The Brain, Sequential Data, and Long Sales Pages

A friend of mine, a software engineer, took a bit of a detour from his career path. After making a good buck from a stint at a large tech company, he decided he’d take up acting for a bit. Completely different mind exercise, and that was the point. He needed to explore new parts of himself.

Other actors had this interest that surprised him: they spent their energy studying stories. The archetypal story arcs, famous stories, unexplored stories.

It turns out we’ve grown up with stories for a good long while, evolutionarily. And that is, in part, because our brains are wired to like sequential data structures.

There’s a bit of a debate on how you should put together sales pages. You should be succinct, to the point, says one camp. Short headlines, lists of features, short paragraphs. The other camp says you should craft long sales pages, to not be afraid of words and flow.

It’s apt to talk about flow when talking about the brain. Jeff Hawkins, a brain researcher who founded a startup called Numenta, popularized some new notions about the brain: it processes inputs sequentially. Sounds are processes sequentially, visual data coming from our eyes are processed sequentially. And then the brain starts predicting what will come next, and it alerts our models when something is off, for correction. The processing is delegated down the line to other centres that have specialties, like language and visual pattern recognition. It really seems to be an architecture built to process streams of information.

Stories are built as streams of information. And a good story is built to ease the person into the narrative. It starts by establishing the setting, it makes the audience relate to characters and places, it develops tensions and a direction, and all the while, the audience’s brain takes in the stream and processes it. When something is off, the brains of the audience members will make a call to interpret, correct, or disconnect from the story. And a good story keeps people connected, through the climax and to the resolution. Into stories you can build layers of meaning, relevance and lessons, with overtness or subtlety. It’s no surprise that we yearn for good stories.

And so back to sales, and sales pages. When you realize that your potential buyer is on the move to solve their problem, you realize they’re already in a story arc of their own. Their brain has decided to go off the predictable path and into story mode, into hero mode, into problem-solving mode. When they get to your sales page, the best thing you can do, with as little or as many words as you wish, is to greet them with just enough of a story about your product so that they can tell themselves “this page understands where I’m coming from, this product fits my story.”