How much time does a cricket batsman have, to decide what shot to play? When a bowler is releasing a ball at about 140km/ hr, the ball reaches the batsman at the other end of the pitch in about 0.45 sec. It is also interesting to note that the time a tennis player has to receive the serve of the opposing player, a time a batter in a baseball game has while facing a ball from a pitcher, the time a soccer goal keeper has while facing a penalty kick are quite the same. In all these game situations, the total time available to make a decision is around 0.45 seconds.

Peter McLeod of Oxford University has done further studies to figure out the various brain processes that occur while a batsman faces a ball from a fast bowler. Professional cricket batsmen will admit that they predict what ball the bowler is going to bowl, by closely watching the body movements of the bowler, more so the micro-movements of the bowling arm. Prof McLord has found that this process of predicting the ball the bowler is going to bowl is taken in a matter of about 0.22 seconds. After that prediction, the batsman Once the batsman will take about 0.22 seconds to swing his bat and meet the ball, right in the centre of the bat. So the time a batsman has to decide what shot to play is the region of 0.01 second. The obvious question is whether decision-making that happens in a matter of milliseconds in the sports fields is the norm in other fields of human behaviour too. On a closer look, one realizes that most reactions of the human body and even other living beings occur in milliseconds. Armed with this knowledge we went a step further to study the time to decide what product tile to click on an e-commerce page.

From various brain studies, we realised that the decision to ‘approach’ or ‘avoid’ a persuasion stimuli, say a product tile on an e-commerce site, is taken in a matter of 0.35 seconds. For the click-through action to happen the ‘liking-wanting’ network of the brain also has to be activated. The ‘liking’ stage is activated in a matter of 0.12 seconds. On an e-commerce site, product tiles of various brands that the consumer will be familiar with will be displayed. To decide which among them the consumer will ‘want’ is decided within about 0.45 seconds. Once the ‘wanting’ stage is activated, it leads to the clicking action. So the total time taken to decide to click the product tile of a frequently bought category in an e-commerce site s about 0.92 seconds.

The knowledge that a decision on an e-commerce site is taken in a matter of 0.92 seconds throws up lots of new challenges. The most important of those challenges is how one can develop a persuasion stimuli that works within 0.92 seconds? The ideal duration of a persuasion stimuli should be looked at from another angle too: the usage pattern of smartphones, the key medium for e-commerce transactions. Studies are showing that digital natives, the 20-35 year olds, on average spent close to 4 hours interacting with their smartphones. But one of the most interesting behaviour facets among smartphone users is that they touch a smartphone screen, an average of 4513 times a day. And with each touch, the editorial context of the smartphone tends to change. Studies have shown that the context duration - the time for which an editorial context is available on the smartphone is between 5-10 sec. This means that 90 percentile of the interactions on the smartphone are less than 5 sec in duration and the 95 percentile of the interactions are less than 10 sec in duration.

With such a short context duration on the smartphone, any persuasion stimuli that we create for the smartphone medium should ideally be a subset of the context duration. For decades, the most prominent persuasion stimuli used was the 30-second commercial. Such long persuasion stimuli made sense because the context duration of television medium is between 5-21 minutes. Now with the knowledge that the decision-making time in e-commerce is less than 1 sec and that the context duration of a smartphone is a mere 5-10 seconds, we need to rethink the duration of the persuasion stimuli used in a smartphone. Even a 5-second edit of a traditional 30-second commercial does not fit into the persuasion game in e-commerce. This realisation is what forced a new thinking in terms of ‘MicroStimuli’: persuasion stimuli that work in a matter of milliseconds.

While developing a MicroStimuli, the key focus is on achieving the most effective persuasion in the shortest time possible. The evolutionary pathways of the human brain have been active for the past 600 million years. Compared to the rational pathways of the brain, the emotional pathways are much faster. So, it is ideal if the development of any MicroStimuli should be based on the evolutionarily active triggers and emotional triggers. MicroStimuli no doubt changes the traditional thinking about communication. When we realise that a cricket batsman evaluates so many complex matters within milliseconds, it is quite preposterous to think that one needs a 30 second long persuasion stimuli to persuade the consumer to buy a frequently bought category like toothpaste.

Sports fields have always provided us great entertainment. The same sports field is now becoming an inspiration for us to create a new paradigm of communication - the MicroStimuli