Today, most recommendation and targeting systems focus on the products: Commerce sites analyze our consumption patterns and use that info to figure out that, say, viewers of Iron Man also watch The Dark Knight. But new work by Dean Eckles, a doctoral student in communications at Stanford University, suggests there’s another factor that can be brought into play. Retailers could not only personalize which products are shown, they could personalize the way they’re pitched, too.

Eckles set up an experimental online bookstore and encouraged customers to browse the titles and mark a few for purchase. By alternating the types of pitches—Appeal to Authority (“Malcolm Gladwell says you’ll like this”), Social Proof (“All your friends on Facebook are buying this book”), and the like—Eckles could track which mode of argument was most persuasive for each person.

Some book buyers felt comforted by the fact that an expert reviewer vouched for their intended product. Others preferred to go with the most popular title or a money-saving deal. Some people succumbed to what Eckles calls “high need for cognition” arguments—smart, subtle points that require some thinking to get (“The Hunger Games is the Inferno of children’s literature”). Still others responded best to being hit over the head with a simple message (“The Hunger Games is a fun, fast read!”).

Small world. It turns out my friend Arjan Haring (@arjanharing) is working for PersuasionAPI, the company mentioned in this article.

On a related note, I spoke at Emerce Conversion a few weeks ago. While the conference was in Dutch (except for my contribution), I was able to follow along with the general idea of most sessions. One presentation that was very much the topic of hallway discussions, was Pieter Jan Troost's discussion of buying styles. Essentially, he shared an ongoing project where various layouts and different kinds of persuasive messages are dynamically generated "to optimize designs for four different ways of buying: content-oriented, relationship oriented, incentive-oriented and purposeful." Here's a Google translation of the session description: http://bit.ly/m28D2Q

Welcome to a Brave New World indeed!