Did you know neurosciences apply to trade shows (and valentine’s day tomorrow)? 🌐

Cognitive biases, for example, are fascinating. 🤓 For those of you who haven’t heard of them, it’s all these pitfalls our brains fall into. 🫨🧠

We are, for the most part, not aware of them, 🤨 and if we are, we still fall for them, 😳unless we take countermeasures. 🤹‍♂️

Here’s an easy one we all are the victims of every day: stereotyping also called prejudice.

Yes, we all do that. Think it’s bad? 😅

Here’s another one: In-group out-group bias.

In-group out-group bias

It’s the tendency to favor individuals within one’s own group and disfavor those from outside the group. 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

Hoochie mama! Right? 🙈

How many of these little nuggets 💡did the researchers find?

+200 That’s a LOT. And wait… they compound… oh la la!

That’s a LOT of possibilities to just fail at reasoning properly. 🤔

When multiple biases influence a decision-making process simultaneously, they 🔄 reinforce and amplify each other. That leads to even more significant distortions in judgment. 🤯

Covid, Ukraine, Chat GPT, the Middle East, when most thought they were displaying their wit, all they were doing was displaying cognitive biases. 🌐

Because as researchers showed, cognitive biases developed in our brains to help us collaborate with our tribe, since it was our key to survival. 🧠

Being right was less important than sticking together… 🤝 (a nice reminder for Valentine’s day isn’t it?)

If that’s great for human groups, 🌍 it’s a little bit less useful for your trade show results (and my work convincing you to do something about it). 🌟

Cause they are many on trade shows. Since I can’t talk about all of them in one post, I’ve decided to make a series over the coming months. You can follow me if you don’t want to miss any. 🗓️

So? Trade shows and cognitive biases…

Here is my first one: the availability heuristic.

The availability heuristic

It’s a phenomenon we all experience that our “short term memory is limited”.

We can only remember our most recent “data entry” when the flow of data to remember is too much. 📚💡

This is why we have shopping gifts lists for Valentine’s day, to-do lists, libraries, CRMs… And this is why we teach exhibitors a method and help them build a tool (not a CRM) to avoid this problem. But it’s not enough. Because visitors are victims of it too.

Remember when you called this visitor you thought was interested and they couldn’t remember you. ❓📞

They too met a LOT of people, and their memory failed them too.

Don’t worry, we teach you a way to countermeasure their availability heuristic too. Yes, that’s cool. But it’s only one, and there are many more left to counter.

Especially a dangerous one for your trade show performance called the context effect.

More about it in a future post.

So stay tuned (or follow me – that’s another bias I’m using here). In the meantime, exhibitors, how did you try to bridge your availability heuristic? 🌉🤔