at scale – companies are collecting more data and reaching more users than ever before. Ensuring customers have the right experience with accurate data at scale requires a well-defined collaboration and deployment process.

Vero already helps organizations deploy hundreds of millions of valuable email interactions every month and we look forward to working together as we build out the tooling and methodology to help you maintain data accuracy, model your customers and ensure your customer interactions are reliable every time, regardless of your scale..