Dan Hill

What’s the worst place to put your logo, and where do advertisers most often put their logo in print ads, TV spots, and direct mail pieces? The answer is the same: the lower right corner, an area dubbed the “Corner of Death” by facial coding expert Dan Hill.

Hill’s comments stem from an interesting eyetracking study by Steve Outing and Laura Rule, reported in The Best of Eyetrack III. This illustration shows a composite average of how people scan a typical web page:

Want your customers to have a better experience? Instead of trying to train your employees to smile, just hire happy people.

Apparently, you don’t have to be an expert in reading faces to tell the difference between a real smile and a “social smile.”

Book Review: About Face – The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising by Dan Hill

At a time when neuromarketing discussions are dominated by brain scans – EEG on the commercial side, and fMRI for academic research – Dan Hill and his firm, Sensory Logic, are the main proponents of using facial coding as a way to determine what consumers are really thinking.

Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds by Dan Hill (Beaver’s Pond Press) builds on the premise that “facial coding,” the inerpreting of the often involuntary expressions our faces make (sometimes called microexpressions), can be used to better understand our real emotions, reactions, and intentions.